Terrible Journalism & Interesting Statistics - Rob Orchard

Rob Orchard is a journalist and the co-founder and editor of Delayed Gratification Magazine. Journalism isn't working. Media outlets are more concerned with being first than being right and stories are built to create outrage rather than insight. Customers aren't happy with this setup, so Rob and his team began a Slow Journalism project which focuses on finding signal from the noise, rather than speedy delivery. Then he found a lot of fascinating statistics about the world. Expect to learn what the most popular crossbreed of dog was in 2020, how the Amanda Knox story shows how modern journalism is totally broken, what you should statistically do if you want to win an Oscar, why the 2010's was a terrible year for original cinema, why there's 2 golf balls on the moon and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Check out Rob's Magazine - https://www.slow-journalism.com/ Follow Delayed Gratification on Twitter - https://twitter.com/dgquarterly Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #journalism #media #news - 00:00 Intro 00:29 What is Slow Journalism? 05:11 Why the Current Media System is Broken 12:25 Is it Better to be First or to be Right? 16:27 What the Press are Getting Wrong 30:55 Rob’s Side Interest of Data Science 38:45 Data Surrounding Emissions & China 47:13 Post-pandemic Lifestyle Changes Data 54:27 People’s Distrust in Big Tech 59:41 Interesting Sets of Data 1:11:50 Rob’s Favourite Infographics 1:20:31 Where to Find Rob - Join the Modern Wisdom Community on Locals - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Journalists come in in the morning and they're given a list of the stories that were trending online overnight, which is why, you know, these poor, poor buggers, they come into work and they're like, right, write something about this. Who is this? I don't know. It's an American celebrity. She was on some kind of series that you've not heard of. And what's happened to her? I don't know. She's breaking up with her boyfriend. Who's her boyfriend? I don't know. It doesn't matter. Just write something.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  Rob Orchard, welcome to the show.

• 0:25Speaker 00

  Nice to be here, Chris. Nice to be here. Thanks very much for inviting me.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  My pleasure. How do you describe what you do for work?

• 0:32Speaker 00

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

• 1:03Chris Williamson?

  So that's slow journalism that you've coined?

• 1:07Speaker 00

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

• 1:35Chris Williamson?

  What's the big difference between slow and fast journalism?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Well, there's all sorts of different things. So what tends to happen in terms of the way that we, we, we process our news is that it's coming at us from all directions. You know, it's on our phones. It's kind of quite often the first thing that we do in the morning, right? Instead of turning to our loved one, we turn on our phones and we check and make sure nothing horrible has happened overnight. And last thing at night as well, and throughout the day, and on our socials, and it's kind of this white noise of news. And what, what tends to happen as well is that it moves in, in kind of cycles. So you get an intense concentration on a massive story for a few days, and then suddenly the news agenda moves on. And you're quite often after the the sort of the feeling of not having really got to grips with what the story was,

• 2:23Speaker 00

  or or wanting to know what happened next. Um. But but you know, the the news cycle feeds on novelty, and so it's kind of constantly moving on. So to take an example, um, Afghanistan, we were all glued to the story um over the summer in August, August fifteenth, the fall of Kabul, and the kind of the few days leading up to that, and the few few days after that. But since then, the coverage of what's been happening in Afghanistan has completely fallen off a cliff. Um. And we happen to have in the next issue, a very um, a very well-written, a very well-considered piece from a female journalist who's been there for the last year and who continued, very bravely continued, didn't leave with everybody else, stayed there, um, and has got this incredible six thousand word read for us, really getting to grips with what has happened in the country since then.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  So I suppose when it works well, what it is, is you open up the the magazine, or or you know, wherever you read it. You open up the magazine and you think, God, yeah, that story, what the hell happened to that? I remember that. And we tell you, you know, and in amongst that, we also tell you the stories that you missed. We have this kind of slightly cheesy line of the stories other missed or others missed or mistold. Um. So this idea of in the kind of the heat of of, you know, like twenty four seven rolling news, there's there's stuff that gets missed and there's stuff that gets that's gets put out there wrongly. So this is ideally, in its best form, it's an antidote to that.

• 3:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. I remember doing an A S level in social media.

• 3:50Chris Williamson?

  Uh, no, sorry, in media studies and sociology. So a quarter of an A level in media studies. And even then, I remember learning about on nine eleven, the way that certain companies executives said it's a good day for bad news. And they released tons and tons of weird murky stories that they just needed to kick out into the press because they knew it was going to be relegated to page one hundred and five, and it didn't really matter. So that's super. So that's before social media, that's before Twitter, that's before rapid smartphone delivery for information and disinformation and misinformation.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  And even then, people were able to play these games and they were able to work with the if it bleeds, it leads um, seductiveness for the press to look at the things that are in front of them. And there's now even more, it it sounds like. Where delivered the front end of the story because that's where the novelty lies, but we never close the loop around what actually happened in the story because who cares about closure? All that anyone wants to know about is what's new.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's very easy to get very cynical about it. And obviously, there are tons of brilliant journalists and brilliant news organisations. And one thing that I'm always trying to be careful about is not in any way to say that like we are the answer. Because we're not, we're a small team, we make a beautiful magazine, comes out once every three months. If you relied on it for finding out what's happening on, what was going on in the world, then, you know, like three months after the fact, you'd be like, oh, wow, so Biden got in. There's a there's a pan, there's a pandemic on, that's why everyone's been dying, there's a pandemic going on. So we're not, we're not the answer in that sense. There are tons of skilled and talented journalists out there doing amazing work. And there are people doing kind of follow up stories. However, that's not, that's not the way that most of the news that we receive works.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  And part of that is, as you say, it's novelty, it's if it bleeds, it leads, which is kind of, you know, from time immemorial, that is, you know, how journalism has worked. But part of it is also the economics, right? So as you have moved away from, you, you, you know, you get up in the morning and you go and buy your particular newspaper, you spend money on it and, you know, you kind of take it and dissect it and so on. And the editors make their best guess as to what will be interesting and useful to you. You move to a time when news is largely free and has been expected to be free. And and the way to monetise it is by, you know, using the data of the people who are buying it and, you know, feeding them up very invasive, very targeted advertising.

• 6:23Speaker 00

  And that kind of militates away from considered journalism, right? Because actually, if you're only measuring value in terms of clicks, then the sensible thing to do is not to, you know, is not to commission a 6,000 word considered piece, which, you know, a team of editors work on with a brave journalist and, you know, you're going to get something really interesting. The sensible thing to do is to bang out a couple of hundred words of nonsense with some sort of sly reference to a celebrity who's in vogue at the moment, put on a provocative headline and just kind of pump it out and pump out 20 or 30 of those, you know, a day. That's, you know, because then you get the clicks and then you get the advertising and then you can fund things and so on. So there's something rotten about the system.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  There's an interesting thing that, I mean, in in recent years, I have seen the pendulum start to swing back a little bit, as it always does, right? Which is paywalls and people putting up, you know, paywalls and demanding money for their journalism. And thank God, right? Because we got into a really bleak period when we launched this this magazine. It was, you know, like, the only way forward that people saw was in digital. Um, like, print was there, digital, and um, had to be free, had to be free and you had to get mass. And that was really, really kind of scary because we were educating the entire generation of people to expect that they should get, you know, all of their news for free, even though good news costs money.

• 7:43Chris Williamson?

  Sam Harris has a point around this, that he says the entire internet made a price estimation error in terms of how much it values content. Podcasts shouldn't be free. Everyone that's listening to this right now should be paying me for my time. Everyone should, and they should be paying every every other podcast for as well. When you think about the amount of value and pleasure that you get and how engaging it is and how awesome that platform is, and that's just one platform. And then talk about the best follow that you have on Twitter. And then think about the best blogger that you follow that just writes because they like to do it. And the best newsletter that you subscribe to. And yeah, people are picking up the scraps with affiliate deals. And maybe they've got a members area where you can pay for more content.

• 8:26Chris Williamson?

  And maybe blah, blah, blah, like freemium model, thin end of the wedge shit. But the bottom line is that when we began the internet, when we began content creation on the internet, we misjudged, the entire universe misjudged what you should be paying for and what you should expect for free. And sadly now, because of anchoring bias, there is, that genie can't go back in the bottle. You cannot do that. There is, anchoring bias is precisely what people are doing with gated content. They're saying, you still get the show for free, but you pay for more. As opposed to this is what you could have got and now you have to pay to get it. It's all about avoiding the anchoring bias. But yeah, I I think that the perverse incentives that

• 9:10Chris Williamson?

  De-incentivise people from writing good pieces of long journalism that would have taken ages versus can you believe what Khloe Kardashian wore last night, here's a photo of her with no makeup on going to the whatever, that's going to get shared around and that'll trend. So

• 9:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course. Well, it's even more insidious than that. So it's also, you know, in in certain news organisations, what happens is journalists come in in the morning and they're given a list of the stories that were trending online overnight, you know, kind of the things that are out there in the ether, people were talking about, which is why, you know, these poor, poor buggers, you know, they they they come into work and they're like, right, write something about this. Who is this? I don't know. It's an American celebrity. She was on some kind of series that you've not heard of. Brian, what's happened to her? Something, I don't know, she's breaking up with her boyfriend. Who's her boyfriend? I don't know. It doesn't matter. Just write something. So, you know, at the bottom end, the other thing that happens with this, of course, and you're absolutely right that there's, I mean, it's not a difficult argument fundamentally, is it, to say that, you know, when you're

• 10:09Speaker 00

  talking about journalism, where you're sending people to the difficult and scary places to, you know, to be put into situations that you wouldn't want to be put into on your behalf so you can get information. That's that should be a fairly easy sell. But the other thing that happens, of course, is that as as the number of media multiply, right? So as you kind of bust outside of the established media, which in many ways was very, very, very good, because it empowers a lot of kind of smaller producers to do some interesting things and to experiment. But as you do that, and as their, you know, economic clout comes down and down and down, and as they sort of hemorrhage cash, there's fewer opportunities for journalists to take, you know, what was traditional journalism. So in this country,

• 10:50Speaker 00

  for example, what would happen is you would, you know, you'd start at an entry level job on a local newspaper, and you'd frantically work away. Hopefully, some nice editor would take you under their wing and sort of knock some of the the rough corners off, rough edges off your your writing and so on. You'd start writing pieces and trying to send them to the nationals and eventually you get a couple placed. And then eventually you might get something, you know, like, you know, at the nationals and then you'd work your way up. There was a there was a there was a kind of a ladder that you could climb. It kind of made sense, right? And so what you end up there with is is proper training and, you know, proper experience. And you can do that in a context in which you can make enough money to survive. That sounds like a good way to fund journalism, which, as we all know, is incredibly important to a stable society, right? And to democracy.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  But the problem is now there's so few, there's no local news jobs. Local news is basically dead, has been killed by the internet. And there's very few opportunities at the kind of the bigger establishment organisations. So you've still got all of these people wanting to become journalists, still loads and loads of people desperate to to kind of go into that. They come out the other side and they realise there's nothing for them to go into. And so then what they have to do is they have to find some sort of back door. So there's the possibility they could launch a podcast, it might take off, it won't, it might, you know, or they could launch their own magazine, it might take off, it won't, it might, you know. And you sort of you're you're hollowing out the whole ecosystem. And what you end up with is the kind of the few opportunities that there are there tend not to be for the

• 12:18Speaker 00

  the better sort of kind of interesting journalists. And they tend to be this thing where you're just turning the wheel to to keep the whole sordid process going.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me about the difference between first and being right. I heard you talk about the Amanda Knox story as a really good example of this.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  The Amanda Knox story was fascinating. So it was this, you know, it was the retrial of Amanda Knox for the murder of Meredith Kircher in Perugia. That's right, yeah. And so this was this was a highly attended court event in Perugia. And all of the world's major news organisations were there. There's these extraordinary photos of, you know, these banks and banks of of people kind of watching the story. And the Daily Mail had prepared two news stories, one for if the the verdict went one way and one for if it

• 13:12Speaker 00

  went the other way. And there was something that happened. Maybe somebody in the court misheard something. You know, it was guilty, but it was guilty to something else, to a lesser charge of slander rather than murder. And the button was pushed and the wrong news story went up online. Because as we know, at the retrial, Amanda Knox's, the guilty verdict was overturned and she was she was ended up subsequently being released. And so this story goes up on the world's single biggest English language news site, which is is the diametric opposite of the truth.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  And you know, this sort of thing has always happened, right? Because news organisations, they've always prepared, you know, for eventualities. You think about elections, you know, there's famous examples in the past of people just being certain the election was going to go one way and they published their front story with X1 and Y wins. And the thing that they got into trouble with the Mail was that there was quite a lot of kind of elaborated colour, there was quite a lot of elaborated quotes that went in there as well.

• 14:13Chris Williamson?

  What like?

• 14:13Speaker 00

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

• 14:54Speaker 00

  the people at the Mail wanted to get it right. But they, they kind of like they pushed the wrong button and this went up. It's only up for a couple of minutes and then they put the correct story up. And, you know, if the verdict had been, you know, what they thought it was, then that would have been, you know, part of the, the record of this event for the rest of history, even though stuff in it was not kind of correct. So that's, that's a weird thing. You know, this, this need for speed in this hyper, hyper, hyper speedy, knee jerk news environment means that we're kind of built for, for error kind of creeping in. And then more than that, and this is not what I'm sort of suggesting in, in this case particularly, but you know, the whole ecosystem is built up for, for spreading

• 15:37Speaker 00

  disinformation and misinformation very, very rapidly around the world.

• 15:41Chris Williamson?

  You know what it's like? It reminds me of the algorithmic trading companies on Wall Street that moved their exchanges closer, that moved their offices closer to the exchanges to gain half a millisecond.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  That's right, that's right. And you know, because it matters, right? Because the economics of it are such that if you get that story out first, then you're higher in the Google rankings, which means more people link to you. And I mean, I know the algorithm is changing all the time, but you know, uh, but you know, you, you, you're notionally going to get higher up, which means you can get more clicks, which means you can charge more for the advertising, which means at a time when people aren't prepared to pay for news, you can still continue to fund your organisations. But I mean, if you sat down to construct a kind of a news ecosystem from scratch, you know, it wouldn't be that.

• 16:27Chris Williamson?

  What else are the press getting wrong at the moment?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  I'm very loath to criticise the press because I think that by and large, um, the, the press is kind of comprised of editors and journalists who are just trying to do their best, um, and trying to get the truth out there. And of course, you know, my magazine, you know, uh, one way we, we've talked about it is we're slightly the kind of, we're the seagulls following the trawler, right? Because we're not, you know, we're not breaking the news. The, the, the slogan down the spine of all of our issues is last to breaking news. So we're kind of following along behind and, you know, we get to, we get to look at what has happened and then we get to kind of ask people to take a broader view on it. And there are interesting things around that. So, you know, one of the things that, that

• 17:14Speaker 00

  often happens is, um, when people are interviewed about an event, when it's just happened, and sometimes when it's still happening, still unfolding behind them, they tend to give a very different reaction, understandably, to a few months down the line when they've had a chance to consider and put things in perspective, you know, when they're standing in front of the burning building, trying to process what's happened. There is a very different reaction to, you know, three months down the line. Okay, think about it. So.

• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  People are selecting for witnesses and for statements and for reactions from people and commentators and opinion pieces, they're selecting for a very particular type of opinion.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Well, that's right. So it is, it is the opinion that you get immediately. And also because the media moves, you know, uh, en masse around certain stories, you also get things. So, uh, I remember going to Salisbury three months after the poisoning. And it's actually my hometown and just kind of walking around talking to people. And they're like, God, there's endless journalists and, you know, people were almost scared to go into the town centre because they would just be stopped like, hi, I'm from CNN, I'm BBC. Can I, you know, can I get some words from you? How are you feeling? I'm feeling fine, just fuck off. It's just like my entire town is now just journalists and like potentially some Novichok. So, uh, yeah, so, so that's, you know, that's, that's another kind of quirk of it.

• 18:33Speaker 00

  But no, as I said, sorry, I'm, I'm very likely to criticize journalists. And I think in an ideal world, um, we would find, and I think, do you know what? I think slowly we're getting there because I think these paywalls seem to be working. And actually, a wonderful example is The Guardian. So The Guardian was losing money hand over fist for, for many, many years. And, um, they took this kind of very grown up decision to say to their readers, what we do costs money and you need to support us if you want it. We'll keep giving it, we'll do it free because we want reach and we think our journalism needs to reach the four corners of the world. And if you can't pay, no problem at all. However, it costs money and if you can support us, then do. And they had tremendous reaction and they managed to, you know, break even, I think ahead of where

• 19:16Speaker 00

  they thought they were going to. So, um, so I think, you know, the people are trying to do. I mean, obviously there's always, you know, as in any, any organizations, there's obviously kind of, you know, there's, there's bias and there's corruption and there's things that I see happening, which, you know, I think are unpleasant in terms of invasion of privacy and things like that. But, you know, that's been with us forever and I probably always will, uh, always will be. But I think, you know, I, I just have, I just have the privilege, I guess, of being able to offer a slightly different view.

• 19:44Chris Williamson?

  The bastards are ubiquitous. It doesn't matter where you are or what industry you're in. The bastards are going to be, they're going to be everywhere. I'm pretty fascinated thinking about what it, what it does to the psyche en masse. For people to hear stories.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  Very vociferous, aggressive, eye-catching stories and never get to hear the conclusion to them, never get to tie up that loose end. That's something I'd never ever thought of before, but it's almost, unless it's a court case, in which the court case itself becomes another piece of novelty that people want to get to. The only reason that that closure is being featured is that the closure is also another piece of novelty. But for the most part, you hear the Afghanistan exit is a perfect example. We all knew what happened with those photos of people falling from the plane as it's taking off, that clinging to it as they're running along and they're waving at the camera. And I don't know how

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  that's even been completed. I have no idea at all.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Well, this is, this is, this is true. And also, I mean, I suppose the other thing is arguably, you know, you could do a magazine that does this every six months. You could do one that does it every year. You know, there's loads of stories that we could continue to follow up and, you know, when, when does it end, right? When do the ripples stop emerging from that, from that story? And I suppose that we've always kind of positioned the magazine is halfway between a magazine and a history book, right? You know, it's like, it's, it's sort of, you know, somewhere, somewhere in the middle between the two. That's true. That's it. I mean, we do do deeper stuff than that. So I mean, it's, it's often the, the stories are kind of inspired by something that happened in that three-month period, but we'll reach further back. And well, I guess what we try to do is, given that we have these lovely, like, long-form stories that we can, we can do, is we try

• 21:31Speaker 00

  to get to do what a lot of journalists aren't given time to do, which is provide lots of context and seek out lots and lots of expert opinion and, you know, like, try to, try to take a broad view. And that's, that's very difficult to do if you're having to turn out stories, you know, at such a tremendous pace.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  It's the consistent, ambient.

• 21:52Chris Williamson?

  Unfulfilled open loop, that it has to have an impact on the public's psychology. It has to. You're constantly being fed issues that do not get resolved. That's what the news is.

• 22:06Speaker 00

  That's true. That's true. And also, of course, I mean, you know, this is not a new thing. And this is, this is, this is just the nature of news as we kind of see it. Is that because everything is, you know, not everything, because there's a lot of terribly bleak things out there. And because you want to cut through with your stories, you kind of have to escalate. I mean, you know, this is, this is right. You know, this kind of feeds back to this amazing Anna Lemke, you know, interview that we're talking about that you, you, you kind of, you know, you, you, you can't, you just, you can't give people the same thing and expect the same reaction. You kind of have to escalate. So, and that's part of the reason, I think, why, you know, so many people have said that they want to switch off the news, you know, and that they feel so

• 22:51Speaker 00

  much better when they stop reading the news for a few months because they can't do anything about it. You know, none of the massive issues are anything that we can actually influence. We can't influence government coronavirus policy. We can't influence China's plans to build coal-fired power stations. We can't do anything about any of these things. And yet, they weigh on us as though we could and as though we're like, we're not fulfilling it. So you're right. News is very anxiety inducing, which is part of the reason that, you know, that people want to consume it because they think that if they can consume it, then they can master it and somehow get on top of it. But they can't. I mean, I kind of wish that I could stop reading the news, but I can't because it's my job.

• 23:26Chris Williamson?

  I got sent a plugin by my buddy George called Tweetmax, which is just a plugin for Chrome. And it's, it brings up a highlight of the person whose profile you're on, their top tweets of all time by likes and retweets. But the most important thing that it does is it covers over the trending portion of my Twitter homepage. So I go on to my news feed now and this thing comes up. And if it, if you're not on someone's profile, it just randomly chooses one of the people that you follow. And it, and it brings up their best tweets of all time, which is awesome because I only follow 99 people. So they're always someone that I know or someone that I absolutely adore what they're doing. But on top of that.

• 24:10Chris Williamson?

  It stops me from seeing trending, that trending thing on the side. And when you realise, when you log on, there is nothing that I can be surprised by now that would go in that point. Like, it could be any story at all. I don't know whether you've seen,

• 24:32Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember who the comedian is from America that did this, but they pieced together, I think it might have been Ryan Long. Ryan Long pieced together how you make an eye catching headline. And it's just a bunch of, a particular group does something in this. So it's outraged mothers fighting over misappropriated cat culture or something like that. And it's just, that's how you piece it together. And he does all that. And you look at, you look at the side of trending and you think, this is fucking, this is the world that we're in, this sort of formulaic, algorithmic headline writing.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely. If you can get, if you can get some outrage in there, that's amazing, because then you get multiple bites of the cherry, right? So you can scrape together, if you look on Twitter, you can find three or four people who are outraged about anything, right? Anything, like, you know, vanilla ice cream, you know, people smiling too much, whatever it might be, you can find them outraged at this vanilla, you know, vanilla ice cream outrage. And then you get that, and then you get the reaction against that, and then you can report that. I mean, you can go on with this forever, and people, people kind of do. But I mean, that's funny about the kind of gaming the system, because, you know, at the beginning, it used to be stuff like writing, you know, writing the word sex in white, on white background

• 25:51Speaker 00

  a thousand times over. So people, you know, then obviously that was way too sophisticated, way too unsophisticated, and then they got kind of changed. And then, you know, putting the names of celebrities into your, into your titles, you'd have these incredibly dry publications that for some reason were referencing Britney Spears and nobody really kind of, you know, like, why are you doing that? You're a plumbing magazine, you know, but, but, you know, it kind of all feeds into it all helps. And this is just the latest part of that, right? You just kind of concoct what will work, what will cut through. But the problem is, because we've all been doing it for so long, the kind of the- The sheer outrage you need to cut through if you're going for the outrage angle is difficult. But that said, you know, I sort of mentioned before, you know, this pendulum, it does swing back and people kind of get sick of it.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, when we when we launched, people were so in love with digital. People were prepared to, without any sort of credible business model, they were prepared, longstanding publishers were prepared to say, yeah, I mean, think, you know, like we're digital first now. How are you going to make money? I don't know. It'll become apparent. What are you talking about? What are you talking about? And also, you know, how in love people were with their smartphones. I mean, you know, there was nothing wrong with smartphones. And now everybody's uneasy about their smartphones. Everybody's trying to detox, trying to kind of get themselves, wean themselves off it. They're anxious about their kids having it. They know, you know, how much time they're spending just scrolling through, you know, stuff that they don't need to scroll through on social. So I think I think these things change.

• 27:14Speaker 00

  And, you know, and actually, so our magazine's a case in point, you know, we've we've managed to build like a modest subscriber base that funds us to do good journalism.

• 27:22Chris Williamson?

  Using an antiquated communication medium.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  That's true. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, go proper old school. But I think almost you need to do that, right? So you need to do the opposite of what other people do. So you do print instead of digital, you do reader funded instead of invasive personalized advertising, and you do slow instead of fast. And then you can, it's always going to be a niche, but you might have a niche that works.

• 27:43Chris Williamson?

  I think that you're right about the counterculture thing. And I think that we are at the beginning of that pendulum, starting to move that you see how much support people's Substacks and Patreons get.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  What do you think? Let's say it's 20 years or 30, let's say it's 50 years time. What do you think that the world will look back on this period of limbic hijack and technology that is incredibly unethical, manipulating the most base elements of our psychology to get us to stay on site for this long? What do you think people are going to look back on this period of history and consider?

• 28:24Speaker 00

  Wow, that's quite a big question.

• 28:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm aware I'm asking you to be the most sort of divinated, clairvoyant that you can, but just.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  Well, no, it's funny. So I see I did this. I did this TEDx in 2014. And one of the things that I said, I sort of, I wanted some nice, bold statements to the end. And I said, in 10 years' time, there won't be a single printed, like a single major printed newspaper left in in the in the Western Europe, or something like that. And so I'm slightly anxious now because it's got like two years to go. There's lots of them.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  Come on, guys, TikTok, TikTok.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Just go out of business. I mean, a lot have folded, but still. Well, it's funny, isn't it? When when you look back, obviously, what happens is that all the noise kind of, all the noise kind of goes away. And, you know, you look back on entire decades, like the the kind of 70s, what was it the decade of? Well, like, you can name kind of three or four things, and one of them is disco. So, you know, I mean, you're all the people who lived through that. It's absolutely nonsensical. But I would imagine that a huge amount of it will be to do with climate stuff, won't it? So it will be, these guys were such morons. Why didn't they just do, you know, why didn't they just do cold fusion like we've got and sort it out with limitless power? What on earth were we thinking? That's so stupid.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And or can you imagine them living in a time before they knew that there were aliens or something like that? It'll be some massive thing that we've not, you know. Um, I think in terms of of my my strong feeling is that

• 29:55Speaker 00

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

• 30:34Speaker 00

  kind of broader news media, I guess probably it'll still, you know, it'll still be guided by the same things that that we want as humans, which is. We want to amass enough information that we'll be invulnerable and we'll have a special advantage over all the other humans and we'll be protected and our families will be protected, which is obviously, you know, nonsense.

• 30:53Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely impossible. Do you have a side interest in data science or something then? Because you've written a book that works out things like how much it would cost to buy everything in an edition of Vogue, or what the actual best inventions since sliced bread have been, or the UK's most popular dog breeds. Are you a closet data scientist too?

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Um, so I would never glorify myself as a data scientist, but since we launched the magazine, so in the first issue of the magazine, my co-editor Marcus said, do you know what we should do? We should do some infographics. Infographics are fun. And our art director, who's the best art director in the world, sort of came on to this and said, yeah, so from the very first issue, we started doing infographics and just trying to work out, you know, how we do them. And over years, we've, we've kind of worked out, well, we've got, we've got better and better at them, I think. And so actually what happened with this book was it was April 2020 and the first lockdown. And suddenly we'd gone from selling, you know, three or 4,000 copies of the magazine at the newsstand to selling zero copies because nobody was going to, you know, airports,

• 31:54Speaker 00

  nobody was going to bookshops, nobody was going to train stations. I mean, obviously, as, you know, in terms of what was going on at the time, that was a very small drama, but for our, our business, that was a big deal. And so we were just casting around for something that we could, we could do, a project that we could all throw ourselves into in this time when we were, you know, not going out, when we were just staying at home. And we thought, let's do a book, because we talked about doing a book for ages and we had 10 years' worth of infographics. So we started putting stuff together and coming up with new ideas and how it would all look. And then we found an agent and we got the, we got an offer from Bloomsby, so we sold it to them. And then we started putting it together. And I love infographics. And I'm not a data scientist, but I have enough, I have enough data manipulation skills

• 32:37Speaker 00

  to pull together, you know, infographics and to do, do the research for them. And they're brilliant for a magazine because they give you, they give you a way in. I think that they are like a gateway drug for magazine purchases. And I've seen people at the newsstand flicking through a copy of the late gratification. You know, and it's not the long form features, the earnest kind of analysis, any of that that they stop at. It's the funnies, it's the little infographics, the little things like, oh, wow, that, my goodness, did you know how many chickens there are? Wow. And so that's, that's, you know, been great for us for, for the magazine. But I also think that they're, they're really interesting from a journalistic point of view because you can kind of use them in a way. Slightly to take the heat out of, of, you know, kind of quite controversial stories.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  Because you could just, you know, you could just put the facts down, right? And you can, you can kind of give people a way into the facts, you know, that, that kind of looks good and that kind of amuses them and intrigues them at the same time as, as hopefully giving them some, some information. So they're great. And this, yeah, this book is, I mean, this book is 10 years in the making. And it's got lots and lots of lovely silly stuff in it, but it's got quite a lot of serious stuff in it. I think I'm glad that you mentioned what's the best thing since sliced bread. Cause that took me flipping forever to work out how to answer that question. Um, but, uh, but basically what we ended up doing was getting loads and loads of lists that eminent bodies had produced of the best human inventions of all time. And then we, we totted up, we did a meta list, so we totted up all of their kind of votes. We worked out what the most kind of, uh, most lauded inventions in human history were.

• 34:05Speaker 00

  Um, post the industrial revolution. So it wasn't like fire at the wheel and stuff like that. And then we found out when sliced bread was invented, it was introduced in 1928, I think in June 1928. And then we just looked at the two inventions that were best ranked after that, which were spoiler alert. They were penicillin and the internet. And penicillin only just scraped under the wire because I think that was something like September 1928, but that's it, you know, that's.

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't penicillin grown on bread as well?

• 34:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:33Chris Williamson?

  So that's two bread-based. And if we'd been able to make the internet off of bread, we would have had three bread-based inventions.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, let's not rule it out at this stage. Let's see if we can get some, uh, some funding.

• 34:47Chris Williamson?

  Into bread. Yeah. So I've, I've got some of my favorite ones that I went through. So the world's oldest person was 122 years old and she was French. Apparently.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, Jeanne Calment. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, so we like looking at old people. So we did this whole infographic at the, uh, the other end of the book, which was, um, it was called How to Live Forever. Um, but it had a little asterisk that said up to a maximum of 122 years. And, uh, what we did was we looked at supercentenarians. So people who had lived older than 110.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  And the nice thing about that is that they've all been interviewed at some stage. And I mean, quite often they're, you know, sort of barely kind of capable of, of giving answers. But the one question everybody has always asked them is, how did you live to such an old age? And, um, and the answers are just, just absolutely delightful. So, um, there's mad stuff like, um, so whiskey and boiled onions, uh, eating boiled polenta, a sense of humor, quite a few people said that, lifelong virginity.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

  Eugenie Blanchard lifelong virginity. God, no alcohol, tobacco, or, or fooling around.

• 35:57Speaker 00

  No fooling around.

• 35:58Chris Williamson?

  No fooling around.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  My favorite one is there's a lady who said, um, daily raw steak and brandy and leaving her husband.

• 36:06Chris Williamson?

  Aged 39.

• 36:09Speaker 00

  So that's quite nice. Like you can, you can start to get, I mean, I'm not sure. I wouldn't necessarily, I'm not sort of necessarily endorsing lifelong virginity in a, a all brandy diet to people. But there's, there's kind of nice, funny things that you can find out.

• 36:20Chris Williamson?

  I'm a big fan of May Harrington, who lived to 113, died on the 29th of December, 2002, and just has nothing divulged written below her advice.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. She's not giving her secrets away. Why would she?

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Enjoy dying at 80, bitches.

• 36:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I knew I didn't tell.

• 36:41Chris Williamson?

  You didn't know. And then, uh, the oldest living creature was a clam that lived to 507 years old until he was accidentally killed by researchers.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  That's right. I think it was the researchers who found the clam accidentally in the process of identifying the clam, working out how old it was, accidentally killed it. So, I mean, it could have been, you know, like, could have gone a lot, you know, it was didn't have a good innings.

• 37:05Chris Williamson?

  Unbelievable. The oldest cow, forty eight years. The oldest goat, twenty two years. Twenty nine years for the oldest dog. That's, I mean, there's a forty three year old spider in here as well, which I do not want to meet.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  No, exactly, exactly. And with all of these things as well. You know. One thing that we found out in making this book, you know, and going through these billions and billions of kind of data sources, and some of them are actually kind of fantastic. And, you know, and, you know, many, many diligent people kind of compiling them, so on, is that you also, you also do get to a few where you think, how did you know that? Like, did some, you know, like the spider one? Was it just, was it just kept in one place for those forty, whatever years it was? I mean, potentially, maybe it was, maybe it was in a zoo or whatever. But if not, you know, is there just a chance that a younger spider scuttled in at some point? It's just like, you know.

• 37:56Chris Williamson?

  You've got, you've got some concerns around the veracity of the conclusions of the spider research. You can't, you can't just cut its leg off and look at how many rings are inside of it. That's not the way it works.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  That's the, you can't carbon date a spider. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's, I think there's just a lot of, in terms of kind of the data that's out there necessarily. You know, there's a lot of best guesses and kind of approximations. I mean, actually, if you think about something like, like CO2 emissions or whatever. You know, we've got these things and broadly, they're probably, you know, like ballpark correct. But then also, like, no government in the world, even the most scrupulous and well-funded government, is measuring every single, you know, fire in somebody's back garden, or every single kind of, you know, whatever it might be. And certainly, that's, you know, that's even the best funded ones. And a lot of people, it'll be, I think, probably just a finger in the air, like approximating it.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Looking at the CO2 emissions, I was quite interested in this. The UK has seen the biggest CO2 emissions drop of all G20 nations, a decrease of forty one percent since nineteen ninety. Meanwhile, China is emitting eleven point five billion tonnes of CO2 per year, which accounts for thirty point three percent of the global total. That's one country.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 39:10Chris Williamson?

  Contributing thirty point three percent of the entire global total of CO2 emissions.

• 39:16Speaker 00

  It's true. I mean. One thing to kind of bear in mind, I suppose, about that, you know, that's that is an impressive drop by the UK and a lot of it has been this real kind of like throwing ourselves into renewables. And so actually, since nineteen ninety, you know, coal-fired power and energy production has has kind of absolutely plummeted. But another thing that's happened is that manufacturing in this country has effectively been offshore to China. So, you know, our emissions data doesn't take into account the embedded emissions of the products that we buy constantly from China.

• 39:48Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 39:49Speaker 00

  And that are, you know, made there using less clean energy and that are shipped here, flown here, whatever it might be, you know. So actually, there's there's loads of different ways of, I mean, even in this, you know, so actually, there's, there's three different kind of major standards for how you measure emissions and some of them take into account, you know, like aviation and and some of the don'ts.

• 40:12Chris Williamson?

  Livestock and stuff, yeah.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  You know, all of these different things. So, um, so, yeah, I mean, generally, the UK has done well. It's it's probably also the case that a lot of the low-hanging fruit for the UK has now been been picked, was actually, you know, somewhere somewhere like China. Actually, they they haven't kind of, you know, made that switch to renewables. But if they did, that would make a massive difference.

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  I'm terrified of China. Sometimes I just sit and think about what it's going to be like with our new East Asian overlords, which personally, I welcome with open arms and have always been an ardent supporter of the Xi Jinping entire, everything that he's done, his hair, his outfits.

• 40:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  His thirty point three percent of the global total CO2 emissions per year. I I welcome them.

• 40:59Speaker 00

  Absolutely, absolutely. Well, so we did, actually, we did an interesting infographic in the book about that, and it was just called, How Has China Changed? And we just looked at some of the data about what has happened to kind of, you know, the the quality of life of citizens in China.

• 41:19Speaker 00

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

• 42:04Speaker 00

  in that in that last twenty years. And China's has increased by more than a thousand percent. I mean, it is completely, I think the UK's around ninety seven or something like that. But it's just, I mean, it's it's an incredible thing that's been happening there in the background. This economic, you know, expansion, which has been coupled with a lot of kind of very good things for some of the citizens and a lot of very bad things for some of the other citizens.

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  Totalitarian communist regime is good for the GDP. That's

• 42:32Speaker 00

  Effective.

• 42:33Chris Williamson?

  That's the it's effective.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  In this case, effective.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  Gets the job done. I would love to see a an accurately done study around happiness levels and around fulfillment and meaning levels for Chinese citizens. You're never going to, the same as finding out if Covid came from Wuhan lab or whatever. We're never going to find out. I think it's very unlikely that we're going to find out. Because you, by its very nature, the people that would be conducting the study have a perverse incentive around the outcomes of the study. But I don't know what it's like to be a Chinese citizen with a social credit score and all of your movements being tracked. And have you seen that they've got gate analysis now on the artificial intelligence system?

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  So even if you don't show your face, they can predict who you are to a ninety seven percent accuracy simply by the way that you walk.

• 43:26Speaker 00

  It's petrifying.

• 43:27Chris Williamson?

  Terrifying.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Absolutely petrifying.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Speaker 00

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

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  Finally caught up with everybody else.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  Exactly. And of course, I mean, it's it's the most populous nation on on the planet as well. So actually, the interesting thing as well is the GDP is colossal. The GDP per capita for China is still very middling. You know, there's a lot of, there's a lot of people not doing kind of particularly well. And there's lots of people who are doing very well. But yeah, I mean, you know, you could do, you could do a book of infographics just on China. I mean, just on on what's happening. They're mad stuff, you know, the, we looked at the tallest towers in the world. I think at least seven of them are in China. You know, the tallest skyscrapers in the world, so it's completely kind of eclipsed.

• 44:29Chris Williamson?

  There's some place, what's the new one? Because there's a new one, is it in some Saudi place that's going to?

• 44:35Speaker 00

  Oh, the Jeddah Tower.

• 44:36Chris Williamson?

  It's going to wipe the floor with the Burj Al Arab.

• 44:40Speaker 00

  Right, that's right.

• 44:40Chris Williamson?

  The Burj Khalifa.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  That's right. So Burj Khalifa is your tallest. You've got one, two, three, four, five, six of the top tall, um, top 10 tallest towers are in China at the moment. And then I think it's the Jeddah Tower, which is scheduled to open in 2024, which is going to be notionally a kilometer high.

• 45:00Chris Williamson?

  And that's in, where's that Saudi Arabia somewhere?

• 45:02Speaker 00

  That's in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, yeah.

• 45:04Chris Williamson?

  And then I know from my trip to Dubai last winter that they are building in the center of a brand new marina that's going to be downtown, huge downtown marina. They are building just, it's not a building, it's just a spike in the ground. But this spike in the ground is going to be 1.1 kilometers high. So they're already planning to take the title that they're about to lose to Jeddah back and put it in the same place. It's just, I shit you not, I shit you not, it's a spike in the ground.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  It does all feel a little bit, a little bit sort of old fashioned this, doesn't it? You know, like it's sort of showing off competition with towers. I mean, we've got a little bit of it. Actually, it was quite interesting with the, um, the kind of the recent launches, kind of Bezos and Branson and so on. Doing these, these big launches into space and a lot of people just saying, why are you doing that? You, you don't think we've got other things?

• 45:57Chris Williamson?

  What have you got left to do when you've got basically unlimited, unlimited oil money in the Middle East? What have you got to do other than stick the biggest spike in the world in the ground? That's it. That's all that's left.

• 46:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I suppose so. I mean, that's kind of the, that's slightly the Bezos argument, although Bezos is also saying that, you know, we, we're going to learn loads of stuff from him going into space. But I don't know, it just seems, it feels a bit of an old fashioned way to spend your, spend your billions, doesn't it?

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  Do you see what Elon tweeted recently talking about how people were criticizing him for not paying tax on his unrealized gains from stock holdings? So he did a Twitter poll to say, should I just dump 10% of Tesla stock? And I'll abide by whatever the results of this poll are. And that ended up with a Twitter poll deciding the fate of $20 billion worth of stocks. And they decided on yes, ended up at 57 and a bit percent said yes. So it sounds like if you're holding Tesla stock, might be an idea to just let, get out of the market for the time being and then rebuy back in. Cause Elon's about to dump a little bit.

• 47:07Speaker 00

  Oh, God save us. But I mean, it all, it keeps us, it keeps us in interesting stories, right? You know, it keeps us with something to talk about.

• 47:13Chris Williamson?

  Dog breeds. I love this one. I love dogs. The most popular dog crossbreed was Cockapoo's with 39,000 being sold through Pets for Homes in 2020. This is in the UK. 10 of the 24 most popular dog breeds has poodles as parents and Cavapoo's are the most expensive dogs. Now I know a lot of people that have got Cockapoo's, so I anecdotally can completely back this.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, this was fascinating. So this was something that we looked at in the magazine first, right? Because it was a big phenomenon about COVID and the lockdown. So actually, we did a ton, a ton, a ton, a ton of infographics about COVID. I mean, there was so much amazing data there to play with. And this was a fascinating peripheral one. It was going through this unbelievable inflation. And so there's two things going on. So people getting more and more interested in crossbreeds. And they were also paying more and more and more for them. And so we got this incredible data. Quite often, you know, for the book, we would kind of go and approach somebody we thought had some interesting data. And Pets for Homes did have interesting data. They sell kind of tons and tons of dogs. I think the thing, one of the things that I like the most,

• 48:21Speaker 00

  though, I'm not particularly a dog person, but I do love the kind of these portmanteau names. So you've got, you know, you've got Cavapoo and Maltipoo and Golden Doodle, but you've got Pomskey, Poochon, you've got Sprudel, you've got Sprocker, a Mulshi, a Morky, a Pomchi, a Chalky, a Puggle, a Jug, and a Shalky. I was just kind of lovely, lovely things. But the prices for these things were insane. I mean, actually, the thing to really invest in over the last year has been crossbreed dogs.

• 48:49Chris Williamson?

  Dogs.

• 48:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:51Chris Williamson?

  Crazy. I'm trying to work out what it is about poodles that make them, because I know that Cockapoo's are, I want to say hypoallergenic, which sounds like the sort of thing that you look for in a bed pillow. Oh, yeah. Well, thankfully, because Jonathan, he's got Infatigo, so we need to have a hypoallergenic fucking pillowcase for him whilst he comes out with a rash. Like, but yeah, I think that there's something to do.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  You've answered. That's exactly right. But it's the poodles that are hypoallergenic.

• 49:18Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so they pass that down. That's a dominant gene, is it? Like having brown eyes? The hypoallergenic nature is, that gets passed down. Even if you mate that with a Dulux dog, the Dulux dog's genes just get completely whitewashed by the poodle.

• 49:31Speaker 00

  Now, that, you have me there. I think that's the case. But you know what? I don't want to definitively say that. But, um, but can I tell you about, so the other, so I'm really glad that you picked that one. The other one that I loved from the lockdown was, and the other kind of really novel bit of data that we got, was we, um, we looked at what people were searching for across the world during lockdown. And it was kind of, it was, it was so revelatory, because it's such a, such a weird experience that we've all had, right? We all went through this. And, you know, a third of the world at one point was in some form of lockdown. And we did quite earnest stuff about the disease and how it spread and, you know, the financial impact and so on. But the really human story, and I think that's where the infographics worked best, is where they kind of got this real human story at the heart of it, was what

• 50:13Speaker 00

  people were searching for on Google. And we, so we went to Google and we said, look, the sort of thing that we're looking for is, is, you know, kind of data that tells us about, you know, how people's priorities changed. So the data that we got was searches that had increased the most year on year. So the year before the pandemic and then the year after, and then we drilled down, we got it kind of day by day. So we related it to how the whole thing unfolded. So fascinatingly, before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic, the big thing that people were searching for was hoarding. You know, you know, we can all remember there was this unease and, you know, there were things starting to, kind of people were starting to hoard things. We weren't quite sure what's going on. And then in order,

• 50:56Speaker 00

  this isn't all of them, but it went hoarding, toilet paper, coronavirus, people just across the world, in every language under the sun, just going, what is coronavirus? Hydroxychloroquine, when Trump was just like, this is, you know, this, I'm interested in this, this is going to sort things out. Ammunition. So driven by people in the States being like, right, it's the end of the world, let's load up. Exercise bike. My absolute favorite bit is on day 12, there's two searches that spike. The first one is homeschooling. So people just being like, how the hell do I do this? And the second one is, when will schools open? Then you had social distancing, which is a term that had not, had never been searched for in a quantity that it would register on Google's radar before, complete breakout

• 51:39Speaker 00

  term. Same with Zoom dating, cut your own hair, permit to go outside, this is lovely, cafe sounds on YouTube. People hadn't searched for that before.

• 51:48Chris Williamson?

  Cafe sounds. They wanted to sound, make themselves feel like they were in a cafe while they were sat at home.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Like they were in a cafe. So, you know, what they used to do in the old days was go to a cafe. And then there was just sitting at home on their bed and just be like, God, this is a bit sad.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  Too fucking silent in here. Let me get, let me get the sound of Sheila making a cup of tea.

• 52:05Speaker 00

  So, which, you know, was the market provided, like the clink and the clank and the sort of, you know, people tamping down espressos or whatever. Unmute on Zoom. How to make your own McDonald's.

• 52:15Chris Williamson?

  That's the most boomer search ever.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Isn't it? That's a bit, come on. Why is my face not here? Where are my grandchildren? Yeah. How to make McDonald's. And then, you know, all of this kind of stuff, all of this, this kind of stuff, the, you know, mad kind of social stuff. And then another breakout thing, and this was. Quite a long way down the line, but how many people can attend a funeral? This was a breakout search that people hadn't had to think about before because well, as many people as can fit in the church or crematorium. But that was the thing that people were searching for on mass around the world. So I love, I love that sort of data. You know, where it's, it's kind of, it's both epic because it's on a global scale, but it's also personal and immediately, you know, relatable. You understand it.

• 52:54Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with Seth Stephens Davidowitz?

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, everybody lies. Yeah.

• 52:59Chris Williamson?

  So Seth's been on the show and he's, that guy's a beast of, with his data. And I saw a feature that he did. He was able to predict, him or his office were able to predict the rates of COVID infections three to five days ahead of the CDC based on aggregated Google data, based on people searching for loss of taste, high temperature, loss of smell.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 53:28Chris Williamson?

  And if you map loss of taste, high temperature, loss of smell, and a couple of other searches that were common. If you map those on the graph, you see that they're just a lead measure for the lagging measure that ends up being COVID cases.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, is there not this idea also that, you know, you could absolutely use people's kind of search history, you could, you could have kind of algorithms kind of constantly scanning and if people opted into it, into their search histories and just kind of patching together firstly outbreaks of, of kind of various different infectious diseases. But also, um, you know, you could correlate it with other information that you have about them and say, do you know what? Actually, something could pop up and say, you know, you should go to your doctor and get this checked out. You know, you have searched for this particular bowel issue several times and it's probably okay, but you know, like, you know, you could just get so much more joined up about all of this, particularly if you also had, of course, you know, if you were linked into their kind of their blood pressure and, you know, all the things that are going through on their wrist and so on, but.

• 54:26Chris Williamson?

  Thinking in a techno-utopian way, it's a bit of a shame that the period of the world that we're living in at the moment, everybody is incredibly protective about their data because we do not believe that the people who are mining our data have our best interests at heart. You could imagine another world in which we, the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos of the world were just seen as these benevolent saints, right? These sort of technocracy saints that were just, all that they did was make our lives better. And we knew that they had our best interests at heart and they weren't selling it and they weren't trying to limbically hijack us. And we just wanted more. We wanted to just continue to give ourselves away. But because of the framing that this situation's

• 55:10Chris Williamson?

  been given, because of concerns around privacy and human, I had Sebastian Junger on the show not long ago, talking about the brutal history of freedom. And freedom is something that we have been fighting for, for a very, very long time. So when you start to encroach on that, humans have a very visceral response. They're really, really not happy about it and understandably so. But there could have been, this could have been done a different way and we may end up in a place where it is done in a different way. But the amount of time it's going to need to regain the public's trust of big tech. Think about big tech, the words big tech. It makes you think of this dark, malevolent being, you know, hiding at the top of some fucking gilded tower behind an astroturf lawn. Like that's,

• 55:55Chris Williamson?

  you know, it's Silicon Valley run amok. And that's what we think about. We think they're selling our data. They're trying to target us with ads. I don't want them to even know my fucking name, let alone my blood pressure. That's what, that's how we feel about this situation. But it could have been different and I, it would have been nice. It would have been nice to have wanted to supply as much data that you have to these companies as possible. Maybe, I have no idea about this, but maybe Web 3 will be able to enable this a little bit more because you can have genuine levels of security. And I don't understand how it works, but someone said that it sounds like it might be a better version than the internet we have at the moment.

• 56:36Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, it wouldn't be difficult, would it? But I mean, you're absolutely right. There was, there was very much missed opportunity there. Because actually, when all of these things started, we could only see the benefits, right? I mean, you know, some people were moaning because actually it turned out that all of the people that they looked up on Facebook from their childhood, you know, there was a reason that they weren't in touch with them anymore and they're all pricks.

• 56:52Chris Williamson?

  Been reminded why they were assholes that I wasn't friends with. Yeah, exactly.

• 56:55Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So there were things like that, but generally there was a lot of, wow, and I get this for free. Wow, and you know, there were incredible social benefits and people kind of reconnecting. And there were wonderful, wonderful, wonderful things. And you're absolutely right, there must have been a moment at which you'd built enough. But the problem is, you only build enough mass by making it free. Um, because there can't be that barrier to entry. But once you set up that relationship where, you know, the people, you know, we are not the clients, we're the products. It's very difficult to turn that around. And at some point you say, tell you what, do you want, do you want this? But you pay for it and we won't mess around with your data. Or well, I mean, you can't, there's no way you can package that up. You have to continue. Once you've set this course, it has to be all about freedom.

• 57:34Speaker 00

  But I don't know, I think, you know, the, the wiser that people get about what is happening and what is, I mean, less so about the data, but what it's doing to, to your mental health, I think, to be kind of, to leave yourself this open to constant, constant distraction and constant kind of titillation and constant anxiety and so on. The more people move away from that and the more people, you know, capitalism moves in and it provides alternatives. Not necessarily quarterly printed magazines, um, but like other stuff, other tech stuff, you know, where there's a kind of a QDOS associated and, you know, you, you pay for it, but, but you get a better service.

• 58:10Chris Williamson?

  That's the visceral response. The fact that everybody understands that their relationship, I don't know a single person whose relationship with technology doesn't need work. And 10 years ago, that would have almost not been the case. I don't know a single person that doesn't need to work on their relationship with technology. And the fact that that's there and it's so obvious and it's felt, it's a felt sense by everyone. That's the gateway drug to people saying we need to have a system wide change with how technology and us relate. You might see something when we move more towards AR and VR and wearables being a little bit more integrated. When you get a step change in the type of, um,

• 58:56Chris Williamson?

  Media mechanism or the type of consumption mechanism, you may be able to reset some of the market's expectations to do with cost, to do with relationship between you and the supplier or the the tech company. So that may be, that may be something. But again, it's just anchoring bias. It's the fact that until you change a bunch of different things at once, we fix ourselves to, well, this was free. And so many people want to have all of the things that they think that they want with none of the things that they know that they don't want. So I want to still have, be able to access my friends and talk to them. But I don't want them to limbically hijack me, but I also don't want to pay for it. And it's like, you don't get to have those three things.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 59:35Chris Williamson?

  The reason it's free is because they're selling your data and that's targeting you with ads. So another one, another one of the things that you looked at, which was the decade with the most blockbusters based on an original idea.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  Oh, yes.

• 59:47Chris Williamson?

  That was the 1980s.

• 59:49Speaker 00

  It was the 80s.

• 59:50Chris Williamson?

  Unsurprisingly, the 2010s came last, last, last out of the last 100 years. The last century, the worst decade for blockbusters based on an original idea was the 2010s.

• 1:00:07Speaker 00

  Isn't that fascinating? Yeah. I mean, it's all, it's all kind of based on, well, it's either, it's kind of remakes and it's based on story, storybooks and things like that. And yeah, I mean, there was, so actually, if you look at it, the 80s, you had, so the biggest, you know, biggest film of each year, in terms of ticket sales, you had Star Wars, Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back. So you've got first Star Wars, sorry, first Star Wars, you've got 1980, you've got Star Wars. And then you've got 81, you've got Braves of the Lost Ark, 82, you've got E.T., 83, you've got another Star Wars, 84, you've got Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, Top Gun, Maple Action, Rain Man.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  Isn't he?

• 1:00:46Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, Indiana Jones, the Lost Ark, you said, all just kind of just original ideas, not based on anything. So yeah, that's, yeah, the, that stuff is absolutely lovely. I think one of the nicest things that we've done in film is, I always kind of come back to it, is how to win an Oscar. So we just looked at every single Oscar winner, going back to nineteen twenty eight, every single male and female winner of the best actor category. And it's fascinating because we looked at kind of like moderately, how you're most likely to win. Because everybody's got that question when it comes around to Oscar season, like, you know, who's going to win and you've all got your pet theories. And actually, it's fascinating to see the facts, which is that, moderately speaking, you'll play a fictional character, who's North American, from the present day if you're

• 1:01:28Speaker 00

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

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  you already have about, you know, what you would expect to see going into this story. But I love, I love that one in the, in the films. A lot of cultural stuff is really nice. And we did a lovely one about, and we got this data from Spotify about songs that have stood the test of time. So the songs from each year, going back to the fifties, that are the most played now. So, you know, like, I think, like, yeah. And it's quite funny because actually it's almost like a, it's like a list of guilty pleasures. It's a bit like, you know, Sessbook, Everybody Lies, you know, you tell the truth to Spotify because you actually want to listen to those songs. And you might, you know, if you were asked to compose your list of the best songs of the last fifty years, whatever.

• 1:02:50Chris Williamson?

  None of those are going to feature on that.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  None of that shit.

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  One of my buddies, one of my buddies is absolutely adamant that the window into a person's soul is their suggested videos on YouTube Home. That what someone watches between ten PM and eleven PM at night on a weekday evening on YouTube, that's, that's who they really are. Not the person that they tell you, not who they are with their, with their lover in their most vulnerable moments, it's the shit that they watch between ten PM and eleven PM at night on YouTube.

• 1:03:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could see that. And that book, Everybody Lies, there was a lot of stuff in that, wasn't there? Because he has this lovely example, which is, you know, what people write about their partner on Facebook, as opposed to what they type into Google about their partner is mad. It's like, you know, my boyfriend is so sweet, charming, kind, generous, like, yeah, adorable, whatever it is. And then people are typing into Google, my boyfriend is horrible. My boyfriend, is my boyfriend autistic? What's wrong with my boyfriend? Why is my boyfriend so mean? And that's how we use Google. It's like, it's, you know, like, it's a electronic psychiatrist on the couch, isn't it? Why is this happening? I mean, one of the things I liked in the, in the thing, the pandemic searches, one of the things people were just doing in large enough

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  numbers for it to register a massive spike, was just going into Google and typing in, I'm bored. And that's amazing. What do you, what do you fucking want them to do? It's a search engine. But I mean, it's actually, you know, it probably would throw up some useful stuff. But I love that, just people, you know, all around the world in all different languages, I'm bored.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Five hundred and sixty-nine people have been to space. Twenty-four went to the moon, twelve of which walked on the moon, and three went to the moon twice. Plus, we left two golf balls on the moon because one of the astronauts played golf up there.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  That's right, yeah. So actually putting together that data was, was quite a colossal job because it's not centralized. So I'm not sure that anybody's ever calculated that before. There are kind of various different calculations floating about the place. But we, we got the kind of the data from NASA and from the Russian Space Agency, from the Chinese Space Agency, and from the kind of the private companies. And so, yeah, so we, we, we kind of went through methodically and we've listed them all. I mean, I think that this is one of the nice things about this, an answer for everything. It's just, there's this kind of, there's this, there's this thing where you quite want to own knowledge, right? I mean, you're never going to sit there and read through the list of every single person who was sent into space in nineteen eighty-four. But I like having it in a book that I own. It's just nice. I like, I like, it's completism.

• 1:05:19Speaker 00

  That's what it is. It's any time that you could be completist about something. Every single person, they're immortalized.

• 1:05:24Chris Williamson?

  Inherently satisfying.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  It is satisfying. And you know, like, why not? Why not spend eight pages going through and like, calling out the most exciting things that they've done. And then, yeah, I mean, there's loads of lovely, we had the NASA, I mean, there's so many data sources that, you know, obviously we can do without them. NASA have got these amazing data sources about stuff that we left on the moon. So there's hammocks, um, for, you know, because the, the astronauts kind of went up and they didn't really cater for where they were going to sleep. When they first sent them, so they were kind of effectively sort of sleeping all hunched up in their spacecraft and eventually they, they graduated to hammocks and they chucked them out afterwards. Um, there's quite a lot of excrement up there. There's, you know, there's, um, unused sick bags. There's this amazing thing where there's a stack of,

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  a stack of money and it's a special, I think it's two dollar bills or something like it. And somebody thought that they would take it up there and then they could go back down and then hand them out souvenirs. You know, because this is a, this is a special bill and it's been on the moon. Wow. You know, that's, that's amazing. But at some point they jettisoned it, like they thought it was a bad idea or they, like they took off and they're like, have I forgotten something? Oh, fuck.

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  They've left forty two, forty two dollars down on the moon.

• 1:06:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. That was my ticket to the big time. So, I mean, that's the other thing is you find out how weird. The world is. There's a lot of long tail stuff as well. I don't know if you saw, we did one about, um, government e petitions. So the UK government has set up, um, set up a few years ago, an e petitions portal. And you can go on there and you can suggest an e petition. And if you get enough, um, if you get enough votes. On your e petition, I think it's a hundred thousand or something like.

• 1:07:01Chris Williamson?

  Ten thousand is that it will be noticed by someone. A hundred thousand is that it gets brought up in the House of Lords, I want to say.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  It's something like, is it like it gets considered for debate in Parliament?

• 1:07:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes, that's it. Yes, yes.

• 1:07:13Speaker 00

  Something. And, and a certain number of them have been, you know, have kind of broken through a tiny percentage. The vast majority of them, and I went through and found out, you know, I went through every single year, how many were, um, submitted, how many were kind of like rejected. The vast majority of them rejected, um, and there's this lovely government line that they put underneath. And so it says like e petition rejected, reason for rejection. And usually the line is just really polite and it just says. This e petition does not relate to something that the government is responsible for. And it's like, no shit. So like some of my favorite ones on there, there's this brilliant one, which is, um, change the plural of sheep to sheeps. Make gingerism part of the discrimination laws. I'm absolutely favourite one, there's somebody wrote on there slightly petition which was

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

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

• 1:08:15Chris Williamson?

  This isn't our remit, mate. This is a this is a you problem, yeah.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  With more NHS and stuff.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, man. Yeah, the the number of times that I've seen a spurious e petition go up. But it does seem like, I don't know, that system for Americans, I don't know if there's an equivalent for Americans, but that system is a it's an a rage outlet for a lot of people's social justice concerns. But the problem is that people believe, the people that are voting on it, believe that they're genuinely making a change by doing that thing. That's the way that I'm going to contribute to this particular movement. So for instance, there's been a a recent social concern around spiking in nightclubs. Not sure if you've seen this.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Chris Williamson?

  Huge, huge concern around it. And I run nightclubs in the UK, so it means that I've been, we've been dealing with this on the front lines, as it were. And the main thing that people were pushing toward there was we're going to do an e petition. We're going to get this to be considered for debate in whatever, wherever Parliament. And one way that you could look at that e petition page is that it has, it's a simulacrum of doing work whilst not requiring any of the things that might actually enact change. That it gives people who are indignant and want to contribute to a social movement, it gives them an outlet that dissipates their rage,

• 1:09:44Chris Williamson?

  but doesn't by the numbers seem to actually make change all that often.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  That's right. I mean, I think you do get certain breakthrough ones. And when you're going through them, there are certain bees in bonnets that are just, you know, it's like everybody's putting up thing over and over and over and over again. But you're right, there's a certain amount of virtue signaling going on. And, you know, you share an e petition on your socials and that's kind of like you've done something about it, but you haven't actually done anything about it. There was this amazing statistic, and I can't remember exactly what it was, but there's this frighteningly high percentage of news stories.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Where they are shared online before people have read the story at all.

• 1:10:25Chris Williamson?

  You get a warning on Twitter if you do that now.

• 1:10:28Speaker 00

  Do you?

• 1:10:28Chris Williamson?

  If you retweet an article, if you retweet an article without Twitter, without opening the link, and Twitter knows if you've opened the link.

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:37Chris Williamson?

  Twitter pops up and says, you haven't read this. Do you want to read the article before retweeting?

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

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

• 1:11:27Chris Williamson?

  The fucking guy in that department. Can you imagine? Can you imagine that poor bastard's job?

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  No, we're not going to make gingerism part of the discrimination laws. No, we're not going to give you extra large bottles of wine, just buy, I don't know, buy a third size bottle of wine. It's not to do with us. I want to serve.

• 1:11:45Chris Williamson?

  What is, what have I missed off? What was one of your favourites from the book that we haven't covered?

• 1:11:52Speaker 00

  Good question. So there's, ah, there's all sorts of lovely things. I think there's a very simple one that I really like, which is just called Where the Babies Come From. And I'm really interested in this, which is that it's just about fertility rates around the world. And I read this really, really good book a few years ago, Empty Planet. I interviewed one of the authors, there's two authors, I think I interviewed John Ibbotson. And it's basically saying that if you look at the fertility rates, as in the number of babies that women around the world are having. In many, many countries, they are way below replacement rate. So in a modern economy, where you've got a good chance of your kids, very good chance of your kids surviving through childhood,

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  um, you need to be having something like 2.1 kids per woman in the population in order to maintain your population static without any immigration. And in dozens and dozens of countries around the world, that is not the case. And in many, it's nowhere near the case. And the trend is all downwards. And a lot of that is a good thing because a lot of that is people moving from primarily agricultural societies to more urbanized societies. It's women becoming educated and realizing they've got more options. It's people leaving it later to have kids and it's birth control. There's all sorts of wonderful things. But, you know, their argument in this book, which we did kind of a big feature on, was that what's going to happen is we're going to reach a tipping point with the global population

• 1:13:20Speaker 00

  much earlier than the UN is predicting. Um, and after that, it's only going to go one direction. The global population of humans will shrink year on, year on, year on, year on, year. And nothing's going to change it because the economics of it kind of won't change. You've tried, you know, all of these governments have tried basically bribing people to have kids. You've got Scandinavian countries that are setting up the most amazing benefits for people who have kids. Still, they don't want to have lots of kids. Um, you know, China's kind of like pulled the brake on its one child policy. And now it's pulled the brake on its two child policy and it's saying, you know, if you want three, that's fine. You can have three. And they're talking about what the world will be like. You know, with this diminished population, what it means is you'll have a much older population, so you'll have far fewer young people paying for a lot more old people. And they're talking about some interesting things that might happen, that you might possibly have

• 1:14:06Speaker 00

  a less aggressive society because you'd have fewer kind of young men. You'd have more oldies just about the place. But then conversely, you might have a lot more very frustrated young men because, you know, they, they're just basically spending their entire lives paying for the pensions of the, the people who went before them. And then this, you know, that was an eight page feature and then just kind of condensing it to the basics. You've just got a map of the world and you color code it by the places that are making babies at a sustainable rate and those that aren't. And it's fascinating because the world is just colored in. You know, like North America, most of South America, all of Europe, large swathes of Asia. People aren't having babies at a sustainable rate. And it's going to shift, everything's going to change everything. You know, you've got people like, I think Taiwan's down at, you know, just, just above one.

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  You know, that's nowhere near enough for its population to sustain. So that's going to have interesting impacts in terms of everything, in terms of environment. You know, it could be that the thing that saves us is not technology, it's not people changing their lifestyles. But it's just that, you know, humans, you know, the human population just starts to wither away. Hopefully in time to mitigate the worst excesses of of of climate change, maybe not. And, you know, you you might completely have a sea change in your attitude towards refugees. You might start to think that you really, really, really needed them, you wanted to welcome in. Everything could change. I I just love that you have a a double page spread, a very simple map. And hopefully you can spark a lot of conversations around that very easily.

• 1:15:30Chris Williamson?

  People in Chad pumping out nearly seven children per woman.

• 1:15:37Speaker 00

  That's right, but it's all still, it's all still trending down.

• 1:15:41Chris Williamson?

  Is that right? And then the bottom five, Singapore at one point one six, the United Arab Emirates at one point one four. So that's interesting to me because both of those are very wealthy countries.

• 1:15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:53Chris Williamson?

  Super wealthy countries, Andorra, one point one three, Puerto Rico, one point one, and Taiwan at one point zero six. Yeah, that's, um, I wouldn't have guessed, I don't know much about Andorra or Puerto Rico, but I wouldn't have guessed Singapore, the United Arab Emirates or Taiwan to be in that bottom five.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

  Hmm. I mean, religion factors into it as well, of course, as you have a kind of a less religious society. And, you know, the the the religious strictures around, you know, uh, populating the earth and not using contraceptions on as they fade away. The the real key thing or one of the real key key dynamics, though, is moving out of villages. Because in villages, everybody knows you and you're under immense social pressure to have kids, particularly if, you know, if there's a level of a kind of religiousness there as well. But when you move to the city, nobody knows you. There's nobody sort of saying, oh, you still no kids, eh? Oh, okay, you know, nobody's wagging their finger. Plus also you can get, you know, an education and you can move on with your lives. And it turns out that when people do that, they don't want so many kids.

• 1:16:51Chris Williamson?

  It's scary, man. When you think about what the Development of birth control and the decline of religion.

• 1:17:01Chris Williamson?

  Those two things, no one could have predicted that that was going to mean. I don't know, does it look like the global population is going to break 10 billion? Or will it, do you think it'll slow before that?

• 1:17:12Speaker 00

  So there's all sorts of different things. So I think the UN one has us breaking 10 billion. This one that, but actually, I think, to be fair, the UN has got three different scenarios.

• 1:17:20Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:17:21Speaker 00

  And one of them has us breaking.

• 1:17:22Chris Williamson?

  Some fucking, loads of fucking, less fucking.

• 1:17:24Speaker 00

  That's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like a fucking scale.

• 1:17:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, uh, and yeah, so, and so, and it, you know, it, it'll depend on, on where we get to on that, on that scale. But yeah, under some scenarios, you know, in 20 years' time or so, you start.

• 1:17:37Chris Williamson?

  Glance off the bottom of 10 billion or something like that.

• 1:17:40Speaker 00

  And then it never stops, you know, the, the decline, I mean, presumably it stops when you get to two people, but you know, like it, it's one person, but it, it, you know, that decline will continue because obviously each generation shrinks, you know, there's fewer people, having fewer kids, having fewer kids.

• 1:17:54Chris Williamson?

  What's the solution to that? Does he propose one?

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  Well, I think that they, um, I think in the book,

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  they think that we don't kind of need a solution, we just need to be ready for it, you know? So actually, there'll be tons and tons of benefits, you know? If indeed, the, the population sort of, you know, levels off and then starts to decline quite rapidly, before we've totally messed up the environment, then that will have incredible benefits. Like each year, there'll be fewer people consuming, you know, the quality of life for the people who remain. Well, I mean, that's quite breathtaking because, because obviously there's, there's a lot of implications about a kind of a dwindling, a dwindling society and having fewer people to kind of do the jobs and so on. But, but from an environmental, from a purely, from a global point of view, actually, the environment, you know, could be a massive, massive beneficiary. And that was one of the big things that they talked about.

• 1:18:44Speaker 00

  And they just said, you know, this will be another thing that, that humans have to adapt to, but it's something that, that bears thinking about.

• 1:18:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, if everything's going to become automated and there's going to be no jobs for us in any case, if robots are going to take over everything, it doesn't matter, there's only going to be two people left. Yeah, I, I wonder, because there must be a, there has to be a level that things flatten out at, that they're, or else we're talking about this is the next big extinction event, that imagine, imagine if we make it through global pandemics, world wars, nuclear weapons, we avoid destroying ourselves, we avoid all of the asteroids, and the fact that we're not fucking enough. Annihilates the human race. How did, how did that, how did that civilization go extinct? Oh, they just got bored with sex. They just got bored with it and they didn't do it enough and they, they, they, that was it.

• 1:19:32Chris Williamson?

  But here's another thing, man. Imagine we could be living through the period where there are the most humans on the planet that there will ever be.

• 1:19:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That, that, I mean, that will, that will probably be another kind of like thing to chalk up in our lifetimes. But then of course, you know, like making predictions about these things is kind of nonsense. You can see where the numbers are trending and so on. But also say the robots do take over and we've got loads and loads and loads of lovely spare time. Do humans start to reorient their lives again?

• 1:20:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Speaker 00

  I mean, they don't need to, they don't need to work to provide, you know, maybe they're living to 120. So they could dedicate 30 years of their lives just to study. And maybe they can have babies when they're in their seventies. So maybe that's the thing. Maybe you start pumping out babies in your seventies.

• 1:20:17Chris Williamson?

  Nobody foresaw the fucking revolution of the 240s. Yeah.

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  That's right. Led by 70 year olds.

• 1:20:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  Led by Randy 70 year olds, you know, on a mission to repopulate the earth. I mean, who knows? Who knows any of these things?

• 1:20:30Chris Williamson?

  I agree. Rob Orchard, ladies and gentlemen, An Answer for Everything, 200 infographics to explain the world. Will be linked in the show notes below. Where else should people go if they want to hassle your company on what it is that you do?

• 1:20:43Speaker 00

  Oh, and so go to slow-journalism.com and find out all about the magazine and subscribe for a very reasonable rate of £40 a year. And come to some of our events. We do fantastic free events where we do in-depth chats with journalists about their stories. We really kind of get behind the scenes of that. Come to one of our classes. We'll teach you how to make infographics. We'll teach you how to be a features writer. Teach you how to launch a magazine, you know, any, any number of different things, how to be a graphic journalist. Yeah, come along to one of those and get the book. It's, do you know what? This book, this is your classic Christmas book. It's 17 quid. But it feels like it's worth 25, which is nice. You know, it's got heft to it. It's got volume. And I kind of picture myself. As I almost, you know, wandering around waterstones like a lost sheep on the 23rd

• 1:21:27Speaker 00

  of December, thinking, I've got to buy for all the, who am I going to buy? What am I going to get? What do they even like? This is good because this has got politics, culture, sport, film, you know, environment, everything. There's something in there for everybody. So it can look like you've chosen it for just that. You'd be like, yeah, I saw they've got a chapter on designer dogs and stuff like that. And I know you like dogs. So here's your Christmas present. So this is good. This is where we're aiming at. It's like four, four square in the centre of that, you know, like that panic buying Christmas market.

• 1:21:53Chris Williamson?

  Very well thought out.

• 1:21:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:21:57Chris Williamson?

  Hello, Rob.

• 1:21:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Chris Williamson?

  Catch you next time.

• 1:22:00Speaker 00

  There you go, mate. Cheers.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. If y'all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:22:21Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and a middle without parent.