The Psychology Of Transport - Rory Sutherland

In fact, there's so many rail cards that they should just say, "Okay, we're going to get rid of all rail cards." Am I going to give middle-aged men a, you know, white bastard middle-aged man's rail card, which means you've got to pay 33 extra? Because, I mean, everybody except the middle-aged gets a bloody rail card nowadays.

You've been looking at transport a lot recently. What have you learned?

Yes, sorry, sorry. Okay, so the book's coming out on Thursday. It's being launched on Thursday, and it's called "Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?" And it's co-authored, and I have to say, he's probably authored rather more than I have, um, by my colleague Pete Dyson, who was my colleague in the behavioral science practice in Ogilvy and now works for the Department for Transport as the head of behavioral science there.

And it's a very, very interesting, uh, area for exploration because transport, even more than most areas of kind of business or governmental behavior, tends to get dominated by reductionist metrics. And as a result, it gets over-optimized around what you can easily measure: things like speed and time and capacity and duration and punctuality, and under-optimized around things that humans care deeply about but which you can't actually measure because we don't have quantifiable SI-derived units. What? Like enjoyment, regret, fairness?

Okay, there's a very useful, actually, a guy called, um, I was going to say Chris Rock, but he's obviously not called Chris Rock. Um, there's a guy called David Rock, who's a neuroscientist. He's a Kiwi but based in New York, and he has a model which he calls SCARF. And SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness. Now, I don't think it's a complete list. I think there are other things like regret avoidance, although you could put that under certainty, I suppose. But his contention is these are five things that humans have evolved to care deeply about, but which economists, or for that matter, transport planners, don't really understand or factor into their equations at all.

So, I'll give you a very simple example, okay? Um, and Daniel Kahneman has actually done work around this. It's much more annoying to miss a train or a flight by five minutes than it is to miss a flight by 25 minutes or half an hour or an hour. Um, now, you know, to a, you know, reductionist metric, it shouldn't matter because you missed the plane, you didn't miss the plane. The degree of annoyance and upset you might experience should be pretty much exactly the same in either case. There's also much more regret, I think, if, uh, if the flight was delayed and left five minutes before you arrived at the airport. It pisses you off more than if the flight wasn't delayed. There are all sorts of interesting psychological things going on here.

Now, the point about that kind of thing is that, for instance, barriers like queues at ticket machines and, you know, problems getting through ticket barriers, or a delay at a gate prior to boarding a train, are likely to create disproportionate annoyance because they cause a large number of people to miss a train by a very narrow amount of money, narrow amount of time.

Another thing would be, which is a particular rant of mine, uh, you know, they spent, you know, hundreds of millions on new rolling stock for Thameslink. Now, Thameslink, because it's a penetrating service, you know, it'll go from places like Brighton to Bedford, for instance. It is potentially, although it's mostly used probably for commuter rail, it is potentially quite a long-distance rail service. And the trains, by the way, are very, very good. I think they're extremely well-designed, with one extraordinary failing: there aren't seat-back tables. So, if you're on a one-and-a-half-hour journey from, let's say, Brighton to, I don't know, just north of London, Kentish Town or something, okay, you can't work on the train.

Okay, now that kind of thing, everybody is basically stipulating their and their assessing transport proposals based on their objective characteristics of time and speed and capacity. And yet, that's based on the assumption that time spent on a train is a dis-utility. And that's, in fact, the justifiable, that's the case used to justify High Speed 2, that everybody on a train is economically useless. So the less time they spend on a train, the more productive these people are. As opposed to, can we make their experience on the train facilitate productivity?

Yeah, so I mean, interestingly, they spent six billion on High Speed 1, and on the, the High Speed Rail line between Folkestone and St. Pancras. Not necessarily a dumb thing to do. I'm not totally disputing the value of that by any means. But they spent six billion speeding the trains up between Paris and London. And it was only something like 12 years later they put Wi-Fi on the trains.

Now, the Wi-Fi on the trains, okay, I imagine, I'd, let me get this, I, I'm going to guess here, but I'm guessing it cost either single-digit millions or maybe low double-digit millions of pounds to install that. It might even have been less, okay? But in many ways, to any business person thinking, "How do I get from central Paris to central London?" that is probably more of a decider, relative to air travel, than the duration of the journey. Because one significant difference between the Eurostar and flying to Paris or Brussels or even Amsterdam, actually, is yes, it takes longer, but it's quality time. You know, you're sitting in the same place with some sort of table for an uninterrupted period of two or three hours. They slightly do interrupt it by making breakfast, to be honest, a little bit too much of a drawn-out procedure for my tastes. But nonetheless, it's three hours of time when you can work, read a book, watch a film, do exactly what you'd be doing if you're at home, to be absolutely honest, okay, with the additional facility of a pleasant view out of the window.

I mean, I find train journeys disproportionately productive. Yep, I agree. And yet, most people actually, you know, I enjoy the trip to Manchester. Two hours, ten is about the right length for a train ride. You know, it's not long enough to get bored, and it's long enough to actually get deeply into something and be a bit productive. So these, these reductionist metrics, which effectively treat humans as though they were freight, in other words, they turn transport into a logistics problem, which is a psychology-free problem. Actually, logistics isn't quite psychology-free because you have the state of mind of the recipient or the sender to consider. And so, for example, online package tracking is actually a transformation for UPS or FedEx because, you know, many, many people might not be that bothered about a parcel arriving a day late, provided they know what's happening. Whereas if your package doesn't arrive on Friday as promised, and you don't have online package tracking, your natural assumption is it's got lost, not that it's got delayed.

Well, I guess so. Actually, even in the case of freight, there's a degree of psychology. But at least the freight itself doesn't have a hissy fit because it's sent by FedEx, not UPS. It doesn't have a hissy fit because it's got to share the lorry with some unsavory characters, you know? Okay, freight is beautifully inert and free of those psychological factors. Whereas human passengers, status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness, really, really matter.

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

Okay, I regard it as monstrosity that railway operators are fined for rolling into a London terminus more than three minutes after the scheduled time. Is that right? Yeah, it's crazy. Now, don't get me wrong, there are cases where punctuality matters, where people have to make a connection, for example. And if you dick around too much with the timetable, it's also punctuality is important for the efficient running of the service because obviously, you, if you run to timetable, uh, you know, it's likely that there are knock-on effects on other trains. I'm not being totally ignorant of the importance of the logistical challenge here. But from a pure passenger point of view, no one traveling into London and arriving at a London terminus has failed to leave 10 or 15 minutes margin of error for their onward journey. Okay? You know, I mean, if you're significantly pissed off because the train is four minutes late, either you're Swiss or you're borderline neurotic. And I would argue that's your problem, not the rail operator's problem. You really should have built in some sort of buffer. Because let's be honest, if you've chosen any other mode of transport, most of all the car, you know, if you drive into central London by car, you have to leave 50 minutes as a margin of error, you know? So the idea that a train is being disappointing if it's three minutes late, it's really getting a bit silly.

Did you have a look at the reliability and the punctuality of different modes of transport?

Yeah, I mean, it is interesting in that, first of all, what is punctuality? So a train that's late where the driver gives information and reassurance to the passengers probably creates a lot less disquiet than a train that just stops in the middle of the countryside for no readily discernible reason for 20 minutes. You know, a train that keeps moving slowly is less frustrating to passengers than a train that grinds to a halt. You, I, I don't know if you drive a car. You're young, so you... Excellent. Yeah. Oh, you're in Manchester, aren't you? Anyway, Newcastle. But I'm in Texas right now. Yeah. Oh, where are you in Texas? Austin. Oh, what a glory. You definitely drive a car then? Yes.

Um, but the point I'm making is that, you know, quite often as a car driver, you might choose a route home where you keep moving, even if the journey is 10 minutes longer. Oh, man, this is me. This is me to a T. Exactly. This is me. I know the routes home where I'm going to get snilled up, and I would prefer to continue to move, even if it's longer and if it's further. But I would prefer to take that route because the psychological discomfort of sitting in traffic, of having to do nose-to-tail, I can't sit on cruise control, I can't just sort of zone out a little bit and continue to go.

Yep, all over it. I mean, I mean, if you've got slow-moving traffic, adaptive cruise control is an absolute joy, isn't it? Because you just outsource your driving to the bugger in front. You know, you basically go, "Okay, I'll set my speed at five miles an hour faster than that guy," and I'll just let him make all the decisions. Glorious. Yeah, it's like a conga line. Like a conga line of people trying to get home from work.

I'm very interested in the psychology of elect... I've just bought an electric car, actually. And I find it very interesting how it changes the psychology of driving. One of which is that range anxiety probably might have beneficial effects on people's style of driving because they, it makes it more salient the extent to which their style of driving impacts on the number of miles that they get per kilowatt. Uh-huh. So you're going to accelerate less, less harshly. You're going to brake less harshly. Yeah, yeah. But secondly, I think there's an interesting thing in that it makes you a nicer person. In that if the guy in front of you brakes unnecessarily, regenerative braking makes you less resentful of your loss of kinetic energy. Because instead of thinking, "That guy's just robbed me of my hard-won kinetic energy," you tend to think, "Oh, well, I've just squirted a bit of electricity back into the tank, as it were."

What are you driving?

And so, so it's a Ford Mustang Mach-E. Right. I'm a bit of a lover of American metal, I have to admit. And the Tesla, to me, is one fantastic car, but it's a bit too Silicon Valley. It's a bit, I want a bit of Detroit, you know, in there. Admittedly, the Mustang's actually made in Mexico. But nonetheless, it has, it's a little bit of Americana, which I rather like, actually. And it's a lovely, gorgeous car to drive. Really fantastic.

Hasn't it been fascinating watching what's happened to the entire world's interpretation of electric vehicles, almost exclusively on the shoulders of Elon Musk? Like that company, to me, seems to have... Think about Priuses five years ago. Think about what it meant to drive a Prius. And now think about the entire category of electric vehicles.

I think, yeah, I mean, I think there are those strange entrepreneurs, aren't there? Who can, where there are certain products which are, in a sense, they are their own advertising. I mean, the iPhone was a similar thing. And the reason I refer to products as their own advertising is that not necessarily because people automatically want them, but there is this effect which is that there are certain technologies which, once experienced, you never go back. And that always fascinates me, actually. That it's an interesting marketing challenge when you have a product which people don't necessarily want to begin with, but once they've had it, they never revert. And the mobile phone is a classic case. Now, you're too young to remember a period where people were cynical about mobile phone ownership, but I experienced 10 years of that. Where I'm, in 1989, I used a brick-sized mobile phone on Oxford Street. Not my fault, I wouldn't have done it to make a call, but someone rang me and people shouted abuse at me from parks and cars. Someone actually ran down the window of a black cab and shouted "wanker" out of the window.

One second, I just gotta... Oh, [ __ ] hello, I'm on the podcast. But where are you? See you shortly. No problem. Fantastic. Okay, bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Um, and, um, so, I mean, there is this electric car thing that you drive in a slightly zen way. I, I had in my previous car, which was an internal combustion engine car, I had adaptive cruise control. Now, apparently, and I don't understand this, by the way, but apparently, once the sufficient number of cars on a highway have adaptive cruise control, it has highly beneficial effects on the transit speed of all traffic. And I think, I think I know what the reason is, okay? Which is that when you have adaptive cruise control, if you're following a car, let's say 100 yards behind, the adaptive cruise control is a much better judge of distance and of the car's deceleration than your human binocular vision is. And therefore, the, your car slows down gradually when the car in front slows down, which means that you don't get this weird braking wave. Because you use your brake lights less effectively. What's fascinating, apparently, is a braking wave travels backwards in along a motorway, uh, something like, it's great, it's on like 500 miles an hour, okay? So, so if you could actually get three cars just to brake really dramatically on a highway, and you could cause, unwittingly, a kind of serious traffic jam and bottleneck, uh, basically four miles behind you, something like 10 seconds later. There are these extraordinary effects going on in the fluidics of motorway driving. And for some reason, if you inject enough cars onto the highway with adaptive cruise control, and you get the drivers to use them, use it, uh, then actually it improves, uh, traffic efficiency, traffic flow efficiency quite markedly, even though a large number of people either don't have it or don't use it.

One other thing I noticed, I'd be interested in your opinion because you're in Austin, which would, which would give a good sample size. I've never been pissed off, as far as I can remember, by anybody driving an electric car. Now, I've never been cut up, they've never tailgated me. Okay? You know, there are certain brands of cars, and we won't name them because Ogilvy does the advertising for some of them, okay? But there are certain brands of cars where the owners are disproportionately tailgaters, left-lane undertakers. You know, I mean, it used to be BMW, and it isn't really anymore to the same extent, but BMW drivers used to have that characteristic. I think it's moved on to other brands now. And what interests me is there are now quite a few Teslas. I mean, it's a very, you know, it's selling in very large numbers. But I've never had an unpleasant act of behavior from a Tesla driver. How much of that is the selection effect of the people that buy Teslas, and how much of that is the type of vehicle?

We've got to remember demography. This is not a representative sample because people who buy cars from new, which is most people buying Teslas at the moment, are disproportionately older and richer. But equally, there was objectionable behavior from new, you know, certain German car brands, which were also new. So you, you may be right. The, the Tesla particularly appeals to a particular mindset of person who isn't an [ __ ] to begin with. Um, but I've never, I've never had an electric car piss me off. I think now, maybe to be honest, this might be [ __ ], but on the other hand, in my own behavior, I have noticed a kind of more zen style of driving emerging.

Have you found yourself more aligned and awakened as soon as you get into your Mustang Mach-E?

Oh, well, it's, I'm practically too zen, mate. I love it. Absolutely love it. Um, yeah, I have to say it's been an absolute joy.

Can you see yourself ever going back to, uh, internal combustion engine?

No, no. In fact, more than that. Now, admittedly, there are tax advantages. I ought to mention this. So it's not, it's not a complete apples-to-apples comparison. But we need to replace my wife's car, and we've basically gone with the electric Mini. Because the act of owning, now logically, you should say, one electric car, one petrol car. But actually, the act of owning an, um, electric car, first of all, has largely banished range anxiety. Okay? So that actually, I don't yet have a charger at home. I'm still fiddling around getting a seven kilowatt charger at home, uh, installed. And, yeah, I just want to say to your listeners, if you do live somewhere now, London might be a bit of an exception, but if you live Newcastle, Manchester, somewhere, you know, which is a sane-sized city, not a stupidly-sized megalopolis, okay? Um, uh, you can get by perfectly well without, uh, particularly if you're a little bit nocturnal like me, um, you can get by perfectly well without a home charger. In fact, assuming your mileage isn't insane.

Presumably, you could use the same charger for your Mustang as you could use for the new Mini as well?

Do they have the same connection? Exactly. That, yeah. So it'll be, it'll be a Type 2 charger, seven kilowatt. And we might even, we don't know if we, at the house we're in, we've got three-phase power, so we could even get two 11 kilowatt chargers if we wanted to go a bit flash.

So, he was an interesting thing. We're both buddies with Rob Henderson. And I remember, probably about three years ago, Rob, I mean, all of that guy is fantastic, dude. He is. Yeah. Anybody that's not following Rob Henderson on Twitter now, search Rob K Henderson. He is fantastic to follow. Um, he tweeted ages ago saying that one way you could encourage the adoption of electric vehicles would be to give a state a signal that was visible by everybody. So, for instance, the Mini is a good example of this. The fact that you look at an electric Mini, and you can't actually tell unless you're a real car buff. And you know that the yellow detailing. We've got the green number plate. Yes, the green number plate. So the grid, the green number plate thing is now in the UK. It's a status symbol. "I am driving an eco-friendly car." This is electric, zone, and so forth. I wonder soon if that green number plate, if people are going to want to revert back to no longer having that, to have it as they don't want it to be this outward show of how much they care about the environment. That I'm so cool. So they'll counter-signal the new signal.

Well, well, you're not only are you right, but I can prove you're right. Because there was research done on Teslas. Sorry, don't. There was research done on Priuses versus, if I'm right, there was a, alongside the Toyota Prius, there was a Honda hybrid. And the Toyota Prius was sui generis. It was obviously a hybrid. Whereas the Honda, something or other, was effectively a stealth hybrid. Okay? It was a little like, you know, a kind of, um, I mean, there are quite a few models. I think there's a Range Rover or Land Rover, isn't there, which is a plug-in hybrid? Um, and what they did find was that in, I think in Democrat areas, people, I mean, vastly more people bought the Prius than bought the, um, the stealth hybrid. But then in certain more right-wing areas, there was an urge for people to enjoy the cost savings of driving a hybrid vehicle without, in fact, telegraphing that fact to their neighbors or to fellow motorists.

That's funny. I, I'll try and dig out the paper. But there was some research done on signaling and counter-signaling, if you like. And it is very interesting because, you know, one of the best things people could do, really, okay, to improve their environmental impact or to reduce their environmental impact, will be either replacing their home central heating or boiler in the case of the UK, um, or indeed replace the boiler with a heat pump. But it's worth noting that unlike a car, a heat pump doesn't really carry the same bragging rights or status connotations. You can't drive the heat pump around the center of London. No, no. You can't drive. And I don't think anybody's pulled by having a heat pump. Yeah, yeah. "Don't worry about the fact that I'm still driving a diesel vehicle. Wait until we get home and you see my heat." "Just wait, wait, Julia, get home, love, and see my heat."

Actually, I didn't even, I'm okay now. I like, you know, I like to consider myself reasonably, you know, um, scanny in terms of physics and general science. But even I can't quite get my head around a heat pump. Because apparently a heat pump is 500% efficient. Okay? So the best boiler you can have converts energy, heat energy from gas into heat energy in your home, at around about the 90% efficiency level, maybe it's a little bit higher. So in other words, you know, they now recapture far more of the heat that used to escape into the into the environment. Um, and I think some of them might even, I think there was one boiler I heard about which had a kind of Stirling engine operating, so it generated a bit of electricity on the, on the exhaust gases. But you can get 95% efficiency. What I never realized is a heat pump. We all understand how a fridge works, right? Okay? It basically uses some energy to extract energy from one place and put it somewhere else. Okay? Now, of course, the problem there is that we tend to think when it's cold outside. Generally, heat pumps work well in countries like the UK, and where you don't get extremes of temperature, by the way. So, you know, Austin, Texas, the case may be slightly weaker over here. You need, you need a vest and shorts during the day, and you need a hooded top and long trousers on a night time. The amount of heat swing in the middle of November is absolutely insane.

Ah, but there's a great thing for that, which is true of Phoenix as well, which is you have a great nightlife because it's intolerable going out during the day. So everybody goes out in the cool of the evening. Correct. And you get totally hot. You know, I always notice that about Phoenix. You actually get a bit of late-night life, you know, which is rather fun because people then go and do the kind of, you know, Spanish style wandering around the street stuff, like kind of eight or nine at night. The thing as well is, especially at this time of year, where it is, it's perfectly fine during the day. It's not disgusting during the day. You're talking 23 degrees, maybe ish, at Celsius during the day outside. So all of those places that have got beer gardens with food trucks that are pulled up outside, they've managed to pivot themselves. So I'm across the street from a place called Cosmic Coffee and Beer Garden. Now, if that's not just a perfect display of the fact that you've got daytime and nighttime, they have this unit. They've got fairy lights that aren't used during the day. They've got a beautiful garden and a waterfall in there. And then on the night time, all the lights come on, everything dims, the music comes out, live stage goes on. And you think, this is a single unit that's got every use under the sun from 9 am for breakfast when I went this morning until 1 in the morning. It's amazing.

There is a guy in Australia who worked out that that you could have a dual-purpose coffee shop and cocktail bar. And I mean, I imagine using digital signage, you could, you could actually branding even more. Yeah, yeah. You could, you could morph a retail outlet from one thing to the other. Yeah, because, you know, the kind of lighting and signage that's appropriate for a tea shop isn't really appropriate for a, you know, you know, cocktail bar or whatever. Yeah, so you could, I'm sure using clever LEDs and lighting and screens, uh, do something really clever there.

But I, I, I've always slightly fantasized about Austin because I'm a little bit hipster and a little bit redneck. Yeah. And so I've always rather liked the idea that I can go to a farmer's market in the morning and buy organic sourdough bread that's handcrafted by people with really interesting body art. But then, if I wanted to, I could drive a pickup truck out into the desert and fire machine guns and oil drums, you know? And the fact that that kind of yin and yang thing really kind of appeals to me. You really feel it here.

Here's another thing I was thinking about to do with transport. So I was talking, where was I driving? I can't remember where I was driving, maybe up to Edinburgh. And Google Maps, you don't have the same number of preferences as I think humans want. And there's two preferences that I would want to have included in Google Maps. The first one would be ease. So that would be, can I sit at a more consistent speed throughout the entire journey? I.E., can I sit on cruise control? My car doesn't have radar-guided cruise control or adaptive cruise control. So can I sit at just a single speed or close to a single speed for the most amount of time? And also the fewest number of turns, the fewest number of junctions, the straightest road. I don't want to go on some B-road for ages and then another. And then a second option that I would love to have in there would be beauty. So can I drive, let's say that I don't actually care about the speed of my journey?

I'll go a bit further than that, which is the Google Maps, and actually, I'm fairly sure that the great guy Jonathan Haidt, his sister is involved in a campaign to make Google Maps more public transit friendly. All right. And one of the American aspects of Google Maps, it doesn't really understand multi-modality. So if I say to Google Maps, "I want to get to work," okay, it will either think that I'm only going to use public transport, which as an American means I don't own a car, and it will suggest I catch a bus to the station, which, you know, which takes bloody ages, okay? And then take a train into London because that's public transport. Or it suggests I'd drive all the way into central London, which you would only do if you're a lunatic. Now, an electric car, I don't even pay the congestion charge. But to be honestly honest, you don't need the congestion charge anymore. They should pay me for the stress of driving into bloody London because it's intolerable. You know, the speed limit changes from 20 to 30 more or less at random. Bus lanes spring up all over the place. There are cycle lanes which take up half the available space. You know, if you don't basically kill someone or or get a 50-pound fine, you count yourself lucky. And then, then we're going to add electric scooters into the mix, and it's going to be, you know, good night Vienna, frankly. Okay? But Google will either suggest I drive, which is mad, or that I get a bus to the station.

Now, what we all do as Brits is we drive to the station, we park the car, we take a train. But Google Maps can't get its American head around that multi-modality. And you're right, I mean, interestingly, when I do drive to the station, I drive to quite often just a station called Oxford, where it's slightly easier to park and it's a little bit cheaper to park. But the main reason I do this quite often, oddly, and it seems completely bonkers, okay, is that I can't deliberately catch a slower train to London Blackfriars. The fast way to get to work is Sevenoaks, London Bridge, change to Thameslink, Thameslink, Blackfriars. Okay? Or what? Sorry, this is really boring to your international audience. Waterloo East, go through Southwark tube station, walk to Blackfriars. Those are the two fast ways to do it. Now, what I do is I take a slow stopping train that takes an hour rather than 33 minutes from Oxford all the way to Blackfriars because it's one hour. First of all, it's not very crowded. The train, so I can work on the train. I get a table because I sit at the back. Okay? And it's an hour of total quality time in which I can clear my email inbox for the day. Now, if I take the faster route, I have to change trains, dick around, go down an escalator. And so you're absolutely right that transport apps are all optimized around speed, not scenicness. Sometimes they're optimized around price, okay? But they're principally optimized around one or two metrics which fail to capture things that really, really matter to the human passenger.

I'll get, do, okay, how many of your listeners to the podcast live in the UK? So this is, okay, if you ever want to go to Cornwall, particularly if you want to go to Devon or you want to go to Bristol from London, okay? There are trains non-stop from Waterloo to Bristol Temple Meads and from Waterloo to Exeter St. Davids. Okay? If you search, even if you search Waterloo to Exeter St. Davids on the National Rail website, these trains do not show up. Because they're so speed-obsessed, they say, "Go to Paddington on the tube, take a fast train to Exeter from Paddington." Now, a consequence of this is that virtually nobody knows these Exeter trains exist. Because if you search for them, the only way you can find them is to go, "Exeter is to go Waterloo to Exeter St. Davids and then traveling via Salisbury." Now, unless you're a KGB officer, you know, looking to kill somebody, nobody's actually searched for that journey, you know, in the last 10 years. Okay? And no one's put in "via Salisbury." When you do put in "via Salisbury," it reveals these trains, which are slow, but it's extremely beautiful as a journey. And because nobody can find the trains, they are insanely cheap. Because yield management basically assumes there's no demand for that service. And the reason there's no demand isn't because nobody wants it, it's because nobody knows that the choice exists because the, the algorithm has basically hidden it from view.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think my daughter, my daughter and three friends had to go to some weird festival in Cornwall because that's what young people do. And I think I got something bonkers like all four of them, now admittedly they have their, you know, young person's bloody rail card. In fact, there's so many rail cards that they should just say, "Okay, we're going to get rid of all rail cards." And we're going to give middle-aged men a, you know, white bastard middle-aged man's rail card, which means you've got to pay 33 extra. You know, because, I mean, everybody except the middle-aged gets a bloody rail card nowadays. Anyway, sorry, the old boomer grumbled over. I'll leave that. I'll leave that for a second. Okay? But I think I got them with their rail cards, it was like a first-class single, um, from Waterloo to Exeter for something like 20 quid each, or 19 quid each in first class. And I said, "Look, I can send you a second class for 12 pounds 50." But I mean, for the sake of eight quid, what the hell, you know?

I had, I was in Rome recently. I'm not sure if you've ever seen this before. Italian trains are wacko cheap sometimes, aren't they? Yeah, they're crazy. But this is the maddest thing. So while you're driving along, uh, in the train, while you're riding along inside of the train, especially on an underground, all of the opportunity for you to see billboards or have advertisements sent to you, they're limited to those tiny little sort of landscape things that are above. You're trying to find the map, and instead you're looking at an advert for insurance or whatever. What they have in Rome, they have mounted projectors onto the outside of the train that project adverts onto the inside of the moving wall as you go along. So you look outside, and you see this advert. And obviously the projector can move, and it's not just a static thing. And then as you arrive at the next station, the projector turns off. People get on, you get back into darkness, you hit another wall, the projector turns back on. It's a different advert. So good that is, actually, given that the alternative is looking at a wall. You know, if you started projecting over building walls and projecting over views of the Thames Valley, I get a bit pissed off about it. But actually, given that the alternative is looking at a dark wall, I think that's actually advertising performing a mild public service. I would agree.

What do you think about Insulate Britain's campaign?

Oh, crikey. Um, yeah, I have to say that there is often a problem with perfectly well-intentioned movements. Okay. I've very interestingly taken environmentalism, by the way, which is, I think there's a 20% chance that Nigel Lawson's right and that actually, um, uh, you know, the, the anthropogenic climate change through carbon emissions may be a scientific mistake and a form of collective insanity. Okay? 20% chance I think he's right, because we, you know, we do see that, you know, collective insanity manifested in institutional decision-making all the time. All the time. Emperor's new clothes. On the other hand, my question is slightly different. Even if we're wrong, is it necessarily a bad thing to treat carbon reduction as a heuristic to improve the quality of life on the planet? So, in other words, you know, electric cars may actually benefit humanity as much through being quiet. Okay? Think about people who live on a busy road. They, I mean, actually, the, the stress created through noise. So it might be, I'll give you an example of this, okay? I think most people who think they're gluten intolerant are actually full of [ __ ]. Okay? Don't get me wrong, okay? There are people with celiac disease, it's a serious condition. But I think for every person who actually is gluten intolerant, there are four people who think they are. And similarly with lactose intolerance, okay? Among Westerners. Not, I mean, it's more common in different genetic populations. On the other hand, people who give up lactose and gluten do feel better, or claim to. Now, a, even if that's purely placebo effect, you know, what the hell? Who cares if it makes you feel better? Who cares? Secondly, it may be that following the heuristic of "don't eat gluten" causes them to feel better for some completely unrelated reason, which is actually nothing to do with gluten. But the fact that they don't digest wheat very well, or they, you know, they don't digest something else very well. It may be just a useful dietary heuristic which improves your gut health for reasons entirely tangential to the reason you state. What this is like, so one argument about carbon reduction is, even if Nigel Lawson's right, that doesn't necessarily mean that carbon reduction isn't a useful heuristic by which to act. Yeah. The reasoning can perhaps be wrong, but you can still arrive at a conclusion which is correct. I had an argument with Steven Pinker about this. Miasma theory wasn't actually true, okay? You know, germ theory is a much better theory of disease. But miasma theory led to beneficial consequences, like, you know, the funding of sewerage, waste management, area, very well-ventilated hospitals with big windows, which it turns out were good things to do, even if we were doing them for the wrong reasons. Well, this is the same as the porcupines don't throw their quills myth, right? The fact that if you treat us, so if you, porcupines for a long time, it was told that porcupines could throw their quills at you, that they were actually some sort of archery, archery animal that was actually able to do that. Now, that would be [ __ ] cool. It would be awesome. Imagine that. But they can't. So porcupines cannot. Otherwise, porcupine darts would have been a flaming killer sport. That would have been amazing.

You had to hold it and then squeeze it and then you can try and aim it.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay. Um, but the type of behavior that the belief, the erroneous belief, the incorrect belief that porcupines throw their quills, the type of behavior that that engenders is optimal because you need probably more of a degree of freedom than you think from the porcupine. And it's exactly the same as, um, why Jewish people don't eat pork. Now, there's a sacred animal and blah, blah, blah. But in olden days, pigs were very difficult to keep clean. They have a higher number of parasites, they have a higher number of, uh, germs within the meat. They're quite often instrumental in the transmission, cross-species transmission from birds to humans as well. Okay? So, I mean, all of these are the reasons. Ducks in proximity with pigs, for example, there's a greater risk of kind of avian flu. Nightmare. Yeah. So both of those things are, um, what's one's, one's I guess like a cultural artifact, and the other one is an outright myth. But it's encouraged a particular group of people to behave in a way which is optimal for them, despite the fact that the reasoning behind that was a little bit more kind of... So I wrote a piece in The Spectator about this, saying that the, telling your children that if you tread on the cracks in the pavement, you might be eaten by bears. Which, a, okay, there's a poem, I think it's a little thing which you have to watch out for the bears because they catch children who tread the cracks of the pavement. Now, children are much more frightened of bears than they are of traffic because they've had a million years of evolution to warn them off wild animals. What this does, now there is no scientific evidence of any correlation between walking on pavement cracks and the risk of bear attack. Okay? But what it does do is it encourages the children to keep an eye on where they're putting their feet, which stops them tripping over. I don't know if you've had very young children, but they are prone to getting distracted and falling flat. And they do a face-plant, you know, they, they kind of fall flat on their faces. But secondly, it means they stay on the pavement and they don't wander off onto the road. Because by adhering strictly to stepping within the cracks, you will, as a byproduct of that belief, you will adopt a more transport-safe behavior. It's this sort of thing that's basically impossible to mandate.

Yeah, so, so this is what you might call heuristic. It's actually heuristic behavior. And there are, there are lots of cases where heuristics are arguably, you know, social norms. And because we're noting that the Greek for law is, okay, I don't know, I don't think that's the origin of norm, but "nomos" means both custom and law. The word can mean those two things. And so the creation of socially beneficial customs which eventually then get formalized as laws doesn't necessarily require reasoning. It simply requires an empirical measurement of the benefit of following that belief. So, you know, a belief in an omniscient God is probably a pretty good way of keeping people well-behaved. You know, clearly, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, if you think about it, there are all kinds of behaviors, um, uh, which would be, you know, bad, you know, which from a purely utilitarian stance would be completely harmless, but it would be better if people didn't indulge in them.

It's strange. I, I wonder a lot about this. The fact that there's a level of virtue or honesty or integrity that kind of almost holds advertising back in this situation. Let's say that you need to tell children that there's a bear if they step on the cracks in the street. But also there's a degree to which you think, "Well, we're [ __ ] lying to children here. We're making them fear bears because of where they put their feet on the pavement." And it's only culture that can deliver this. A top-down, dictatorial campaign couldn't do this because it would just be an outright lie. Charlie says, "Have a look at the COI campaign." Charlie says, which you won't, you'll be too young to remember, but it was a boy who had a friend who was a cat who delivered sensible advice about not talking to strangers, not and telling your mummy. Because bear in mind, this is the 1970s, so your dad was at work and your mum was at home. But always tell your mummy if you were going out with strangers or going out with your friends. You know, tell your mummy where you are going. And Charlie says, okay, I was a cartoon character, just to be clear. And then the child would translate for the benefit of the earth. "Charlie says that you should always tell your mummy."

Now, that was the use of an animal to impart good advice. Now, you know, if we get absolutely literal about this, you know, why on earth would you have the advice delivered by a cat rather than by, you know... Well, the Green Cross Code was a hedgehog for years, wasn't it? You had... Hold on, you had no, there's a very bad weasel, wasn't there? Hold on, let me get this right. There was a weasel that was bad, and there was a squirrel that was good. So that was a different one. That wasn't Charlie Says. That was a thing with a squirrel. Sophie, what was that squirrel that used to give you advice about crossing the road?

Tufty. Tufty. Now, that wasn't, that Tufty wasn't actually a COI campaign. It was funded by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, I think. Um, but it was a very, very useful campaign where again, you had a squirrel, and then the weasel, which was a badly behaved criminal thing, uh, would always ignore the advice and end up getting run over by a truck or sent to hospital or whatever. Um, and, um, it was, it was quite weasel-ish. I mean, you know, it was probably a bit unfair to weasels. But that kind of thing is interesting because the assumption is, as adults, of course, we don't need any of that stuff. We just respond to facts. But as, to be honest, okay, the most boring finding in advertising, okay, which is so banal that I can't stand there as kind of Oxbridge graduate in front of a bunch of clients and even utter this fact, despite the fact that it is completely true, is that basically advertising that features animals, particularly, I suspect in the UK, advertising that features animals, is more effective than advertising that doesn't feature animals. Now, you know, the, you know, BMP, under the glorious days of John Webster and the Hofmeister Bear, and the Cresta Bear, and the, uh, and the dog, Tonto, I think it was, in John Smith's. Okay? I mean, John, John Webster actually said, "My question is not, does the ad have legs? Does the campaign have legs? It's, does it have four legs and a tail?" But it's almost such a banal finding that if I had to stand up in front of a bunch of people from P&G and go, "Why don't we put an animal in this?" I'd feel like a complete idiot. But it works.

There's a Family Guy episode where Stewie the baby is going shopping with Lois, the mother, and he's being pushed along in the...

The trolley and he sat there, and she needs to get, uh, aluminum foil. They call it. Also, why is, why, why is Americans removed one of the eyes from aluminum? There's something even weirder about that, which is the British used to pronounce or spell it differently in some way as well. So, I'll try and find out. I'll go and do the research after this is over. Aluminum foil, pushing along, and he starts mocking the fact that on the side of one of these aluminum foils, there's a tiger. He says, "Look at this tiger. What's the tiger doing on aluminum foil? It's pointless." And then his mother goes to pick up the one that doesn't have the tiger, and he goes, "No, no, I want the one that's got the tiger on." Tiger? Yeah, precisely. So, I want to talk about you. Is kind of a walking id, isn't it? Correct. Correct. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's just exposition throughout the entire thing. Absolutely brilliant. Yeah. I want to talk about some of the things. Why is he got a British accent? Is that just because I'm not sure. I think it's because there's a low-key hint at the fact that he's gay, and he, that effeminate nature. Maybe Americans think that Brits are a bit effeminate. But there's also the limey Brit as well, isn't there? There's the sort of slimy limey version. But then there's maybe the, I don't know. It's fascinating, isn't it? I, I mean, it may just be because the guy who does the voice loves doing it. That nails it. Yeah. And then you're locked in. That's that's the mad thing about when you start a TV show or anything like cartoons. A good example. You begin a cartoon, you do a pilot, you put it out there, and you think, right, well, this is this is the way that it's going to be. And we'll, we'll just have a go. And hopefully, we'll get signed. 13 seasons and 200 episodes later, and all of those creative decisions that you and your mates made when you had no idea what you were doing, you're locked into those. Shy of killing some poor unfortunate bastard off. Yeah. Absolutely fascinating. I was talking to John Cleese about how they came up with Monty Python, and they literally went in to see some guy at the BBC. And, um, he'd say, "So, this, this sort of comedy series, you know, is it going to feature sketches?" And they kind of look at each other and go, "Is it going to feature sketches?" "Yeah, yeah, I think we might have some sketches." And genuinely, of course, they haven't. They haven't got a clue what they're doing. And of course, this being the BBC in 1970 or '60, whatever it was, they said, "We'll just go away and make 10 episodes. Here's the money. And let's go and see what happens." And in a weird way, because they didn't know what they were doing, they created something completely unique and distinctive. If they'd gone in with a clean format in mind, it wouldn't have had any of the delicious. Because it was unlike, and I remember this as a kid, it was unlike any other television you ever watched. You know, you know the bizarre segues, the, you know, you know, everything about it, the the fast-pacedness, you know, uh, you know, extraordinary kind of animated sequences that would suddenly interpolate themselves in between sketches. And it was utterly transfixing. In the same way, I think that Curb Your Enthusiasm, the fact that it's plotted but not scripted. There's something about Curb Your Enthusiasm which means that even when it's not being funny, which is comparatively rare, it's still very watchable because there are elements to the whole thing which somehow seem completely fresh. There's a kind of verity to the dialogue and so forth, which I don't, I don't think you could write. Are you familiar with The Thick of It? Amanda Yanucci's thing? Yeah. Extraordinary fan of that. Glorious. One of the best British. In fact, I would say, I would go as far as to say, it's got, it's worthy of the Blackadder title of the modern era. You know, it was the 2010s Blackadder. Um, I don't know whether you knew this, but I read that they filmed every scene a minimum of twice. So they filmed one perfectly on script, and they filmed another where the actors were permitted to ad-lib as much as they wanted. And they ended up using a really high proportion of the number of ones where they actually went off script. And there's a really good. Do you remember when, um, one of the guys is being asked to make a coffee, and as he's walking away, he throws a ball at him, and he turns around and says, "You're getting a cough wee." It's coffee with wee in it. And that scene was shot 30 times. And he did a new version each time. 30 different takes of him turning around. And they just decided to go for "coffee, coffee with wee in it." Because Stuart Lee talks about this very interestingly. So one of the reasons why stand-up people kind of rehearse is they will dick around with. And the person who first spoke about this in comedy, that it's so execution dependent, okay? And, uh, the first person I remember hearing this from, uh, was, let me get this right. Um, oh, yeah. It was Douglas Adams. And Douglas Adams used to read sentences and paragraphs of P.G. Wodehouse and try and disentangle what it was about the precise word order that made them funny. Okay? And then subsequently, reading about stand-up comics, what they will do. I think there was, you know, Gary, Gary Lineker, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like a velvet owl. It was a little analogy that Lee used. And he, he was tweaking different versions of velvet owl in every single performance, both to find out what amused the audience the most, but also actually to find out what amused him the most. Because there's a kind of recursive, um, stochastic thing. Yeah, yeah. It's an iterative thing where you don't quite know what's funny until you've found it. And you notice that, that, you know, you can end. If you write a piece, you know, which is supposed to be funny of, you know, 500 words, you'll particularly dick around with the last sentence about 47 different times. And you can't explain what it is that makes the last sentence right. But you know when you've got that. You couldn't, you can't get there in advance. You can't say, "The way to write a last sentence is this." And there's something about the cadence that we understand instinctively that makes it funny. And a proper, the last line of body copy in advertising would be the same. The last sentence, you know, where you traditionally leap back to the first paragraph to create a kind of closed system. Are people ruling that as well? Is the peak-end rule contributing to that? So instinctively, we kind of feel, uh, how something ends, uh, has a disproportionate effect on its potency. As we would do if we were making a speech, you know, so you wouldn't just come up with a banal thing. You've got to end your talk on a sentence that is kind of semi-quotable or pithy. And by the way, that advertising thing of looping back to the beginning of the body copy was a bit of an overused trope, to be absolutely honest. I mean, quite a few very good copywriters said, "No, no, no, when it's the right place to end, just end it there. You don't always have to refer back to the beginning." What, what have you become an evangelist for recently? Because we spoke a couple of years ago, and we talked about an air fryer. But since then, I've heard you talk about a glass-sided toaster, a Japanese toilet, and having two dishwashers. Yeah. I think there is a certain category of technology which is, it's not self-explanatory, but it's self-revelatory. Which is, you know, once driven, forever smitten, to borrow that line from Foxhall. Um, and I think the electric car is one such thing. Which is that it's difficult to persuade. Mobile phones, another, multi-channel television, the internet. Now, you know, I spent a large part of the late 1990s working in an advertising agency, basically writing to be BT customers and saying, "It might be a good idea to pay to have internet access at home." Okay? Now, it's ridiculous now. Okay? Right. Okay. I mean, you know, if you moved into a house, there was no Wi-Fi, you'd just go, "Okay, this is a [ __ ] non-starter." Right? Okay. I mean, you know, nearly everybody under the age of, actually, 80 would, okay? But back then, you had to persuade people. Now, I don't think there are many other people who change broadband provider. I don't think there are many people who actually revert. Okay? I don't, you know, I, I had friends who are very, very late, rich friends, by the way, who are very late to get a mobile phone because they just didn't like the idea. Now, eventually, they get a mobile phone, and once they've had a mobile phone, you never go back. And actually, the car itself, fascinatingly, there's a very good article in Edge by a guy who's an expert in adaptive preference formation, who made the point that nobody wanted a car. But once actually, if, if the car had never been invented, we'd all whizz around on trains and buses, thinking this was perfectly acceptable. Okay? Once you've experienced car ownership, your bar and expectation for personal autonomy ratchets up by about 70%. To a point where nobody who has ever, it, a lot of young people in London, okay? You go, "No, you don't need to own a car." Now, one of the reasons they're so anti-car is that they've never owned one. In the same way that, you know, um, you know, surprisingly, you know, what often happens is anybody who's been vaccinated is not an anti-vaxxer. Okay? So it's one of those strange things. And actually, as the proportion of the population gets vaccinated goes up, the number of anti-vaxxers goes down. So there is a kind of collective herd mentality that seems to go on with these opinions. Talk to me about this glass-sided toaster. And so the glass-sided toaster, particularly good if you, if you toast a lot of different things, either different breads or crumpets, morning goods, muffins, whatever it is you toast, because of course, uh, it's difficult to know what the right setting is in advance for every single toastable product you put into the toaster. And so the great thing with a glass-sided toaster is you can, if in doubt, you put it on eight. Okay? You bang the toaster on, and then you look at it. And when it reaches a point where it looks kind of just at the right level of toastiness, just at, as what Thomas Hardy would have saw in "Brown Men," once it's reached the, uh, the op, the optimal level of enronment, then you hit eject. That's such a good idea. Why the two dishwashers thing? I'm going to need explaining to me as well. Ah, okay. So I'll explain that, which is that if you do have two dishwashers, and this is a bit of a bone of contention with my wife, because we're having the kitchen redone, and she doesn't want two dishwashers because she's a bloody luddite. And she said, you know, "Okay, but you never have to unload your dishwasher." So you don't lose any storage space. Because what it is, is you have a dirty dishwasher, okay? And you have a clean dishwasher. You retrieve plates from the clean dishwasher, use them, put them in the dirty dishwasher. Eventually, the clean dishwasher is empty, the dirty dishwasher is full. You turn on the dirty dishwasher, and then you reverse the process. That becomes the clean dishwasher. And so you don't have to unload your dishwasher and put things. Because the problem with the dishwasher is you've got to empty the dishwasher before you can put dirty things in. Okay? And that's a pain in the ass because you have to put things in cupboards, okay, before you can start putting dirty plates back in the dishwasher. Now, with two dishwashers, that process doesn't happen. And it takes quite a bit of, it takes a certain understanding of logistics and understanding of complexity theory to grasp that principle, because it's not intuitively obvious. Do you think that they'll end up making purpose-built, uh, two-segment kind of like bunk bed dishwashers? You could get one that would come in, and then you could even have perhaps a wall between them that you could slide things backward and forward. Well, there is, interestingly, a Fisher & Paykel dishwasher made in New Zealand, which has two drawers, and you can put them on separately. Probably not enough size, though, eh? Because you want to be able to have a full dishwasher load. Well, I, I kind of agree with you. They, they're also, of course, popular. Um, someone thought I was absolutely bonkers when I said this. They had a Fisher & Paykel dishwasher, and I said, "Very popular with Orthodox Jews." And they thought I was making some sort of weird racist point and got really upset. No, no, it's because if you are actually a devout Jew, you have to keep your crockery separate. So it's stuff that's, stuff that touches dairy and stuff that touches meat has to be entirely separate. No. So the Fisher & Paykel dishwasher, which allows you to wash them separately. And, and somebody, not realizing this thing about Jewish dietary law, looked at me as if I was kind of like some sort of xenophobe. Yeah. Weird xenophobe. But I said, "No, no, no, no, no, it's a religious prescription." I learned this about, um, about Ben Shapiro, who's a Jew, and their Sabbath, I think, is, is it Friday sunset, Friday sundown to Saturday sundown? Yeah. Precisely. And he's not allowed to use anything electric. So he can't touch anything electric during that time. It's slightly complicated. You can have things on timers, yes. But so that's what he's got. He's got smart lights around his house that are pre-programmed. And that, to me, I don't get me wrong, I think that Ben should be allowed to light his house as he wishes. But I'm not sure that that's in the spirit of the dog. I mean, the other thing you can have is a Sabbath goy. And a Sabbath goy is someone who lives, who's not Jewish. Um, oh God, they're a light turner, honorary. So, yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember when I was at university, it was late, and, uh, they closed the door to the college at about, I can't remember what it was, midnight or something, okay? And there was a little door, and then they locked the little door at the, it's called a Judas door, actually. They locked the Judas door sometime like midnight. And we were there Saturday night, and there was this huge banging on the door. And the Italian guy who was the porter said, "Jews." Okay? And of course, they couldn't ring the bell, but they could knock on the door. Oh, that's so funny. And the reason is, of course, electricity didn't exist. But it's deemed to be making fire. And so if you flick a switch, it's there's also a weird thing about keys, about locking your house. Because I spoke to a Manchester police officer who did quite a lot of police work with the orthodox community in Manchester. And you can wear keys, but you can't carry them on the Sabbath. And so there's some sort of thing which is, if you have a kind of key chain, that's considered okay. Whereas putting them in your pocket loose, so a lanyard or something might just accept. There's some sort of, but they would quite often get people, you would quite, uh, off, and quite often be patrolling the area, and people will come in and say, uh, "You know, could you turn my cooker on for me?" Wow. That's crazy. I didn't know. I think, I think that question of the spirit of the thing is an interesting question. Because I've always thought that's a little, you know, having an elevator that goes up and down. If you go to an Israeli hotel, okay, quite often on the Sabbath, the elevator is programmed just to stop at every floor. So no one needs to push a button. Now, uh, yeah, there's a bit of me that goes, "That's kind of cheating, mate." Um, but I, I think the point is that there is a certain doc, there's a certain kind of Jewish restriction which you obey it. And there is no reason. The argument is, and I can't remember what the Hebrew phrase is, but it's a law for which there is no reason. You simply have to follow this. And the argument they made about this particular kind of law is that if you provide a reason, okay, people will always look for reasons to get rid of the law. They'll say, "Ah, but it doesn't apply because, you know, uh, it doesn't, you know, the, you know, the prescription on pork doesn't apply because, um, now we have high standards of hygiene in a factory." So if you've given a reason saying that this is unclean. So in order to have these successful heuristic rules, they need to be capable of being Chesterton's fences. In other words, something you obey without knowing why you were bad. I mean, that's every, yeah, that's every parent of a teenager. That's their rule decree. "Why can't I go out tonight?" "Because I said so." That's the, it's because there is no coming back to that. Because "I said so" is this bulletproof of an argument as you're going to find. And so actually having those, um, I mean, there's a huge amount of Chestertonian fence stuff in, for example, Jewish and Muslim, uh, law, which is very Chestertonian in the sense that just because you don't know what it's for, doesn't mean you should just disregard it, because the person who instigated it may have had a good reason. There's a hell of a lot of good stuff in the Quran about what to do if there's a plague, for example. Jewish, Muslim, very, very rapid burying of bodies. Okay? It, you know, has very positive hygiene effects. So during the Crimean War, interestingly, you had effectively Christians fighting Turks, and the Muslims were absolutely assiduous about burying the dead, and the Christians weren't. And as a result, from decomposition and decomposing bodies, the disease was a much, much greater, uh, cause of loss of life on the part of the, I think I haven't got this right, I'm probably talking historical bollocks here, but, but, um, similarly, um, the belief in revenants is why, um, cemeteries tend to be built outside towns. The belief that the souls of the dead would rise up and haunt you. Totally irrational belief. On the other hand, building cemeteries outside towns is pretty good from a public health point of view. Yeah, particularly if you have to deal with a water supply or, you know, anything of that kind. Do you know where the word quarantine comes from? 40 days. Yes. Quaranta. Yes. I learned that while I was in Florence, uh, a couple of weeks ago. That's probably a heuristic rule. Which is that, by and large, anything that's going to manifest itself will manifest itself in that period. Yeah. It's either, you're either dead or you're okay in the space. We could argue, okay, it was kind of, I guess, in, in, they eventually, in COVID, they brought it down to about, what was it? Ten days, I think, wasn't it? Eventually. Yeah. That, and by the way, that was probabilistic. I think that there were a certain number of people who manifested symptoms ten days more than ten days after they were infected. But what you were doing was effectively making a trade-off then between, uh, you know, total inconvenience. Yep. And, you know, so it couldn't have been the last 40 days, because the compliance would have been so low that it might as well have been. Yeah. Well, that's a very interesting question, actually, which I often raise about this, which is that when you design a rule, you, it's very rare that you can design a rule on purely scientific grounds without factoring in behavioral factors. So 40 days in a hotel room would be so much to ask your people that, um, what about happened in Melbourne, wasn't it? Is the hotel security started having sex with the guests? No way. No. There was a huge outbreak in Victoria, and the reason was that people at the quarantined hotels were so goddamn bored, they started having sex with the people who are there to provide security. Amazing. That was so funny. Oh my god. And the joke was, why, why is Australia like the Spice Girls? Because Victoria has to spoil it for everyone else. But, but the interesting thing is, let's say, let's say, you know, and I think they knew this, okay? Six or eight months ago, okay? Outdoor, non-dense social encounters are highly unlikely to lead to transmission. Okay? So, outdoor and non-dense. I don't mean a football crowd, but I mean people, a garden, a Buckingham Palace garden party with reasonable social distancing is very unlikely to lead to transmission. So a completely rational person would say, "Okay, we'll allow outdoor social events." Now, the problem there is you've got to factor in the behavioral component as well as the scientific component, which is this outdoor event, outdoor socializing tends to lead to indoor socializing. Because you meet in the afternoon, it gets cold in the early evening, a few people move into the conservatory, they leave the door open, you know, the patio heaters run out of gas, the next thing you know is there are 10 people in the conservatory, then they close the door because it's getting a bit nippy, then four people use the loo, then they go into the kitchen and they have a row about Brexit, and before you know it, you've had a super-spreading event. Now, if that sounds fanciful, that's exactly what happened at the White House. Right? They had a bloody session in the Rose Garden. I think nobody who only attended the Rose Garden event got infected. They all went back into that orangery thing, whatever it's called, you know, that kind of, you know, you know, off the path, you can't really reverse the White House having a patio, but you know what I mean. And they went into that thing with the curvy windows, and that's when the transmission happened. And so you can't just say, you have to be an empiricist. You can't just be a kind of reductionist when you design legislation. What are your thoughts around the communications that we've seen to do with vaccines? The, um, oh, crikey. Bloody hell. Uh, one really interesting thing, okay. There's been, to be honest, I mean, in the UK, I'm, I'm pretty impressed with my fellow Brits. They're pretty sane. But in fairness, as more and more people get vaccinated, the hesitancy or decreases. Even in the unvaccinated, I'm not totally hostile to anti-vaxxers, by which I mean people who are opposed to vaccinating, um, the very young. Because there is a case to be made that actually, you know, the cost-benefit analysis might not pay off. Old people who refuse to be vaccinated are just being irresponsible. Middle-aged people, look, mate, you know, you kind of have a duty to, you know, to your fellow man. Here, anti-masters struck me, struck me as completely bonkers. Because it was, to me, even if the thing didn't work, it was a mild courtesy to my fellow man. You know, I saw the mask wearing as, you know, rather like the reason I tend to wear underpants and trousers when I go out, which is that even if it would be more convenient for me to walk around naked, I, I'm conscious of the fact that it might cause distress to other people. So, you know, and also, I love the, the comment of the comedian, I can never remember his name, he's always on, uh, Bill Bailey. I said, "People said, you know, wearing a mask, you know, they're making us wear masks, it's like the Nazis." Because that's right, isn't it? Because he said, "That's what the Nazis are chiefly famous for, imposing mild inconveniences." I think, all right, okay. My view was the cost of wearing a mask was so trivial. One or two caveats there. Um, I'm not totally comfortable with mandating masks all the time outdoors for a very strange reason, which is I did find that wearing a mask slightly disoriented me when I was crossing a busy road. I have no idea why that is. Um, but there were certain aspects to it. But indoor mask wearing and mask wearing in any kind of densely populated area struck me as simply something which, even if I didn't believe in it, I'd be happy to go along with that of just, you know, courtesy to my fellow man. Now, one very important point with anti-vaxxing, which I was, I, I had theorized about this but had never written about it because I thought it was maybe too stupid a point to make. But somebody else also theorized it and went to the intelligent lengths of actually investigating it, and that's the fear of needles played a bigger part in anti-vaxxing than we let on. Because about a significant double-digit percentage of people are really frightened of needles. Okay? I'm not, not bothered. I've got a friend who might faint if you injected him with a needle. You know, he was actually had a policy for the Liberal Democrats. He's an Oxford history graduate. He's not some wacko. But the phobias are very strange. They're very strange things. If I said to you, because of some peculiar medical reason, that the injection, the COVID vaccine injection, had to be given into your eyeball, I think you'd rapidly go around, you know, looking for reasons not to get vaccinated. I mean, you know, I, I, you know, I think it's now for people who have a real phobia of needles, the idea of being injected in the arm is equivalently distressing as it would be to you or me. After all, I know you may be frightened of needles, but do you, or me, being injected in the eye? I think it's fair to say would give me the [ __ ] heebie-jeebies. Yeah. It's just differences in, uh, differences in degree, not differences in kind. Right? Just risk tolerance here. So one interesting thing is quite some of those people may have been engaging in what you might call, um, motivated reasoning. So they were frightened of getting injected, but they didn't want to say this. So they contrived, they reverse-engineered a whole load of reasons not to get vaccinated, which were enough. Now, I don't think that explains the whole anti-vax movement, but it's a relevant sector. And one of the things they said is, if you told people, "You can get vaccinated in private, you can get vaccinated lying down, so if you do faint, you don't crash onto the floor." Um, and the other, another thing you might want to do is you might want to offer those people a very, very rapid fact. So if you, if you went to someone who's frightened of needles, right, and you said, "Do you want to come in now and get vaccinated?" They might go, "[ __ ] it out and get it over with." Yes. Yes. If you, because the anticipation for so long is where their, yeah, their discomfort is going to come from. You know, I've got friends who basically, you know, well, I'll give you the classic example of where I understand this is public speaking, because I do a lot of it, right? You've got to do a lot of it because if you only do a bit of it, it's too frightening. And I know people, totally intelligent people, who if they have to give a speech, like a best man speech or a business speech, in front of a hundred people, four weeks away, they have to spend four weeks [ __ ] themselves. Okay? Literally four weeks. I noticed when I started flying on business, because of course, a lot of people who fly business don't really want to fly, but their boss has told them they've got to go to Frankfurt. I notice in the business class compartment of planes, a significant minority of people are clutching the armrest on takeoff. You know, it's white-knuckle [ __ ]. So one of the interesting things you could do with people who are frightened of getting injected is just say, "Come in right now and get injected." You know, or there's a walk-on by thing. Because if you actually had an appointment for them three weeks hence, they'd have to put up with three weeks of total anxiety. And that might have been a factor in in emotional decision-making, which we didn't, we didn't actually think about. Did you know? I don't know if this story is true, and I'm going to stress-test it on you. The original, by the way, on the fear of things like that. I had a friend who did medicine at Cambridge, and on about day 10, you go into the dissecting room. It's your first-year medical student. There are a lot of corpses, right, laid out on tables. And you've got to get a scalpel, you've got to start putting into bits, right? Now, bear in mind, these people have spent six years of their life getting into Cambridge to read medicine, okay? Right. And apparently, on that first day, you know, you'll get, I don't know, 300 medical students or whatever in the first year medical students. I don't know how many there are, but it'll be something like 200, 300. And about two or three of them will just go, "[ __ ] this. Right. Not for me. Not for me." Yeah. And they'll go and read law or, you know, something like that. So that's like a hazing ritual to select out the people that are never going to be able to do this. It's a really, really interesting question about that. Because if you're too squeamish to do that, maybe you just can't be a doctor. Cut your [ __ ] losses after 10 days, mate. It's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Cut your losses. Yeah. Yeah. Um, did you know about this? Is the original reason that a head on top of a beer, a pint of beer, that that was there, and it was seen as scum? Originally? No, that's coffee, not beer, is it? Coffee. Oh, yes. It's Kramer. Kramer. That's it. Yes. So, in other words, it was, it was considered scum. And it was the gadget machine, post-war gadget machine, produced this stuff. And instead of getting rid of it, because an espresso, previously pre-war Italian espresso, was just pure and black, they, they effectively rebranded it as Kramer. And something else has occurred to me, which has done that. Okay. Are you familiar with the, how long have you, how long since you've been in the UK? Week. Oh, so, well, you'll have to tell me why you're in Austin. Anyway, fantastic. Okay. Are you familiar with the M&S Cheddar brand, Cornish Cruncher? [Laughter] It's a mature cheddar brand, and it's called Cornish Cruncher. Now, what's very clever about that, right, is that when you make mature cheddar, particularly super mature cheddar, the process of maturation causes salt crystals to form within the cheese. And so, you know, someone who just called it "Cornish Mature" would run the risk that people go, "What are these weird lumps doing in my cheese?" But by calling it Cornish Cruncher, you turn a bug into a feature. That's so good. So it's really, really clever. Really, really clever thing to do. I love that. That's what, what, how, I don't know how you would, it's like advertising Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. So you've taken something which was a byproduct that shouldn't have been there, and turned it into something which is now an actual attribute of the product. The most glorious thing of all, I might actually go there this evening, I'm almost tempted, is the German Kebab. And I couldn't get my head around this at all. It's a huge thing in, in Britain, the, um, the German Kebab house. Okay? And I just think, what the [ __ ] hell have the Germans contributed to the kebab? You know, why would I go to? Now, it's interesting because, of course, Germany has a Turkish population of about six million. The kebab world, it's like the Indian restaurant world in Britain. Okay? The kebab world in Germany, because their ethnic food is Turkish, whereas ours is largely, you know, Indian as God intended. Okay? And I was, I was saying to someone the other day, which is that my own particular pantheon of food, all Indian restaurants have an automatic Michelin star. You know, it's like, all, all buildings built before 1700 are automatically Grade II, and all Indian restaurants have a Grade, have a Michelin star in my, in my particular book. Okay? Because even if it's bad, it's still better than anything else. Right? Okay. But, but anyway, in Germany, it's, it's the kebab that they're, kebab wars, it's hugely competitive. Okay? And you literally have people putting fresh heads of lettuce in the window of their shop to show how fresh the salad is. And so this hyper-competition in the church, in German, and since their auto industry might be stuffed by the electric car, it's good they've got another export industry waiting in the wings. So, so the German concern, I might actually go this evening and tool into Bromley and try one of these things. So I've never had one. I think I did, I think I got treated to one the last time I came to London, but it was just someone said, "You just want to get a kebab?" And I thought, it's three in the afternoon. This is a, we're 12 hours too early. And I haven't had six pints. Yeah. Precisely. I haven't, I haven't fought anyone this evening. I haven't, haven't lost my keys and had an argument with the misses. So, yeah, it's, um, that's so strange to think about the fact that you associate a particular type of food with the time of the day, and not just because of the effect it has on you. So, for instance, if you have a big pizza for lunch, you're going to be sleepy for the rest of the day. No one's, no one's serving a big pizza at lunch ahead of a long conference where everyone's in a warm room. You can game that system, by the way. Next time you're in central London, go and find a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant. Now, as I said, all Indian restaurants have a Michelin star, but go and find one with a real Michelin star. Okay? And first of all, you'll be able to get in. Okay? At lunchtime, this is the big thing. Secondly, they will have a lunchtime set menu, which is like £24.95. Okay? You spend that at Pizza Express, it's the biggest bargain in the world. It's all because most people associate Indian food with the evening. And I also suspect it's because out of any group of four people, there'll always be one, "Well, you guys eat Indian food for lunch." I had a boss, I lost all respect for them. Boss, you said, "You don't need Indian food at lunchtime." I said, "Well, 1.4 billion Indians seem to manage." Okay, mate. And, um, so I love eating Indian food at lunchtime. I'm sure it's fantastic. But you will get the best bar. I mean, you, you're getting world-class food there for kind of pizza money, pennies on the dollar. Yeah. I think this was one of your tweets from the other day. One reason political polarization tends to be confined to the young and stupid is this: anyone over 35 possessed of any observational mouse has noticed that there is no correlation between political allegiance and basic decency as a human being. Yeah. By the way, a lot of people misinterpreted that and thought I meant young and also stupid, whereas I meant and or stupid. So I'm just going to qualify that. This is the problem with Twitter. You don't have quite the space to necessarily make clear. And also the great mistake, you understand what you're writing, and other, and on Twitter, because people willfully misunderstand what you're saying, which is the worst problem of all. So you have this inadequate mode of expression combined with willful misunderstanding, which leads to these kind of ridiculous spats. Okay? And so the point I'm making is that, yeah, I would argue that this moralization of political opinion, if you are reasonably astute, um, or, you know, you're reasonably astute, particularly if you're over 40 years old, you do realize that there are nice left-wing people and nice right-wing people, and there are horrible left-wing people and horrible right-wing people. And that political allegiance is not really a suitable enough, um, shiver left on which to actually judge people's moral character. I, I still think that's a fair point. I mean, you know, there are certain behaviors, for example, uh, where, you know, certain behaviors which you would think would be right-wing, which some, which just as often crop up in the left. Like, you know, extreme stinginess, for example. You know, you know, real stinginess is, is doesn't really, you'd think that might be a bit of a right-wing vice, but actually, you find it just as often in people on the left. Um, and, okay, people were then going, "Oh, but, you know, you know, but actually, you know, they spit, what about the extreme right and the extreme left?" Well, fair point, but they tend to be pretty nasty on either, you know, in either direction. Um, for nasty for different reasons, but still nasty. I think the average age at the moment, it might be in the UK, I think it is in the UK, is 20. The average age for the population in the UK? No, no, it's much higher than that. No, there are lots of countries where the average age, lost countries in Africa, where the average age is very, very young. Okay? But Japan's, Japan's historically the highest, right? Um, uh, Germany's quite high, or I mean, uh, uh, historically, because Germans have fewer and fewer children, and have them also people have children later, which also skews things. No, no, the UK tends to be, tends to be quite a, has quite a large elderly population. I think what is the median? The proper thing is not perhaps the average age, but the median age. So let me again find out what the median age is in the UK. UK median age, 40.4. Wow. Is it? I've got mine. Don't worry. In 2001, it was 37.9. Yeah. So the average age of the UK population has been increasing throughout this time period. Although between 2014 and 2016, the median age remained at 40. Wow. So what you're saying is that if it has the highest median age, actually, it's very interesting. Monaco, taxation, 55.4, followed by Japan at 48.6, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, which is so small as to be a bit silly, um, and then Germany, 47.8. Well, I mean, Japan's, Japan's completely annihilated by all of these outliers that live to 120 years old. That's their problem. Yeah. They also, also, I suppose, whether they have, you, you also get these weird people who live, live at home, don't you? You know, um, so they tend not to have children, so family formation happens later and later, combined with smaller and smaller families. And so quite often, there are three or three things going on at the same time. We're going to see some really interesting population demographics, aren't we, over the next sort of 20 to 50 years? It really does feel like we're not going to. I asked someone the other day that seems to understand this pretty well, whether or not the world is going to break 10 billion people. And they said, they said it was touch and go about whether or not we just glance off the bottom of that and then start to tune back down again. My my hunch would be actually that there's a very good book on this which is packed full of statistics. Two good books I'll recommend to your listeners. Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Oh, you. Thank you. I was just going to Google it. And there's another book called The Great Slowdown by Danny Dorling, who's an Oxford professor of geography, who makes the point that actually most things in the world are either shrinking, or the speed at which they're growing is shrinking. And let me just read out, if I, if I look up The Great Slowdown by, uh, Danny Dorling, I will tell you what the subtitle is, because it's quite a good book. It's called Slowdown: Sorry, The End of the Great Acceleration and Why It's Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives. And Dorling has an interesting take on statistics, using these particularly peculiar graphs which are mostly used, I think, only in, you know, abstruse parts of mathematics, which shows that most things are either slowing down, or they're increasing at a decreasing rate. And, um, so, you know, the very large families are disappearing very, very rapidly in parts of the world like Latin America, where we wouldn't necessarily have predicted it. In my childhood, the only thing Dorling could find that was increasing at an increasing rate was, I think, jet air travel, which would have been effectively because China and India have now been entered into the domestic airline. So we've got a step change there that's opened up an extra two and a half billion people to this. That's effectively opened up, I guess, it's what is it? Probably 50 million or 60 million people in India, 60, 100 million people in China, maybe more, who can fly domestically on planes, whereas that would have been a tiny percentage of the population, uh, you know, not that many decades ago. You know, India, you travel by train if you're going long distance, unless you were super rich. Um, and, um, I mean, my brother remembers going on a long-distance coach in Chile in the 1990s, and he boarded this coach and was surprised to discover it was a super luxury coach with like reclining seats and everything else. And he couldn't work out why this thing, you know, because your vision of a Latin American coach in the 1990s was kind of, you know, you'd be sharing it with some chickens or something, okay? And what he realized, of course, is back in 1994, to fly internally within Chile was like super expensive. So this was effectively a business coach. If you're traveling on business between Santiago and, um, Valparaiso, that isn't Chile, isn't, I'm not talking [ __ ] here, okay? If you're traveling long distance, and Chile, of course, is the kind of shape where quite a lot of journeys are quite long, unless you were like the chief executive of the business, you wouldn't fly, you'd basically go by coach. Um, and so as a result, they had these super luxury coaches, which were the equivalent of domestic air travel in the United States. We should have that in the UK more, I think. I mean, you know, funnily enough, George Monbiot has made that case that coach travel, if you could destigmatize coach travel. I'll tell you, I'll tell you a business, if anybody's listening and they want to get in touch, okay? You could even take the business even further and put your car on a car transporter. But, okay, but a bus that left London at, let's say, 9 p.m., picked me up at Ashford or Ebbsfleet at like 10:30, where I had a tiny little cabin, and woke up in Frankfurt. Right? You've got the European motorway network, which is more or less empty overnight. Certainly, it'll be very smooth. You've got modern coaches which have much, much better suspension and soundproofing, and they've got toilets and onboard entertainment and a coffee machine. Okay? It's not the coach travel of my childhood, which was frankly, um, pretty grim. Okay? So you could undoubtedly, if you could just destigmatize coach travel, you could use the failure to create a European sleeper train network. And actually, I would now. The other one I've always wanted is one where you put your car on a car transporter. Okay? Uh, you, you bought, you bought a kind of little cabin thing. Now, the way you could do it is if they're two of you, you'd share a cabin. If I'm traveling on business, I'd pay double and have a cabin to myself with a bit of a desk. A bit, the way the sleeper trains work, you know, first class is the same as second, you just don't have to share. And, you know, I would, I would definitely travel to Frankfurt one way overnight that way. Because I'd rather get on a bloody coach in Ebbsfleet at ten o'clock at night than have to get up at five o'clock in the morning and then travel to London City or something. But that's the alternative, right? This is something that nobody ever thinks about. They look at the journey time, and Skyscanner does this brilliantly, because they tell you the total amount of travel time, but then you need to add on the transfers. Then you need to add on the amount of time to check in at the front end, to collect your bags at the back end, the transport, and potential cost to get yourself from where you are to the airport. And when you actually end up loading all of this up at the end, you think, "[ __ ] I might as well just." Of course, what happened is that coach travel tended to be, has been associated with people who can't afford to travel any other way. Because they don't own a car, they can't afford to go by train, they're very price sensitive. Um, you know, quite often you get a fairly high pisshead propensity on a coach. As well. You get that on trains as well, though. Trains, trains are, you can, trains are, yeah, it's okay to drink at any time on a train. If it's 10 a.m., isn't that funny? People drink. Yeah. They forget. We wouldn't go for a pint at 10 in the morning, usually. You're off to a work meeting, but because you're on a train, there used to be a train that went effectively non-stop from Glasgow to Brighton, and it went through Kensington Olympia. So it went through that western thing, then went down to East Croydon, then Gatwick, then Brighton. I think I've got that right, have I? Yes. Yeah. Definitely. Uh, and anyway, I boarded it once between, I think Kensington Olympia and Gatwick, because it was a convenient way of getting together. Bear in mind, it was full of Glaswegians who'd been on the train for five and a half hours. Basically, I was a smoker back then. I was in the smoking compartment. You couldn't see the opposite window. And every time the train went over a set of points, 407 empty cans of Tennent's Super would crash off the table or roll around the floor, just gorging their contents. It was one of the most, it was, it was kind of like Hieronymus Bosch. You know, it was extraordinary. But I don't blame them entirely. But if you're going to sit on a train for eight hours, I mean, it's not a totally crazy way of passing the time. The only way that you can put up with it is by getting yourself pissed. Look, Rory Sutherland, ladies and gentlemen. Where can people go to pick up the new book? Rory? Right, so you can go wherever you normally buy books, which probably means Amazon. But let me go and give you, it's called Transport for Humans. It's Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland are the authors. The subtitle is, um, "Are We Nearly There Yet?" Okay? It's got a very nice cover, which shows the brain in the shape of a tube map, which I have to say, whoever the graphic designer was, deserves some kudos. And, uh, it's available. I suppose I should quote the price, shouldn't I? Did you do this? Actually, did you do an audible version of it as well? I've got to record that. Okay. So you can pre-order that. Okay. I haven't recorded the audible footage. Okay. Well, it's fairness to me, okay? I, I, I was already in sector one weekend and they got a massively sore throat. Now, it's pre-orderable on Amazon. It'll be available because it comes out on the 18th. Right. 14.99. The Kindle edition's 8.49. The paperback's 14.99. And let me just brag, it's currently, even though it hasn't come out yet, just on pre-orders alone on Amazon, it's number one in Road and Transport Engineering, number one in Urban and Rural Planning, and number four in the Transportation Industry category. So the only books that are beating it in the Transportation Industry category are published by the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, which books you need to read to pass your driving test. We're even beating "All Aboard," the timeless book, all about, um, uh, remembering British railways. So unless it's mandated by law before you can actually get in a car, your book's doing pretty well. So at no point did I ever think that I would be number four in the transportation industry books category of Amazon. So I have, it's one of those strange things. You know, it's going to be my best humble brag for the rest of my life. I think I was once, once number four in the transportation category on Amazon. But the one I don't understand is why is "The Ghosts of Biggin Hill" by Bob Ogle, who's a local Sevenoaks historian, by the way, and frequent columnist for the Sevenoaks Chronicle, not that you'd be expected to know that, why is it in at number 29? Why has it suddenly surged? Why isn't he in it higher than that? That's the question that we need to be asking. Yeah, I know. I'm beating "The Ghosts of Biggin Hill" anyway. So, you know, so take that, Bob, you bastard. Rory, thank you so much for today. It's a drive anytime. Thanks, everyone. What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.