Why Logical Thinking is Illogical - Rory Sutherland

people talking is an art form or medium which is probably quarter a million years old or half a million years old in evolutionary terms okay whereas everything else is 5,000 years or less yeah I mean I don't even know if the Egyptians had drama I'm guessing they might have done yeah okay but you know I don't know what the plays would have been about but um uh but I me writing's what 4,000 5,000 6,000 years old Max isn't it M the only two things that are really really old conversation and dogs are the two things

that are really old yeah my my theory is about podcasting that well famously I think um Socrates never wanted to write anything down and part of the reason for that it might be apocryphal is that if you write something down you don't have to remember it it's like you don't you you sort of you you should be practicing this or my University policy for not taking notes but it didn't really work in my case yeah well well also there's a sense in which the way philosophy is supposed to be done is through conversation yes and

so when you write down philosophy what you're actually creating is this simulacrum of the ideal way of doing philosophy which is through conversation so you know Socrates or Plato writing a book about philosophy is the wrong way to do it isn't it because you know where you're going when you start bloody I think that's why so many philosophies are done in the style of of dialogues that is like you know said that same thing the dialectic is the is similar isn't it well well you have I mean literal dialogues between characters so like the platonic

dialogues Galilea right rights dialogues human rights dialogues and he invents these characters in order to make a philosophical point because instead of just saying here's my viewpoint here's my philosophical worldview they say we're going to do this through conversation because the best way to do philosophy is one person says something another person asks a question and clarifies and they debate and so Plato is probably thinking to himself you know as is Hume as is Galileo thinking to themselves gosh if only there were a way you know to capture brast the actual conversation brilliant fantastic yes

yes yes and so which I've got to write it down like a script exactly and so Plato made that [ __ ] up didn't he I think I'm right to saying those conversations a lot of it was yeah those conversation probably didn't happen but the funny thing is that like a lot of people say you know oh you know I used to read so much philosophy I but now I never read cuz because I'm I'm too busy listening to podcasts and stuff and I'm like well hold on what you're doing you're trading the simulacrum for

the thing that's for for like how it's supposed to be you know this is fascinating fun fun enough it's Arisen as an interesting question we are rolling right are we rolling oh see you later thanks thanks for the help today fascinatingly this has arisen as a question uh in terms of the AI yeah AI use in market research which is do you write down a load of questions and ask the respon respondant which is what tends to happen in Market Research Now where effectively the questions reflect a preconception of what you think is important but

with AI Market researchers you will take it as a conversation where it goes wherever it goesh and so there's this whole sort of area which basically says the great advantage of this is we can actually start an inquiry without preconceptions as to the as to the end point yeah but that that in many ways is what philosophy is supposed to be and so when you read these these dialogues I think what people are trying to do is recreate that element of Discovery and uh trial and error in terms of your ideas which is necessary to

the philosophical process and given that when somebody does say to me well I don't I don't read anymore you know I wish I was smart and I read books but instead I just spend all of my time listening to podcasts I'm thinking well if you're doing philosophy if what you're listening to and that's effectively what Plato was sort of doing the like imagine if somebody like took a conversation that somebody had on their podcast an episode of Joe Rogan and they transcribed it but maybe they had to do it from memory and maybe they slightly

adapted yeah to make it a little bit maybe maybe a little bit more streamlined but also maybe to sort of make their point a bit more strongly even if the person who wrote this even if it was Joe Rogan himself remembering the conversation writing down roughly what happened you'd probably still rather listen to the original conversation right you'd probably rather if that were available yeah definitely yeah and so actually you'd rather watch it because there are Mo you know there are questions like you know um I mean what what I tend to do when I

watch podcasts on YouTube and it's partly because my TV is connected to the best sound system I've got but um what's quite good about it is you can kind of get on with something else in other words it doesn't demand your full attention Okay it's rather my my joke about you know In fairness to you know to tea coffee and tobacco they're three drugs you can consume while performing other useful functions okay which isn't generally true of like acid or something um and the the radio is the medium of the industrious because you can listen

to the radio while getting on with something else you see what I mean and actually video podcasting generally you like the scene setting and you also glance up every now and then but it doesn't demand your undivided attention in the way that television program would that's probably right I do take it as a compliment when somebody says you know Alex this was one of those episodes where I actually had to sort of sit and listen I couldn't be like doing the washing up because you sort of have to go back and and I suppose that

probably hurts our hurts our watch time a little bit because a lot of these things are are deep Dives that really do require that that that Focus um I was kind of ahead of the curve on the you know the the Tik Tock uh YouTube shorts Instagram thing where they'll have the video and then underneath they'll have the video game footage of Subway Surface or whatever to like keep people's attention I was ahead of the curve on this because I used to listen to podcasts and debates but because you know I'm just watching people debate

on a screen I would play some mindless video game Skate 3 Grand Theft Auto where I could just sort of like mindlessly keep my eyes in a flow stage keep your eyes yeah and so I when I started seeing this this kids do this thing and more and more people actually do this thing of watching TV with the subtitles on which is kind of interesting yeah um I think that's got lot to do with the fact that I I've seen uh a few people make this there's a video I say on YouTube about this about

how as microphone technology gets better performances get worse or like less clear that is like there was a time when if you were on television you had to talk like this to the camera make sure that it's a bit like theater you face the audience you're very clear but when microphones got good enough to pick up everything you're saying suddenly you can well you can you can make a make a point like this and and and it actually makes it more difficult to hear and so people now have to use sub so just as you

had this change in music where the kuna people like ALB or Sinatra were made possible by microphone technology you basically couldn't sing like I mean yes you know in Opera obviously okay it's very much the opposite of cring which is highly intimate yes and you now have this unfortunate thing where there's a kind of verit just in in cinema in both lighting design and in sound recording where to be h be honest you can't hear what the [ __ ] are saying half the time you know I mean you do notice when you watch Carri

grod that clearly you know what what you know whatever else you think there's no problem understanding what he's saying yeah yeah and you do Tom Hardy is famously a mumbler isn't he they're various actors who uh yeah but this is the strange Paradox of as the technology gets better the delivery gets worse delivery gets worse because it doesn't need to be good anymore and and there there I mean that's great because those performances of a Time Gone by were much clearer and you know my grandparents can hear them on the TV without having to to

to turn it up too loud but at the same time it's not as a sort of realistic a performance you don't really like believe you're in that world with the characters and so I suppose if you're a news reader how realistic is that anyway so there is an argument for the sort of Alvar Liddell absolute Clarity of speech for things like news reading because that isn't a natural that's that that's not you know that that's effectively a sort of proclamation of things yeah but you're right about conversation that picking up the nuances and the the

you know and actually keeping in the ums isn't necessarily I mean there's a whole interesting question about what because I I'm not sure about this if you have an AI agent do you actually want it to mimic a h a full screen human being um or at least all the time and there are a lot of people now talking about what you might call multimodal uh interfaces where you go I'm interested in staying in a hotel in F Ventura can you show me a few that you think I might like and so because I mean

the mistake that Alexa made I mean Amazon spent effectively you know several billion dollars developing Alexa with the idea that it would become a channel for the ordering of goods and services in the absence of a video component now in the event if that's all it becomes it would have been cheaper for them to give everybody an egg timer and a barometer because 90% of the questions are what time is it set an alarm and what's the weather like today yeah um and I there's there's an interesting question which is you know effectively what interface

is is is optimal for performing various tasks MH my hunch is that Google must be bricking it because the threat to Google is really an interface shift isn't it yes the big threat to Google to kill the sort of habituation of use and so forth is that people side they'd rather talk than type yeah I mean that's a kind of you know that's a kind of potentially existential threat yeah and and how these AI chatbots are kind of like a new kind of search engine because instead of searching this index of websites they're searching through

their training data and then searching through the websites as well at the same time I I've got a really weird idea for a new business using AI which is actually where you pay if you think about it okay let's say you're really into kite surfing and you want to go live somewhere windy okay now if you've got a hundred people paying you a100 a month okay that's a stack of a lot of money I mean particularly if you can live anywhere you like oh yeah right now if you have an if you have an a

PA on the end of a phone or the end of a zoom call okay even better who is just very very good at using the various different AI opportunities out there you could hire that person as your info Butler and it might make more sense to employ a human who's particularly Adept at that okay than it is to actually use the technology yourself however good that technology may be sure so the question is you know do I really want to spend the last sort of few Decades of My Life as a typist or talking to

machines or could you argue that you could create an Uber Jeeves out of a human being who had no requirement to be physically present but with whom you'd interact for you know 20 minutes a few times a week and you'd effectively say okay I need you to sort out this thing with my bank account I need you to talk to so and so so and so you could text them you could use any any medium of exchange you liked you'd have an occasional Zoom call they'd come up with suggestions for your hotel in for Ventura

okay I mean wouldn't it make more sense because this is to thean chess isn't it that the best chess player is a human plus a machine well if this is really that powerful why do we want to skimp on the human component if it's really that potent because I don't need this guy 100% of the time or woman indeed me okay not not not presupposing um You probably need that person for you know I don't know 20 minutes a day right okay now with 20 minutes a day you know uh you know they could get

on with their life quite a lot of time they could service a hell of a lot of people that way they'd also learn from the other people they looked after who might be people like me so what I'm saying is do do we actually use this to bring back domestic Service as a really lucrative form of employment sorry I've got it because in a sense is it is it is it the best use of my time when I could be sitting on podcasts or whatever to actually be there endlessly having to master improvements to that

technology or do we Bor a bit from Adam Smith and go look there's AIT of division of labor here might be quite helpful and that being an AI expert on behalf of a hundred human beings it's like an AI middleman yeah someone who's just very good at using the techn INF mediary I think was once the phrase they kind of used you could also then as an AI company start developing AI tools which are designed to not be sort of this really great public facing anyone can use this and get they could be hardore yeah

like you've got to know the keywords you've got to know the the commands but once you do once you learn that language this AI tool is like in the 1970s for whatever reason I mean this is I'm old enough to remember this it was slightly um demeaning to be seen typing right you had a typist to do that okay now just as Simon cowl does not have a mobile phone okay he has people to do my argument is that we have a weird Tech Fetish around the optimization of efficiency which basically means the elimination of

humanity from every process because the biggest cost is the wage cost yes but just as a hydraulic okay let's say a JCB made a navi a 100 times more productive but you still had the navi okay the Assumption of the tech world is that you always eliminate the human and the wage cost from everything and you disintermediate everything and of course there's a huge assumption in economics is that disintermediation is a wonderful thing I would argue we will still have a state agents in a 100 years time because ultimately I want a transaction of that

scale to be mediated by a human being now I'll give you an example of that I was a campaigner uh for maintaining manned ticket offices at Railway stations because my argument is there are certain functions I want performed by a machine which which is I know exactly the ticket I want and I simply want to buy it with a contactless credit card but there are there are people and there are occasions who don't want that either they're elderly people who want a human being to say no no dear you need the off Peak return um

and there are also unusual Journeys where I need a human being whom I can trust to say actually make what I'll do and the Machine will never do this okay yeah um look I'll sell you the um the peak single to over and then you can get an off Peak return back from do because it's 9 quid cheaper and that gives me the confidence to know that the ticket I'm buying is not stupid the machines are getting better at doing this well there's no incentive to make them better well that that's that's the thing there's

only the decency of the human being well the yeah but then I wonder if um like for example you know like split ticketing you can get them on trains yeah that's true those are done not by the railway companies unsurprisingly they're done by train line train line who will who will Who who will promote a split tick yeah I and I guess I guess that's sort of an intermediary machine um but I mean you you you talked in um in in your book in in alchemy about uh the the maps problem like Google Maps and

I I resonate with this so much the idea that like and the way you talk about it is say you want to get from A to B you can you can look at how long it takes to drive you can change it to the public transport mode and it'll show you how to get there in public transport the problem is is that you don't always not want to drive because you don't have a car sometimes I see what you mean sometimes the reason that you don't want to drive is just because you know it's it's

a it's a more convoluted Journey or a less reliable Journey so maybe you want to drive to the train station and then get the train but if I look on Google Maps oh no no Google's very bad at that because they don't the assumption that Google and now fly enough let me get this right I think it may be is it Nicholas cis's sister um it's somebody like that might be Nick cis's sister who's involved in a campaign to make Google Maps much more public transport friendly because the American assumption is if you're using public

transportation it's because you don't have a car yeah so they then assume you're taking a bus to the station and you're walking to the bus the very British practice of driving to a railway station actually New Yorkers would do this Connecticut residents would do it more accurately to get to New York but in Los Angeles the only reason you're taking public transport is because you don't have a car mhm um and Google is very Californian in that assumption I think that's absolutely true and it's repeatedly annoyed me because it gives ludicrously um pessimistic assumptions of

how long the journey would take on public transport because it assumes I'm making no use of a of a car to get to the station and no use of a taxi at the other end so it basically assumes this bated idea of you're either basically a car car owner in which case you go everywhere by car or you're effectively at the mercy of public transportation for the entire length of your journey it is really annoying like if if the two of us wanted to go to Cambridge right now Cambridge City Center and we looked on

Google Maps it would either tell us it's a whatever how long it takes to drive to to you know St John's College or if we say well I want to take the train we click public transport and what does it tell us it tells us well you have to get to this station get a bus here get to the train station then once you get to Cambridge you have to get out and you have to get this bus which is going to take you up and then you walk 15 minutes which is of course both

of those options are total bollocks in the first option you'll get stuck in traffic in London for ages uh and when you leave the station at Cambridge you're going to get attack by the way I I give all your all your listeners a great tip here which is that um rail uh algorithms when they recommend trains sometimes overweight the importance of Journey time so if ever you're going down to the West country if you're going to Plymouth or Cornwall okay what you have to do is you go in search for a journey starting at watero

not Paddington and you have to add via Salsbury now Southwestern trains have these trains that go from waterl all the way to Exodus and Davids at which point you can then change onto a train going further west because they're a bit slow they never feature on the website because they never feature on the website they're absurdly cheap you can actually get a kind of first class single to exus and David's watero and it's highly Scenic cuz you go through some pretty lovely English countries Packa hamper I'm not sure what the onboard caterings like um but

um uh you i' I've literally I think my daughter's had to come back from a music festival in was it board Masters you young people understand don't don't ask me no no okay B Masters okay camera people know excellent okay and the the trains were absolutely rammed and I I think I got she and her four friends came back first class in EX for like 35 each it's absolutely Bonkers and of course living in Seven Oaks as I do water and water East is a lot easier than getting to Paddington so there's a double win

um but that's one of those cases where it's I think it's called the alignment problem isn't it the algorithm doesn't really know what you're trying to do this is why I'm questioning whether we need human intermediaries because a really good human backed with an AI is going to be such a potent Aid to your life okay that actually the money you spend on the human which is perfectly enough to support that human in employment is worth it simply for the fact that you don't have to master all these godamn interfaces yeah now you'd have to

the second thing is you your your specialism is the value of religion is you a bit of a fan of the Quakers my my view is what the country needs is a Quaker Revival um the trouble with the Quakers they're not very good at marketing to be absolutely honest okay they've never never managed to really break through sure but the thing that always fascinates me about Quaker ism is their extraordinary success in business um in that you know it's a tiny population which gave rise to Cadbury to Round Tree to Barkley's Bank to Lloyd's bank

one of the founders of Sony was a Quaker ironically the Quaker Oats company are not Quakers they chose the Quaker as an image because of its um associations of complete trustworthiness and they have this principle in quakerism that your word is your bond there's no need to to swear Oaths or um I think there's actually an exception for Quakers if you have to testify in court because you object to testifying on the Bible because you say everything I say has the force of Truth Now what it meant was that Quaker business didn't really require any

lawyers or any of these tedious trust grating intermediaries because you'd basically go and say I'd like to buy your chocolate factory how much are you willing to pay 20,000 guine done and that was it the whole thing was done okay so it was an extraordinar efficient form of capitalism and it also helped that they weren't allowed to go to university for a time so they actually had to go and do something useful instead um because you had to be an Anglican I think to go to Oxford or Cambridge which were the only two universities right

so they were kind of forced into business however intelligent they were because they were you know they they couldn't go into they couldn't get sidetracked uh into a university but it struck me that actually you know if you have a very trustworthy human being with whom you have a repeated relationship okay so that they're actually optimizing for long-term value not short-term transactional value that person has a huge value in helping you navigate the digital world which is after all optimized for um well it's actually it's calibrated for very low levels of trust so do you

still need humans and Concepts like shame or even fear of divine retribution as part of this system well we could potentially build in fear of divine retribution to to an AI system you know once um once it develops so much that we start questioning whether it might be conscious why don't we just sort of build into its into its interface belief in the existence of God and Sh and shame and and eternal afterlife it's possible I mean I I get the feeling that the technology just isn't good enough yet and and that what you're identifying

as a as well this just isn't What machines do machines don't think in this way way I think that's a problem that can be solved for example the earliest chess computers were pretty good at chess and people are impressed they think wow you know I can play a game of chess against a computer and it puts you know it gives me a run for my money but they say but the the reason why a chess computer is never going to beat a human is because chess computers don't have the creativity that's necessary for because you

can tell a chess machine you know never lose your queen the chess for doesn't understand is that there are some instances where sacrificing your queen is the right thing to do but of course saying that now seems silly because of course you can eventually teach a again you don't teach at creativity per se but you treat it you teach it a better unless you define creativity as highly unless you define creativity as highly refined pattern recognition yeah fine in which case which a lot of creativity is then then I guess you are teaching it creativity

but but whatever you call it the the computer learns to do the the thing which previously it was thought computers just don't do that because they just become better at approximating what you really want and so I can imagine a machine that can you you know can can can recognize when somebody is is struggling to to type and maybe switches it from ABC to querty or vice versa and somebody you know who is obviously trying I mean a computer Could Be Clever enough to work out that when someone's clicked on Liverpool Street Station they were

actually trying to go to Liverpool Lime Street and like put up a this kind of like you know that kind of thing that usually would require the human to go oh well actually you should probably just get this one and you know what technically if you buy this ticket they'll let you on that train it's the kind of thing that as long as companies allow this technology to develop there's no reason a computer can't do that the only thing is that the codification of everything uh in real life manifests itself as bureaucracy after time sure

and understanding things like the benefit of the doubt and wiggle room and defaulting to trust okay I'm just I'm just wondering whether you know actually an in it isn't more economically efficient to have an info Quaker who is entirely trustworthy and to whom I pay uh you know a reasonable monthly salary for performing it might just be easier than me having to master yet another bastard interface I yeah I I was on a train once and there was a woman opposite me who spoke not a word of English and she just start I mean she

was talking quite loudly into her phone and I was God's sake I'm trying and then she just started crying she like burst into tears and it's because she'd meant to get on this train that was supposed to be like a 5 10 minute Journey to the next station and was finding a way going somewhere into the north of England and she couldn't even speak English so after a bunch of translations uh just just sort of you know I was like oh you use the phone to transl I use my phone to translate so so technology

grade and all you're an Android User then are you no no I I was on you know Google translate on my phone whatever and it was very funny because she would speak into her phone and report back to me just to say sort of like thank you or yes and I think she was sort of trying to be nice to me but there was something Lost in Translation so she sort of come back like thank you handsome man and and and stuff like this it was it was could have been sincere do yourself down there

could have been I just don't think you would you would quite put it in those terms um or maybe maybe it's just the kind of kind of woman she was I don't know but at any rate this whole Saga ends with you know the the train worker coming over and me explaining what had happened what I'd garnered she'd gone on the wrong train she needs to get off at you can imagine trying to explain someone who doesn't speak English you need to get off at this train you need trans transfer to this platform whatever but

it ended with the with the with the train operator because she didn't have the ticket right she she she had the ticket for this train journey and she was supposed to go all this convoluted route and the train operator took like you know her ticket or whatever and just wrote on the back of it with a pen You Know This Woman's trying to get here blah blah blah blah blah you know GRE her and ARR exactly and sort of wrote out and and and like that does make me think even if a computer could do

that it's not the kind of thing you could formalize we program not to do it because the benefit of the doubt would show up as a loss financially ex yes um and secondly it would be vulnerable to fraud so the first thing to be closed down is the benefit of the doubt I mean look and it's possible that this woman was actually defrauding us all the whole time and but but I imagine that she wasn't and the reason that I know that is because I'm a human being who was looking at another human being right

and I do wonder if if a computer will ever capable of capturing that kind of interaction you know it's it's it's kind of hard to say because what computers don't what what computers do is just well the the thing that you condemn so much in a lot of human interactions which is this sort of hyper rationality this is now you're on a podcast right now called within reason that's the name of this podcast we like to celebrate the I'll leave right now I'll get Cod we well it would it's it would be the first time

that's happened on this podcast believe you mean me um although usually a bit less politely that's happened in the past um I think did that happen with um uh what's his name didn't it out yeah you know it's slipping my mind um yeah a certain Mr Hitchens I won't tell you which one I remember um yeah he did he did to decide to to stand up and to stand up and leave so as I say you wouldn't be the first um but I'd like to see if you could match the entertainment hissy fit was about

entirely to be honest neither am I I think it might have something to do with being with drugs um well I I was talking to him for for like 40 minutes interviewing him about his drug decriminalization policy you know the one that he um wrote a book about to which he told me that I'd been banging on about it for too long and that he was sick to death of the subject and to the of those who who promoted and um and got up to leave but not before spending 17 minutes at the doorting you

about telling me how much he personally disliked me yeah I did actually see him again last night it the first time we've been in a room together um I didn't speak to him he was doing this doing this event um it was like it was like an election debate so he was representing the conservative party and there were a few other people and there was a Q&A it was quite an intimate audience there was a Q&A after surprise Hitchens believes the conservative party is a conservative party well he doesn't he thinks that the conservative party

deserves to be destroyed but he's so fearful of Labor that he was telling people to to vote conservative anyway so he was doing this sort of intriguingly of course our first past the post system allows you to correct against over Lodge majorities so my argument would be if you're in a safe conservative or libdem seat regardless of your proclivities it is actually in the interest of the labor party for you to vote conservative the argument being that if you had a huge labor majority it would implode serve only one term and then you'd be effectively

back to where you were when you started yes um that there is actually a serious problem about that because of the ferous nature of left-wing politics people would get it preoccupied with a lot of sort of single-issue um obsessions yeah and the whole thing would go D which tends to happen well there are ways to to sort of think about in principle how you might hack the system when it comes to voting I'm actually interested in your philosophy of voting because as somebody who thinks outside of the box about unintuitive solutions to problems and and

how to solve this problem you might not realize that you know the way to sell more products might be to put the price up rather than taking it down this kind of thing when it comes to voting a lot people have these ideas about how well you know unintuitively if if you you know don't like the conservative party if you're some left Winger who wants to see the conservative party destroyed you might best vote reform UK in this election because that's going to take votes you know that's that's going to sort of make it more

difficult for the conservative party if labor are going to win anyway like there is a substantial um uh right-wing uh body of opinion in the UK uh which has always found an outlet through the conservative party which has for the most part been comparatively reasonable okay by Continental standards um I think that might be a be careful what you wish for yeah yeah yeah yeah um well well I I I'm sort of seeing the the a way to sort of destroy the conservative party not by voting for labor sort of weird ways of thinking about

voting I mean like when when you see people going to the polls and and voting what do you think they should be having in mind there's an advantage to a first past the post electoral system which is that you get a Fairly reliable Purge every now and then also true in the United States okay so you you do undoubtedly get the problem and interestingly the Greeks have a system which is quite clever which is that the largest party it's proportional representation but the largest party gets this kind of bonus of seats which increases the chance

of a majority they did invent democracy so I think we ought to give them some credit okay um and it gives them a kind of bonus which makes a which makes a majority more likely so you have a functioning government but at the same time you still have this power effectively to reboot you know do a hard reset on your politics when any particular party has been in power for too long it's probably pretty good to have a purgative function there's also the question of direct representation which is there is a person who represents me

you know there's proper accountability which you don't have if you have party lists you know you have no particular control over getting an individual scoundrel uh out of the system yeah sure so I mean there are chest fences I think in um in the first part of the post system it's it it whether it works well or badly of course depends on the particular breakdown of opinion um uh you know at any given time I would also argue that I think um voting for reality TV programs and got and Eurovision and everything else has um

slightly changed the nature of how people exercise a vote in that they're more likely to do it for symbolic reasons uh you know or for reasons of identity or statement for performative reasons than for actually instrumental reasons yes yeah well that's I know I think we have seen an element of that that's what I'm interested in in in your views on when it comes to voting we've got an election in this country next week yeah and when you go to the polls if you go to the polls I don't know if you're a voter um

you know are you thinking like I'm going to vote as somebody who like knows how how crowds work and operate how uh public opinion and purchasing decisions can affect company outcomes when it comes to voting are you thinking I'm just going to vote for the party I want to win are you voting against the party you don't want to lose are you tactical you could tactically vote to say I live in Seven Oaks which is a fairly safe conservative seat and I could I'm not sure whether I will make the not unreasonable decision that if

s Oaks is not a conservative constituency that means that you would have a conservative party of kind of 38 or 47 people something of that kind um uh uh there's not much chance there's not much liberal democracy in Kent the LI Dems have never actually made much Headway in most most of Kent in local government they have but in parliamentary constituencies not much um and I could make a perfectly reason decision to say there needs to be some sort of competent opposition um and and vote conservative with a you know with while pinching my nose

I I haven't ruled that out yeah um as a perfectly and and that is of course using the electoral system to some extent that's one thing you don't have in proportional representation to quite the same extent which is the freedom to say I want you know I wouldn't particularly mind a labor majority but a very large one bear in mind of course you also get the problem that you then get a huge number of members of the Parliamentary party who are have no ministerial role so and and and probably a huge number of them who

have no Prospect of it yeah which is it's very good to have a reasonable number of those people but a huge number of those people might make the whole thing unruly yes yeah yeah I can I can I can imagine it's interesting what you're saying about representation I had a friend recently who was wondering and this person is a is a right-winger he wanted to vote for a right-wing party but lives in a place where the green party actually has a pretty good shot of getting a seat and he was like well I don't know

what to do because I think that all of their policies are are like total bunk but because we live in a system where they can get lots of votes but not get any seats I feel a slight duty to vote for the greens even though I hate them just because I value democracy so much that I think they deserve to be but is it is it perf reason I I might do the same thing in that there should be some green representation in Parliament and so even if you totally dislike the party even if you

think it's like the worst thing in the world or whatever you know that there was still this incentive to potentially vote for them just for the sake of democracy you know there should be some reform representation in Parliament by the way because I mean it's uh you know anything that has the support of 10 to 15% of the population deserves a few seats deserves deserves a voice yes undoubtedly and I think I think there should be some mechanism uh where that can work and I'm I'm very interested on the on the green question I'm kind

of conflicted because I think that climate change is probably real okay and potentially catastrophic but I also say that most of the actions that have been taken in pursuit of combating it may have been counterproductive or misdirected what are your views on just stop oil well that that will be an interesting question which is a wider question on the possible um how would I say this I think a large part of demonstration culture is counterproductive MH okay it's a bit like you know in other words uh it it makes you feel great okay but everybody

else hates it so the classic example of that was Neil kinnick's or right on the eve of the election in against John Major 92 I guess it was wasn't it okay um if you're in the hall surrounded by labor supporters going all right makes you feel fantastic unfortunately it's also broadcast on television okay and so there's a well-known phenomenon where it's sometimes called a purity spiral where people in groups adopt more and more extreme positions and behaviors to Signal their adherance to the group in other words it's not enough to be averagely concerned uh you

have to go to more and more extreme behaviors to Signal the extent to to your Compadres that you really really care about this stuff and that leads to kind of you know what you might call um uh runaway signaling and the problem is that when those behaviors are observed by other people um uh they tend to um uh uh they tend to actually be effectively more likely to set the cause back than to promote it I mean I mean if you look at very successful movements and there are a lot of them by the way

we tend to forget the unsuccessful movements I make that there's massive survivorship bias in our belief in protests you know there would have been huge anti-catholic protests in Britain in the early 19th century or the late 18th century for example there are lots of protests I mean CND went nowhere if we were going to be out you know that that took up a lot of attention in my uh maybe it should have G somewhere by the way I mean uh I think they had much better arguments than they had um PR advisers yeah there's a

wonderful thing in Jon o Farrell's book things can only get bitter where uh he made the point that um you know what you would tend to have is you tend to have a CN demonstration and someone would be dressed you know dressed up in a sort of clown suit uh appearing to fate a nuclear missile as some Act of performative Art and John O Farrell said when Winston Churchill said that uh you know if naism should Triumph it would mean the end of Western Civilization as we know it it was not necessary for him to

also dress up in a skeleton suit and fall to the ground at the end of the speech okay and so some of that stuff is actually deeply by the way there's a huge the extent to which we give coverage to demonstrations um okay is an extraordinary form of media bias because about I would say 70% of the population for various reasons are incapable of participating in them okay either they don't live anywhere near London okay I mean the people of Liverpool would have to burn the city to the ground to get the same media attention

as you know 50,000 londoners breaking a few windows with you know you know five Sky News cameramen on convenient hand okay so it's massively biased towards London opinion the whole business of giving coverage to demonstrations it's much less meaningful than it used to be now the police can't beat them up okay so when the police could actually beat up demonstrators before the age of the mobile phone cam you could at least reasonably assume some degree of conviction on the part of people presenting whereas for all we know now it's just effectively it's Tinder for lefties

right you know okay it's a way to meet a load of like-minded people and hang out yeah okay um but also I mean also if you're right of Center like me We if we're angry about something we only have two modes of response one of which is write to the Daily Telegraph and the other one is buy an assault rifle we we don't have any Middle Ground okay now have half jok but there are a lot of people who find um massively unfair to introverts the whole idea of a demonstration okay right I mean okay

I would find have you would you go to glastenbury I would find GL there is no limit to how much I would pay not to go to the GL and I had to learn this that there are people who actually enjoy being In Crowd situations which I find totally incomprehensible okay any kind of crowd now I always make that point that yes it means I miss out a lot of music festivals on the upside I wouldn't have gone to the nurenberg rallies either yeah I would even worried about the toilet facilities regardless of the political

regardless of any political connotations there's no way but also to me genuinely um um having someone shout at me with a megaphone and I shout the same thing back okay would make me physically sick I think okay just that action that particular action of just having someone shout something I shout the same thing back just runs completely counter to every Instinct I have I would just find it a repellent activity I I couldn't do it for any cause okay it it it's just not in my DNA to do that now I don't think you know

I don't know if you're the same whether you enjoy shouting things that someone has shouted at you it on the day I think okay you have those moments it depends on the time of day as well depends on my energy levels interestingly Jordan Peterson said once uh I'm not sure how true this is but he said you know he gets protested his talks all the time so he was sort of touring universities giving talks and he would get people sit outside leftwing protesters just screaming trying to block entrances all of this kind of stuff and

he made one change to to the way that he conducted his talks and the protest disappeared overnight gone he started holding them in the morning that is unbelievably perfect and people couldn't be bothered to get out of bed um so I mean that that was his well that is proof of my theory that since the police are unable to actually practice indiscriminate violence okay the the protest has lost some of its meaning but it's become actually a form of entertainment for a particular kind of person that's yeah I I see what you're saying there it's

unrepresentative I mean okay um the fact that no okay let's be honest about this there isn't a counterfactual because there was no Palestinian entry uh to Eurovision but the fact that Israel headed the popular vote on the telephone okay with a not particularly brilliant song okay in the UK France Germany Etc okay right okay now as I said I'm being very honest here there was the Palestinian entry I'm sure if there were that would have done very well too so but nonetheless what I'm saying is our fetishization of protest and our fetishization of certain types

of opinion um if you like uh strikes me as slightly weird slightly weird facet of the modern world yeah it's not as if you don't have social media for these people to vent after all I mean it's a you know it's a peculiarly weird thing but when Jordan Peterson shifted his talks to the morning basically the trouble dissipated nobody could be bothered that's what he said anyway I mean I mean it might have been exaggerating and it might I mean there sort of a joke in there some never protest against anybody least of all at

a university but I the one thing I do worry about is that um you know I'm I'm basically on the far left of the outright in my politics okay and one of the one of the reasons I stay there is that I notice that people who become invested in right-wing opinion are driven slightly insane M by the extent to which their whole identity of necessity because of the hostility they face so you could argue I'm simply ducking you know I'm actually chickening out at this point but if your whole identity gets defined by responding to

criticism and attack okay I I I I just it may be highly principled act but I don't think it's good for your quality of life there are lots of things about life which are absolutely not remotely political okay sure uh Dr Johnson said of all the things that human hearts endure how small the part that Kings and laws can cure I think that was Dr Johnson who was pretty much my my kind of Sanity Touchstone on pretty much all matters actually um and um uh the point I'm making is that one of the things I

noticed is there are certain people on Twitter I'm totally happy to have people disagree with me on Twitter politically m when someone disagrees with you go and look at their Twitter feed first of all if there is an insane volume of activity by which I mean they've been on the platform for 5 years and they've tweeted 97,000 times okay they're Bonkers okay if you go back through their Twitter feed and it's all about politics just block them and get rid of them they have no future interest okay that in other words they're in the grip

of a kind of mental um derangement right if in amongst the stuff about I rishy sunak there are a few pictures of their kittens or their children or whatever something that's actually not political I mean someone who someone who ends up seeing life through an entirely political lens which of course was always a disease of the left you know you literally had people who got up and said you know how can I possibly enjoy eggs benedict when something bad is happening okay and that used to be a little bit of a disease of the kind

of hair shirted left but you can end up on this kind of what you might call the equivalent on the right and my argument is it's actually just as unhealthy I want to hear what Jordan Peterson has to say about like maple syrup or something occasionally right I don't you know he Canadian he's probably highly expert apparently the dark kind's much better than the light kinds just for the tourists but life is infinitely complex and interesting politics is by the way actually if you if you strip out the identity component uh local politics is probably

more important than National politics I love the point that Jess Phillips made which is that every time there a local elections people just go um oh well of course it's just the local elections to it's just what do you mean solving the problems that act people actually care about okay um but secondly um I mean politics is has has become infected by effectively the need to win arguments rather than solve problems and I would argue that the mental skills required to solve problems are actually very very different than the mental problems required to win arguments

and Dogma is an extraordinary kind of enemy of problem solving I think I think that the conservative party and the political right made a massive mistake um allowing rather than using some neoliberal thought which was probably pretty handy in 1979 instead they became entirely infected by economic neoliberalism which like all forms of Economics is utter bollocks apart from the austrians um and half se but economics an extraordinary ludicrous discipline an attempt to kind of quantify and predict human behavior as though humans were kind of inert atoms as if they were chess pie chess pieces Adam

Smith warns against this precise thing and what are they doing they're doing exactly the thing that Adam Smith warned them again yeah because Smith reminds us that it would be as if you were trying to organize chest pieces when each chest piece had its own individual will and its own individual and of attraction repulsion from other chess people it would just be in other words principles of you know it has principles and motivations all of its own and this idea of the sort of being able to you know Place pieces where you will uh you

know as if there were no forces in acting in between them yeah is a kind of nonsense and he warned against that now you know the right probably quite rightly took that as a completely useful um uh warning against Central Command and control economies quite rightly that's possibly what he partly meant um but it's also in a sense a warning to economics that you know in other words the man of system is the person he criticized isn't it that's right um and and and um I mean this this stuff is very interesting but I mean

I I think that I've got I've got some um uh Hindu friends who rather brilliantly always criticize westerners I think rightly for what they call Mono theism and he said just because just as we only have we have to have one God we also have to have one Theory to explain everything okay and one of them um um a fantastic chap called jug Bala he points out that his mother goes to a temple in India and on the altar at the temple there is an elephant obviously not a real one a monkey and Jesus yeah

and she sees absolutely no problem uh with uh having all three whereas in in the west we're undoubtedly given to this idea that you have to have one in entirely explanatory kind of Newtonian um uh explanation of everything okay and I think I think he's right I think I think he's got a point there that actually I think um you know what's interesting is there's an awful lot to learn from some slightly odd political movements like georgism ustan school economics the fringes of Economics are more interesting than the mainstream actually um an Italian socialist I

think this is a brilliant idea who I I genuinely think actually it's fantastic okay this is okay he believed that money should basically have an expiration date so you should issue money but to encourage people to spend it rather than hoarding it up it would effectively run out yeah so you'd encourage the rapid velocity and circulation of money now what's interesting about that of course is marketers have already invented that with the the voucher that you get at Sainsbury's that expires in two we's time you know in other words get5 off if you spend £60

at Sainsbury's expires probably yesterday knowing my luck but you know what I mean okay and the whole point of that is to encourage the velocity of expenditure in regular Air Miles you know some Airline loyalty programs are exactly what Hayek talked about when he talked about multiple currencies and you can have different rules for the different currency but why is it good why is it good to to encourage people to to spend money quickly well hold on a second I'm not really a capitalist I'm a consumerist um and I would argue that one of the

strangest things we do in politics and this is this comes from an assumption of neoliberal Economics okay which is that everybody is a perfect utility Optimizer and there are lots of assumptions in economics which strike me as absolutely heinous the other one is the single representative agent in other words you construct this kind of imaginary being who is kind of average of everybody in the model you optimize for them and you assume that what's optimal for the average is optimal for everybody so you have a model which for example can't really clock inequality for instance

so I'm weirdly although as I said I'm on the political right I'm I'm very exercised by intergenerational inequality and the Absurd distortions in wealth that have been created by the property Market where actually how wealthy you are uh is more a product of when you happen to buy a house where you happen to live than your contribution to uh any wider society and so by putting in it's completely arbitrary it's it's it's like making the it's like making the national lottery the property Market is like making the national lottery 50% of the economy okay yeah

it's whack I don't understand by the way you young people okay um you're very weird because you're passionate about the NHS despite the fact that you get almost no value from it in proportion to what you pay there should be a waiting that older people pay more tax than younger people because their health care costs are higher and they have more money okay is that is that that unreasonable I mean you know you'll probably fall off your fixie once or twice and need to have quick visit you you young people with your bloody photograph your

genitals you know sorry I okay but I mean you'll probably fall off your fixie once tce but actually the value you get to the NHS I mean about 80% of it is probably within six weeks of your death okay all right um so you're basically happy to pay huge amounts of tax at a young age that's true okay this is the kind of idea that interests me Roger L Martin very good Canadian business guy believe that instead of having a tax-free allowance every year it should be weighted to the front of your life so the

first $100,000 Canadian dollars or first $200,000 Canadian dollars you earn in your life is taxfree after which you start paying tax on everything not per year not per year it's it's just as soon so if you got a job at Goldman Sachs you'd have one Bonanza year you earn 200,000 taxfree and then you start paying tax if you're earning $40,000 Canadian dollars a year you get five years of taxfree earnings to effectively allow you to accumulate wealth early which is when you need it I I I don't the entire the entire tax system seems to

be Gant toile okay I'm 58 and I get my financial advisor going well if you move this thing if you basically you can put some money into your pension get the tax back and then you can take it out again you that's that was great but I said where were all these tax breaks when I was 30 35 had two kids and I kind of needed the money okay it is absurd so the fetish I think it's simply a product of the fact that economists are stingy by temperament MH and they fetishize why is saving

better than spending it's just consumerism needlessly postponed okay now just to be clear about this what we have done I'm no I'm not get saving I'm I'm being mischievous okay but if you have a lot of wealth it basically means you either don't need the money or lack the imagination to spend it okay so taxing wealth uh seems healthier to me than taxing income and Adam Smith broadly speaking believed the same thing he was in favor of high inheritance taxes because he thought just inheriting a huge sum of money effectively made people lazy and it

was actually quite a good idea he was also in favor of uh of taxing Grand rent so he was effectively a georgist okay the the point the point one of the reasons this government this whole election is so boring okay is the Overton window of discussion is now so small that none of the parties appears to be advancing anything that you might regard as surprising or interesting they're tinkering with the same usual five levers okay when what's needed is a bit of radical intervention in a few ways I mean taxing of wealth which after all

since quantitative easing a huge amount of this wealth has been earned uh in a way way that's completely kind of undeserved it's just asset value inflation okay um you you know I mean it was absurd I mean what you know what you should have done with quantitive easing is followed that Italian socialist and given people a load of money which they had to spend really fast all right but then presumably a load of money that you spend really fast you buy a house that house is still going to increase in value you're still going to

have wealth tied up in assets it's a terrible way in which people acire assets though because logically speaking what they should do when they retire is sell their house cash in yeah um and down size if people did that the problem wouldn't really be there they don't I I don't understand I literally okay I know of people where you have a single person a widow living in a house worth 2.2 million whose own children are having trouble replacing the shock shock absorbers of their car before the woman's husband died the two of them went down

to the Harvester at the end of the road okay discovered that the special offer on the the cheap dinner before 600 p.m. didn't apply on Fridays and walked all the way home again now I don't know when you know I don't know what your idea of millionaire is okay but probably your your definition of millionaire is not someone who goes to little because they're worried about the price of lemons but I know people who have literally so you have this absurd discrepancy where you have people who are asset rich in a form of an asset

which is completely liquid where for whatever reasons and some of them are good reasons I'm not disputing this but older people seem absurdly reluctant to downsize I have I don't quite know what's going on there okay but I mean my brother lives in a house somewhere in buckinghamshire where um effectively the entire Road not quite the entire Road I think the entire Road bar three houses consists of a house worth a million quid in which one or two retired people live with four or five bedrooms they they're effectively bed blockers for the property Market okay

they're preventing people from forming families those people they don't need the space it's kind of wacko okay I don't quite get what's going on now one thing you one thing that could solve the problem quite quickly is the engineer a pretty decent property crash just temporarily so people no longer had this absurd overconfidence in the fact that their house would continue to go up I think there are people who don't move out of London who would be happier living out of London but they're terrified that once you move out you'll never be able to move

back in and they're terrified of missing out it's it's it's basically a massive Collective fomo okay now I mentioned the fact that you know neoliberal economics um assumes optimal uh utility maximizing expenditure just to be clear on this okay housing is the worst way you can spend your money in terms of the externalities okay if I go and go to the pub right okay I'll give you give you an example of if you look at the effect my expenditure has my spending money has on other people right there's a huge amount of variety in that

in that if I go to the pub I'm not just buying myself a pint I'm also securing the survival of a pub for the benefit of lots of other people okay spending money in pubs cafes and restaurants I would argue is kind of positive it's positive for The Wider Community yeah okay um you might even argue and I would that buying a car from new is an extraordinary Act of philanthropy because I buy a car I take a massive hit in terms of depreciation so that someone significantly poorer than me can have a car that

was that is nearly as good as my car was when I bought it new for half the price go out seriously go out and buy a six-year-old Jag okay you're basically driving around in a luxury vehicle at somebody else's expense I mean people who buy cars from new should be celebrated we should have we you know we should have a statue to anybody who buys a car from new it's an amazing Act of philanthropy okay my brother's an academic and I always tease him by saying that I he basically in most material Goods he ends

up buying exactly the same [ __ ] I do just three years later okay you know whether it's computers or mobile phone phones or whatever a secondhand iPhone UT utter extraordinary Act of generosity someone has a phone which effectively the richest person in the world probably would have owned I mean not the very same phone but an identical phone three years before and they get it three years later for a third of the price there are lots of ways in which consumption is actually extreme you got even if I go and buy a hot tub

okay which is getting onto the more selfish phase of things um if lots of people buy hot tubs hot tubs will become a lot cheaper and more people are be able to afford hot tubs if you okay so this is this is my problem I feel that I've worked in advertising for 30 years and I've entirely wasted my time because what I've done is helped people bu better and better and cheaper and cheaper consumer goods for the most part there are problems in customer service in in in service Le Brands which I'll I'll park for

a second I think I think customer service has got worse all the way through a kind of cult of automation but but basically the manufactured Goods you buy the meals the food you buy the meals you eat out okay are better than they were I mean you're not even old enough to fully appreciate it but trust me compared to the 1970s okay you P pizzer Express is the Manu cat sail compared okay compared to you know a standard place you go and eat in 1973 everything's got better it's mostly got cheaper and more affordable okay

and the subtotal of that effect has been to allow people to spend more of their discretion income on property and therefore most of the what should have been the extraordinary gains in living standards in terms of the holidays people enjoy the cars people drive and everything else has been soaked up effectively by the property Market okay and I think we should tax that because I think it's a it's an entirely worthless form of wealth accumulation and I think that land value not if you improve your house you get to keep that because that's your work

but the actual basic value of the land and the appreciation of the value of the land should be heavily taxed because it's an atrocious thing for people to do with their money it's not an investment okay it's totally inert in terms of its effect it's purely rivalrous it's it's it's much worse than the Dutch tulip thing the property Market because I don't have to buy a tulip right okay the Dutch tulip boom was an insane kind of Ponzi scheme Nutter boom but you know there are substitution for tulips I know these tulips getting be expensive

I think what is the dut there was a thing that it's part true part mythical I think if you dig into it um it was effectively that tulip prices um and particularly for rare tulips basically spiraled out of control at some point in 17th century Holland and so it was one of these cases where effectively um Rising prices brought in ever more demand and so you had this thing where effectively it was a crazy boom which spiral out of control but the great you know that's not that's not a problem because I I I I

don't need a tulip I can get by without them I could decide to substitute with gladioli okay but you need housing you need a place to live and actually you need a place to live with a reasonable degree of certainty in which you can bring up a family um the fact that housing has become the predominant uh form of wealth storage is to Adam Smith okay Adam Smith distinguished between three things labor Capital land subsequent economists because it made the maths easier conflated labor and land sorry conflated capital and land and treated them as the

same thing Adam Smith quite rightly spotted that they are not the same thing capital and land are not the same thing land is something that is in short supply and in many cases the value of it is determined by the actions of others okay you know someone builds a road suddenly your house is worth either less or more depending on the road is whether the road framed as a good thing or a bad thing um the Singaporean government basically is georgist in other words they own a lot of the land they fund a large part

of the government by they're effectively property developers with a side gig in governance I think that's the third or fourth time you said Georges now can you oh oh CRA well I um so Henry George I'm I'm not I'm not by the way you could apply the same principle to any non nonrenewable resource whether it be land or fossil fuels but George's idea was that I mean taken to its purest extreme was that there should only be a single tax in the United States and the tax should be on the value of land because the

the the idea being that the value of land is basically land ownership is basically extractive it's rent seeking now here's the greatest mystery in economics all economy agree that rent seeking is a bad thing in other words patent you know patent trolling would be another example okay you're not actually contributing to anything what you're seeking to do is to own a bottleneck all right and then effectively own something that is essential to somebody else and basically milk your ownership of it you're not actually doing any useful work you're not investing and creating anything new You're

simply exploiting you know an asset that other people require access to so what tends to happen okay what what George would say is that when you get people let's say forming a community and the community becomes more and more desirable and more and more wealthier and more people want to move there and so forth um the gains which should go to the people who did the work or indeed provided The Upfront investment to build the buildings or whatever instead go to the owner of the land who contributed nothing and what tends to happen is whenever

you have any any source of whenever you have any form of useful activity which Depends for its performance on its location the gains from that activity do not primarily go to the person who's performing the useful activity okay they go to the person who owns the land on which that activity takes place yes okay so you know an example would be airport retail which is effectively you know uh ious brands have to be there you the people who get rich out of airport retail are not retailers they're airports MH um and what they happen to

do is simply own a kind of you know they've got a um a location the ownership of which confers an income on them without requiring any commensurate investment or risk and so the idea is that effectively since this thing is extractive some people have described georgism as basically socialism in relation to land uh free market capitalism in relation to everything else yeah okay that's probably a quite a good that's quite a good shorthand you could interestingly I'm sure some people do I haven't researched this enough extend exactly the same thing to for example non-renewable energy

yeah you could say oil the the the the ethical justification for this is kind of look land okay the fruits of your labors rightly belong to you because you created that thing okay however land shouldn't necessarily belong to anybody because it was effectively an endowment from the Creator you might have said and the gains from that endowment deserve to be apportioned fairly and reasonably whereas the gains from Individual labor Enterprise or risk deserve to be disproportionately um uh a portioned to rewarding the person who underwent those efforts or those risks I think that makes sense

does it so it's basically saying that land is a different category of thing yeah okay and you might argue a fossil fuels I I I would I I would say it's not a huge leap to say that you should basically tax the use of nonrenewable resources yeah because the idea being that they aren't actually the fruit of man if you want to get religious about it they're actually a kind of you know that they're a fixed endowment um and that uh you know as people don't deserve the fair share of other people's labors yeah there's

an argument that they you should reapportion the wealth that comes from effectively extractive rent seeking through land ownership yeah see I'm thinking won't Adar me to the world's property developers maybe not and more ironically still my one of my daughters is planning to work in commercial property but um my my point about this is that it's certainly okay it was given that Adam Smith believed it um uh actually a surprisingly large number of people I think Winston Churchill was a georgist I think to a large extent I think Milton Friedman was by the way right

there have been large numbers of economists and and fairly eminent people uh who who's that fashion designer who uh was married to Mal McLaren you know the one who oh you're asking the wrong person someone must famous um fashion designer who died fairly recently Vivian Westwood Vivian Westwood was a Geist I'm delighted to say uh there are quite some quite interesting people who um uh uh you know weirdly who are like ex Goldman Sachs who believe this stuff now it's worthy of exploration it's worthy of experimentation that's all I can say I mean you could

experiment fairly easily by creating a Georgia Community somewhere as indeed happened in the United States and a couple of places right and you establish a place effectively on Georgia's principles where the you know the the public services are paid for in proportion to land ownership but unfortunately we fetishized home ownership and the argument is if you tax wealth or you tax home ownership uh you're taxing people twice well that's bollocks okay okay I mean okay yes they earned the money to buy the house out of income probably that's not even that's not but the the

vast increase in the value of that house has been created by government monetary policy okay and it's a completely un wholesome what I'm saying is that if you or hasn't been prevented if if that old lady unlikely to happen the old lady who didn't want to go down to Harvester to get the the non-gain meal it would be better for the economy if she sold the house and went on a massive orgy of uh crack smoking and uh jet skiing MH it would actually be better for the economy if she moved out of that house

and actually spent the money in some shape or form in a way in which it would actually circulate because we literally have trillions of pounds of wealth in the UK up in the most inert non-liquid you know okay if she bought IBM shares and she had 2 million you know 1950 something and she had2 million pounds worth of IBM shares when her children needed their shock absorbers fixed on the a daughter and her son-in-law okay needed the shock absorbers fixed on their car I think it Fant she probably would have sold a bit of it

a house is appalling because the only way you can realize the Gain Is by dying or by moving house yeah okay I mean for that alone we should hate money so you know that's actually tied up in property so this tax property property ownership makes people stupid in a weird kind of way how do you mean stupid well I mean you get these people okay people don't want to move I get it but you literally have this whole generation attachment I respect as an advertising person I respect irrational attachment there my only point is that

um I would argue that people in their 70s and 80s probably are pretty irrational MH okay by the standards of anybody else in terms of what they're attached to MH um I'd also argue that we fetishize the old okay in that all you need is one newspaper so story about an old person who's who's got to move out of their home okay because they can't afford the new land value tax and that's georgism killed now old people now they didn't fight in World War II they were at the bloody Festival pensioners now right you know

I I you know I understand why we extremely differential towards the generation of old people who I knew as I as I grew up because they'd you know fought in the trenches or in the case of my great uncle being you know you know being a rear Gunner and a Lancaster bomber in 50 missions over occupying Europe I I don't want to move that guy out of his home the current old people they're crap they're rubbish they're totally for whom final salary pensions okay you know they're they're not they're not proper old people they're people

get older I think people like have this deep respect for elders because they've Bard in the trenches as you say and then they get themselves get older and they've they've sort of internalized this well you've really got to respect your elders thing realizing that maybe the reasons why we we had that particular respect don't don't to I don't think the conditions apply to the extent they did I don't think our veneration of the old and our deference toward the old okay they're not Captain to these people right they did some cushy job they grew up

in the 60s they had really good music okay they had pretty good drugs and then they got a job you know in some public sector position with a final salary pension sorry I'm not you know I don't think we should actually screw over young people to you know respect people who you know had some crappy public sector job with a cushy pension I don't think that deserves the same level of veneration and Def that we're giving them I think that's fair enough I also they're old they've lucked out right I've got I've had friends who

died in their 40s and 50s okay they're already Lucky in terms of the health endowment they've enjoyed okay right and now we're actually giving them money as well it's ridiculous yeah but I mean do you think you'll you'll still feel that way when you're 80 um if I make it um uh the um the point I would make is that I hope when I was 80 regardless of the state of my financial affairs I'd have some intelligent apportionment of my wealth where 100% of my available you know of my wealth was not tied up in

the place where I lived I I would have at least made mental preparation to move somewhere smaller by the way it's a bit like getting a stairlift most people who get a stairlift wish they done it five years earlier okay most people who downsize wish they'd done it five years earlier yeah my father was forced to downsize because he had a um a property business which kind of crashed badly and was forced to move from a bigger house into a smaller house house one year later he actually said this was the best thing that happened

because otherwise I would have been an 87y old struggling to maintain a huge house right it's not a great way to it's you know and you know there are only two of you or one of you right you don't need you know you don't need five bedrooms okay my wife said this she said oh I want a bigger place so the children can come and stay okay [ __ ] that the little shits can go and stay in the Travel Lodge not going to have them hanging around the place I'm not going to I'm not

going to spend 250,000 on Bloody spare bedroom just so the little shits can you know come and visit for sort of three days every month they can go down the Travel Lodge like everybody else and um so no no I I I I I find it weird that we regard this as normal I there are lots of aspects of the property Market um where economists have conflated land ownership with capital okay um lots of aspects of the property Market uh for example the fact that for 30 years property price Rises were presented in the news

as a good news story right okay yeah now nobody says hey good news if you got a full tank of petrol the cost of petrol has gone up okay because it's something that people need to use over time okay but for some reason now just just to be clear if you look at it um sequentially longitudinally okay a property price rise is very good news if you've got parents who are planning to die soon and it's very good news if you're planning to downsize for everybody else either people who don't own property or who are

planning to move to a larger property because they've just had kids a property price R is bad news MH it is good news for an extraordinarily small group of people in a particularly select point of their life okay other than that it's bad news for everybody else and yet the news coverage of it for more or less the entire duration of my adult life was great news property has gone up why I I Collective insanity is the only thing I can think of you know hey great news if you've already got a loaf of bread

bread prices have gone up nobody says that okay but for some reason property was treated as wealth it's not it's consumption you consume property okay people need to consume property they need a place to live there is an answer by the way which is to um and nobody's going to like this what we actually need is trailer parks now the point about a trailer park is you own the thing in which you live but you don't own the land on which it stands and if the trailer park person gets a bit greedy you can move

it somewhere else mhm now if you go to the Caribbean there's this extraordinary thing called the chattle house which is a little two room house made of wood they're very very beautiful they were obviously the product of really talented carpenters and they arose when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean in I suppose the I suppose it's the 1820s or something is it my dates some sometime in the early 19th century and what happened was that the slave owners were obliged to pay a wage to the freed slaves but they got it back by basically claiming

rent for living in their current housing on the plantation okay so it was kind of meaningless which is by the way a metaphor for I think our current state of affairs which is that all economic gains okay all economic gains all improvements in consumer products all improvements in wealth even I would argue the double inome household okay the is getting really controversial have largely been soaked up in the shape of higher property prices so the double income household okay it starts as an option lovely my wife can go out to work too and we can

earn two salaries early days absolutely lovely okay suddenly okay who benefits the government because they're getting twice as much tax right um homeowners benefit because now you need two salaries to buy a house and therefore houses are worth commensurately you know 50% more most of the gains over the long term not immediately if if you're an early two income household you were rolling in it okay but over time people coton onto the fact that people were earning two two incomes and therefore demanded more money for a house as a consequence of which the government got

more tax revenue homeowners got rich from it the I would argue the typical double inome household enjoyed a fairly mod EST increase in their quality of life all right and lost 35 hours of discretionary time every week per household so when I was a kid a workingclass person could bring up kids on one salary it wasn't a particularly nice life but it was actually possible without resorting to Total peny uh I now know of Hospital Consultants who are single who basically can't afford to buy anything okay they can barely afford they're you know they're consultant

surgeon whatever it may be that you know they cannot afford to buy you know a tolerable place to live with only one income if they're single so you know the double income thing starts as an option it becomes an obligation yeah hugely unfair to single people hugely unfair to people who want to take time off to bring up children uh it's and now okay before I get looked at as if I'm some sort of weirdo sexist I want to make the point that the two people who raise this this is not okay Elizabeth Warren the

senator for Massachusetts of whom I'm a weird fan I think she's really really and Fay Welden who I knew quite well because she used to be an Ogle copywriter and Fay Weldon said that effectively you know the two income idea was great news for certain people at a certain time but the long-term effects might have been net negative unless you are either a government or a property owner so what I see is that there's no point in getting I mean look okay look at these cameras here okay they're a miracle okay you know if you

go and look at a this is a weird this guy doesn't seem have a Telly he's got a lot of art where's his Telly that's a good question actually does that painting actually slide back and reveal a 955 in Samsung 48k Telly anyway um well like we can just we can just tell them there's a there yeah yeah um okay you know okay your television is a miracle compared to a television 20 years ago I mean literally you know people would have paid Millions for a frat screen TV if it had existed in the 1970s

Okay computer games everything of that kind has been massively improved without any commensurate increase in price by the way and actually an extraordinary degree of egalitarianism which is that if you're a multi-millionaire you can't really get a better phone than someone on median income sure you can okay you can get a fancier TV I grant that but only at the point of being ridiculous yeah not to the point that it's actually actually your Netflix is the same as my Netflix okay an awful lot of and actually Netflix in AB abist with is as good as

the Netflix in London yes bar that's one thing which nobody ever talks about which is the extraordinary geographical leveling up in terms of access to information and goods in you know I grew up in the Welsh borders if you wanted to buy a bit of fancy highi equipment you might have gone to London you might have gone to Bristol or Cardiff you know Comet for people who remember that um uh now you know if I wanted to go and see a Korean film all right living in mouth the the odds were pretty slim I'd have

a really really long waight put it that way um probably indefinite weight if you want to see a Korean film in abist with well good luck right now anybody anywhere one of the reasons I don't quite understand the fixation with people people have with living in London Because the actual material gains you get from a metropolitan existence in terms of your consumption aren't nearly as dramatic as they were when I was a kid sure okay I mean I mean genuinely and that that applies not only to things you can buy online I did Goods or

Goods that are delivered by Amazon or a cardo or whoever and that also applies to things like food and drink and and so on I mean the quality of you know eating out is actually I think I'd rather eat out in East Kent than I would in London to be honest partly because you get these creative people who move down there because they can't afford to open a restaurant in London um but but but I but I mean I do find this interesting in that that you know that I I sometimes feel all all the

lifestyle gains that should have come from those extra technological improvements have just been mopped up in rivalrous chasing of of um property Assets Now what happened what I was talking about in the Caribbean was these things were built called chattle houses which were portable and so to prevent your Plantation owner saying um look mate I'm afraid you've got to pay rent that's not un adjacent to your current salary uh they'd build these little houses and if the chap demanded too much land rent two men could pick them up and move them onto the adjacent Plantation

where the plantation owner would go no problem mate you can you can stay here for a third of the price yeah and so what it did was it disentangled the ownership of housing from the from land ownership yes and the trailer park does that in the US there are actually really blingy trailer parks there's one in Malibu where I've got a vague idea pamar Anderson lives in a trailer park okay really in Malibu um and it's somewhere near near the beach I mean they're actually the trailers are quite they've been pimped up quite dramatically and

it's a prettyy nice Community but notionally I think legally I think it may actually exist as a trailer park now if you got um if the government got Johnny I and there guy called Mark newon who's an Australian designer who I think it's a mate of his and just said okay your job is you got to produce the coolest mobile form of housing you possibly can okay and you you create some sort of legislation where people I'm be well on for living in a pub car park when you I me there a lot of Pub

country pubs that have a bit of spare space in the car park okay if you could plunk my little two-bedroom job in the pub car park well on for that so if people could actually buy for 50 60 in America you can buy a trailer I mean a really nice brand new trailer it's about $80,000 and they're pretty nice and they're fully kitted out with all sorts of [ __ ] okay and you know okay they got a better climate I mean we got to accept some things about that but you could join two of

these things together and if you are free to own a form of accommodation without owning the the rights to build on the land on which it sits you could fundamentally disrupt the property Market maybe what you need is planning permission for three years only do you see what I mean yes so that when people gave planning permission for people to live in the neighboring field it was for three years and they got a bit of money from it uh rather than indefinitely I had this same idea which is I think we should build lots of

nuclear power stations on ships mhm right and the reason is that if someone wants to build a nuclear power station next to my house right yeah even me I'm pretty Pro nuclear power but I'm going to have I'm going to be a bit iffy about it but I've got I've got a little flatten deal and I'm a bit of an amateur rackman I do own two small Flats I it's partly a product of my you know the the time in which I was born um but if if a nuclear power station sails in close to

the coast okay plugs into a big wire and then for 3 months it provides a lot of power to East Kent and then it sails off somewhere else I'm not remotely bothered am I okay I'm not I'm not going to protest that to the same degree I would uh protest a permanent fixture so I've got this theory that you just put nuclear power stations on ships and people be pretty chill they thought okay the thing's going to be in Harbor for eight months and then it's going to go somewhere else yeah completely different level of

objection there could be some sort of like tax benefit for the people who live near it or something well that's fascinating if we didn't have this huge explosion in property prices which unjustly enriches people uh without any real measure of the contribution they've made to society yeah without any proportionality first of all you know one of the things you do is you discredit capitalism because you know you can say what you like about Henry Ford being rich but he gave a lot of people a c right okay whereas you know nowadays the rich person is

likely to be some weird Russian who's Honey Trap the local Nur into selling them an aluminium smelting works for you know 20,000 rubles you know it is it doesn't have the same degree of meritocracy or earned Merit okay than it used to so you discredit the whole nature of wealth and capitalism by making it so much to do with your asset class ownership rather than your effort that's that's my first objection second thing is if we hadn't had property if we had an artificial means EG taxation of keeping and then and a commensurate reduction in

income tax right if we'd had some means of taxing land value uh could people now actually work a 4-day week and maintain their basic quality of life I think that's entirely possible okay could you have a guaranteed basic income on the basis of this it might be possible now my point about this is by the way not saying that I'm right and I'm definitely right I'm simply utterly baffled by the extent to which the incredibly limited number of variables that are considered by neoliberal economic models complet completely limit the possibility for experimentation I mean interest

rates become this like weird tool you know or keeping inflation down okay you know and and and there are there are loads and loads of experiments with the reapportionment of the rewards not the rear portion of wealth necessarily but just the rear portion of the rewards to effort MH that should be at least intelligently tried and experimented with um I I've got a vague idea I think that for example someone at Kent County Council went to the government and said we'd like to do an experiment where we basically sell planning permission MH because when you

give someone planning permission well let me explain how I would have paid for highp Speed to all right I would have bought 20,000 Acres um actually two lots of 20,000 Acres between London and Birmingham and twoot of 20,000 Acres again of agricultural land between burm and Manchester and I would have built the railway I would have awarded myself planning permission uh for those 20,000 acres to build housing or communities or whatever you needed and then I would have built a station in the center of each of those communities the value of agricultural land I'm probably

a bit outd here is about3 to 4,000 an acre the value of land with planning permission for residential building um uh uh within 20 minutes of Houston Station is probably something like uh that's actually interesting possibly a million pounds an acre is it might be more right it's going to be a few million I thought okay so literally you're multiplying your money by a few orders of magnitude y now if you'd done that three times you would have paid for the whole Railway okay simply by awarding yourself planning permission what do we do at the

moment we award planning permission to people we effectively give them a gift of a million quid their neighbors meanwhile have to put up with all the [ __ ] and disruption they get absolutely nothing the state gets nothing the local Council gets more or less nothing this is an absurd system it's absolutely batshit crazy so you have government conferring millions of pounds of wealth on people through the planning system without recouping any of it to the benefit of The Wider Community what a weird thing to do that is quite strange and and and unfortunately rather

pessimistic note on which we're going to have to wrap up I mean because unfortunately I do not own this this this but but my only argument is these things are testable they're two-way doors yeah okay you can this Jeff Bezos phrase a two-way door is something where to be honest it's actually easier to try it out in reality than it is to argue it in theory Sure and the complete death of experimentation in areas like this where I think Kent tried to do this and the treasury just had a complete like contion about it okay

this we'd like to experiment with a system where we fund local government by basically selling planning permission to people and effectively um what you might call nationalizing the gains from effectively what is a government action which is issuing permission to build yeah it's an empirical question you can try it out and see if it try it out see if it works isn't the motto of your company um something like try the unintuitive things because no no that's actually I think that's me I I would like it to be the botom know test counterintuitive things because

all all the all the logical things have been tried already okay if there were a logical answer to your problem some would would have already solved it there's no shortage of logical people kicking around okay so by a kind of logic Darwinism you can say that the problems that are actually that submit to logic have mostly gone away and we're left for the ones that require something counterintuitive oblique tangential weird yeah there's a great book by John Kay called obliquity which I really recommend that everybody reads which is precisely about this I'll make sure it's

down in the description Southerland thank you for uh for it's been a huge pleasure absolute Delight thank you very much wonderful tour of some interesting areas that we don't usually get to touch on on this channel but I mean it it It just strikes me as utterly weird that all you need to do is a fairly easy reframing where you see property ownership is property ownership is not wealth it's consumption you're consuming the property in which you live by depriving someone else of the right to live there now if interestingly consumer electronics not really consumption

because if I buy an iPhone I make iPhones cheaper for other people so there's a there's an odd thing how how do you define consumption well you could argue that the worst form the best form of consumption is when I go to a pub and I'm I make a pub available for lots of other people at lots of different times okay there's a wider benefit to that okay when I buy a new car you might argue I'm engaging in an active philanthropy where I'm effectively giving someone poorer than me a really good imagine if property

were like the car market yeah I bought this place for 2 million in Fulham but I've used it for three years so you can have it for you can have it for 900,000 yeah that's how the property Market would work apparently it does a bit in Florida where there was so much new build that actually property did actually decline in value with use really you got that peculiarity but you know it feels like property is different because it feel I know you say property is something that you consume it feels like something you don't consume

it feels like something that that that you own that is just there that you inhabit no no no no it's it's undoubtedly a form of rivalrous consumption because that old lady living in that house is depriving a family of a family home okay the people on my brother's Street are depriving families of places where they could live by insisting on living there as just two people um I don't know quite what drives the terror of downsizing actually I mean some of it's loss of status probably okay uh that you know some of it is you

know fear of running out of money but I mean literally I know of cases of people who are paper millionaires but who are who are like cancelling their sub spectator subscription yeah yeah well that's not the the that's not when you set a okay put it here's another phrase I I I used in The Spectator which Chim with a lot of people okay let's imagine you get a job as a sort of corporate lawyer I'm not saying that's good okay I hope you don't become a corporate lawyer but if you did and you suddenly ended

up earning £150,000 a year okay and you decided you're going to buy half of a terorist house in Fulham for like 950,000 what that means is that for the next 20 years a very large sthe of your discretionary income is going to be eaten up in order to own something that a poor person would have owned in 1917 now that is not progress right you impoverishing yourself as an immensely immensely wealthy lawyer in 2024 and the sum total of your ambition is to own something that a poor person owned in 1917 nobody aspires to cars

from 1917 okay go and buy [ __ ] jet ski you know go and buy something that people in 1917 couldn't have owned all right you go and buy something that would have made you know Louis the 14th go [ __ ] hell I want one of those yeah all right right don't go and buy because Louis the 14th would go I don't Louis the 14th would look at you as your corporate liar and go right your television you know your dental care your analgesics all the things brought to you by consumer capitalism okay defy

apart from maybe the food and the clothing I reckon I think Louis the 14th go bit dowy you go wouldn't he tiny bit where's the silk come on B you shirt and also um your car even I don't do you have a car cuz you're young I didn't have a car [ __ ] young people I can't even drive well you can't drive [ __ ] hell what's wrong with you people I grew up on the Welsh borders I would have chosen to actually sever my own genitals rather than not have a car okay and

actually to be honest not having a car would have had a worse effect on my social and sex life than severing my genitals okay you young people you're Al so [ __ ] metol oh no no I'll just get an Uber no learn to [ __ ] drive grow up crying out loud the other problem is I'm G to tell you something here which is interesting because I think it's a problem for the motor industry yeah if you drive frequently driving becom a system one and it's really enjoyable I'm not talking about London traffic but

I'm talking about driving in the country is one of life's great Joys you young people you just like hire a car when you're in lanzerotti for seven days if you only drive for seven days or 14 days a year driving is terrifying so you don't enjoy it so you're missing out on this massive pleasure you know um but I I don't understand this I mean you young people you don't really even want a car where am I going to where am I going to put a car you want a [ __ ] car where where

am I going to put a car you know you where did you you live in London in London I mean have you have you have you tried driving in oh no driving in London is much fun I get out get out how old are you now you you've been living in a Suburbia how old do you think I am my guess is about 32 I'm 25 you're 25 25 okay fair enough you can say in London you don't need to have a car okay I'll I'll back down when you're 32 you're going to start looking

at two the homes and you get a decent car and a lawnmower you know ridiculous business so protracted childhood is a product of the property Market think going to save up my money and buy jet ski instead yeah byy the jet ski yeah absolutely yeah but no I mean what fascinates me about that is how much of our disposable income and therefore how much of our labor now In fairness to me okay I only own a flat the flat I live in is probably worth less than I don't know maybe half a million okay I

bought it for 400,000 quite a long time ago hasn't gone up in val at all but it is in a Robert Adam house you know Louis the 14th would go well you're living in the Attic mate that's a bit dismal but [ __ ] me it's a grade one house m I've got a friend all credit to him he lives in the barbacan and there's a bit of me which goes yeah I kind of get that you go into this flat in the barbacan you go well it's worth 1.8 million but you do walk into

the apartment and go [ __ ] me this is amazing he's on the 23rd floor right but I don't understand I don't understand these people who are spending like you know 2 this house actually is pretty damn cool isn't it okay oh yeah you know okay if I have 5 million this this house we're in now which is yours isn't it I get a from your your proceeds from podcast yeah that's right no but what I'm saying is I do I do at least get this place where you come and you go it's got a

swimming pool and it's in central London it is lovely this is extraordinary what amazes me is the amount of money that's soaked up in property that's compl I don't actually live here I I do not actually live here just for I going to ruin my my my my supporters on on substack would probably immediately cancel if they if they thought that this was my house but um but it's a very weird of our money yeah to to spend that much money in something so unremarkable which could be devoted to either things that are amazing like

EasyJet I realize I'm not doing myself any favors with the environmental Community by recommending but the electric jet ski that's going to be a real thing oh yeah that's going to be a [ __ ] me that's going to be great but the ultimate solution and I think this is elon's plan okay is to destroy the whole property market right what's he got Starling okay yeah he's got massive batteries solar panels electric vehicles okay oh boy now put them all together what have you got you got the potential to be nomadic all right so effectively

when you have the Tesla winbo which I think is waiting in the wings which is a [ __ ] massive American Motor do you ever watch um uh there's a brilliant brilliant YouTube channel uh where there's an RV salesman uh who basically takes you through the latest American um the Ingenuity with which they use the space is absolutely beautiful they have the other the other thing even a fairly base level American motor home this explains how bad the value is we get from our property okay which is we spend a fortune on a thing it's

just a pile of bricks okay it could have been built it well you know I mean there's very little about the technology of house building that's moved on since well frankly the Romans okay I mean the Romans would look at Builders and basically know what they were doing okay I mean that's appalling I mean why don't we produce housing and the way we Mass produce cars it's obviously stupid okay I have no idea what's going on here Buck Mr Fuller tried but the real American motor home at the base level you pay £80,000 for this

American motor home it's got you know it's got a nice bedroom it's got a [ __ ] TV on the outside I'm not making that up okay because to the American motor home owner you might want to sit outside watch television so there's actually a panel that lifts up on the outside of the motor home and there's a flat screen TV underneath so you can watch television outside now that's living now I wonder if elon's plan is effectively to destroy the property Market by encouraging us to become nomadic because for your generation it's quite logical

if you think about it okay you can buy you know you can afford to buy a really nice motor home uh you're paying only for accommodation you're not because this is what's weird about property okay in order to buy a place to live you also have to buy the land on which it sits and you have to buy the the rights to that land in most cases now that is by far the great part of the value of that house if if you go around if you look at this house now the the cost of

rebuilding this house even though it's pretty magnificent house would I guess be 200 250,000 the value of the house is probably 2.5 million mhm so it's the land that actually maintains the value okay not the actual bricks mortar and all the other stuff yeah so what we're forcing people to do is say yeah yeah you can buy you can buy a place to live but you have to spend nine times as much again on owning the rights to that land now imagine if okay imagine a world where if you if you bought a car okay

let's say you wanted to buy a Ford Mond I know you're young and therefore you you've probably got a fixie bicycle or some weird you scooter right sorry okay you know while you're not photographing your food and shaving your genitals okay I'm just stereotypical old man there um okay but but um if you bought a Ford Bond air they say yeah you can buy the Ford Bond air but you have to buy £200,000 worth of Ford shares in order to own a Ford Mand this is ridiculous I just want a car right I don't want

an investment I just want a thing to drive around in but in a house we've conflated those two things it's completely Bonkers and the people who solved it the Irish traveler Community were people who who found themselves in the UK and couldn't afford to buy or rent a house so they borrowed Romany LIF style in order so that's nomadism and then you have the trailer park in the US or you have the chattle house in the Caribbean which is effectively ownership of a house without ownership of the land on which it sit we do really

have to get out of here now okay of you probably have to photograph AV the car thing among the young to someone who grew up on the Welsh borders is oh no don't own a car you [ __ ] kidding you Ian I'm not young so I I own a car you a there's no going back is that once You' own a car yeah I got a car as soon as I could yeah exactly a car and a fixie bike do you you got both you yeah no just a fixie bike just a fixie bike

no I've got a car you got a car okay I don't even have a bike I I I use those lime so you live in London in um yeah I live in London and I sort of use those those lime bikes to to get around they that's interesting is theyt the electric bike actually is really important because the important thing with electric cars isn't just making cars that look like modern cars that are electric it's the potential for miniaturization so actually one thing I'm really sympathetic to is the cargo the electric cargo bike okay because

the problem with a bike is that there are too many things that can kill it if you got to go uphill this is a physical bike it if it's raining it's killed if you got to go uphill it's killed if you got luggage it's killed if you want to go shopping it's no good okay now the cargo bike is like this because the electric thing basically takes care of the hills for you and it's got a bit of storage it's quite a happy compromise between a car and a bicycle yeah so there's something there that

really appeals to me and then of course there's this whole micr Mobility thing there's this Swiss company that makes little two-seater cars has anybody been to France recently the Citron Amy did you see those they're actually kicking around they're like apparently you can get them here you just rent them is it like 200 a month and you just plug it into the mail yeah it's tiny yeah 16y olds can okay we need to change that that's the sort of thing the government should be doing saying okay if you're 16 you can yeah you can have

a little mini yeah I think max speed is about 20 miles an hour something that's take yeah I'm sure people mod them yeah of course but we won't say that we say that that's we see wizling past at 60 mil hour but actually they hell of a lot of my journey to the station this morning I could have happily done in one of those you know um but actually that those those are I mean that's the interesting thing which is that in evolutionary terms for electric cars the adjacent possible is much bigger you can't really

miniaturize petrol you can't really have driverless with uh internal combustion engines to the same extent either can you you can't de the have you got electric on your car no I'm about to go electric what you know what are you going for Sor we should recorded this really brilliant you take a 25-year-old philosopher and theologian and you just hijack it and turn it into a car podcast This brilliant yeah yeah you have to do your sign off what what are you going for yeah it's going to be well you guys yeah philosophy we're talking about

cars here look we're going we're going to wrap this up and you two can car this conversation off in the in in in the corridor so I can I can do my fancy goodbyes to the camera before we get kicked out of this place okay you better do your fancy I'll be kiing quiet that's all right well we he is he going to be in short he have to turn around you want no no it's all right I mean we can we can I'm going to do I'm going to do all that stuff separately so

okay let carry on we'll go say goodbye Mo the for being ah we'll just end it like that that's fine