Save the Cat, Snyder's movie structure outline

I was explain how Save the Cat worked to a friend and thought I’d outline it in more details (with GPT) and summaries it here.

Save the Cat! by Blake Snyder is a cheeky, brutally pragmatic breakdown of Hollywood storytelling.

1. The Core Philosophy

Snyder’s thesis is simple:

“Audiences love heroes who do something selfless early on — they save the cat.”

That small, human act earns audience empathy.
The rest of the book expands that logic into a system: structure, genre, theme, and tone must all serve audience connection. Snyder’s genius was to codify that connection into an easy-to-follow, relentlessly commercial structure.

2. The “Save the Cat” Beat Sheet

This is the skeleton for nearly every Hollywood movie Snyder reverse-engineered. Each “beat” roughly corresponds to a page count (assuming a 110-page screenplay).

Opening Image – The first impression of tone, world, and protagonist before transformation.

1. Theme Stated – Someone hints at the story’s moral or central question, often in dialogue.

2. Set-Up – Introduce key characters, show what’s missing in the hero’s life, and establish stakes.

3. Catalyst – The inciting incident: something disruptive happens that kicks the story into motion.

4. Debate – The hero resists the call, doubts themselves, and weighs options.

5. Break into Two – The decision point where the hero commits to the journey and enters a new world.

6. B Story – A relationship subplot, often romantic or emotional, that carries the theme.

7. Fun and Games – The “promise of the premise”; the central gimmick or joy of the story.

8. Midpoint – A false victory or false defeat; the stakes sharpen, often with a twist or revelation.

9. Bad Guys Close In – Internal and external pressures rise; allies fall away; antagonistic forces strengthen.

10. All Is Lost – A moment of seeming death or total failure — mentor dies, plan collapses, love lost.

11. Dark Night of the Soul – The emotional low; the hero confronts despair and the deeper meaning of their struggle.

12. Break into Three – A new idea or insight emerges from uniting the A-story and B-story; the hero regains purpose.

13. Finale – The protagonist applies what they’ve learned, overcomes old flaws, and resolves the main conflict.

14. Final Image – A mirror of the opening, showing transformation and emotional closure.

3. The “10 Genres” (Snyder’s Story DNA)

Snyder hated traditional genres like “rom-com” or “thriller.” He created story function genres instead — types of emotional engines:

1. Monster in the House – Evil + sin + confinement (e.g. Jaws, Alien).

2. Golden Fleece – A journey or quest story (The Wizard of Oz, O Brother, Where Art Thou?).

3. Out of the Bottle – Magic wish or transformation (Liar Liar, Shrek).

4. Dude with a Problem – An ordinary person vs. extraordinary circumstance (Die Hard, 127 Hours).

5. Rites of Passage – Life transitions: age, death, divorce (American Beauty).

6. Buddy Love – Relationship as central conflict (When Harry Met Sally, Toy Story).

7. Whydunit – Character-driven mystery (Chinatown, Gone Girl).

8. The Fool Triumphant – Underdog wins by being authentically themselves (Forrest Gump).

9. Institutionalized – Individual vs. system/group (MASH*, The Devil Wears Prada).

10. Superhero – One extraordinary person in an ordinary world (Spider-Man, Erin Brockovich).

Each genre has required “ingredients” and emotional arcs.
For example, Monster in the House always involves:

• A confined space

• A monster

• A sin or transgression that “invited” the monster

4. Key Structural Rules & Mantras

• “Give me the same thing… only different.”
  Audiences want fresh spins on familiar setups — not pure novelty.

• “Double mumbo jumbo.”
  Don’t introduce two different fantastical premises. Stick to one “magical” conceit.

• “The Pope in the Pool.”
  Hide exposition in an engaging scene (Pope swimming laps while revealing plot).

• “The Covenant of the Arc.”
  Your hero must change. Endings must show emotional evolution, not just victory.

• “Watch out for the Deadly Logline.”
  Your movie’s one-sentence pitch should express irony and hook emotion immediately.

5. Why It Works (and Why Purists Hate It)

Why it works:

• It codifies what audiences unconsciously expect.

• It’s short, funny, and usable tomorrow.

• It creates rhythm: change every 10–15 pages keeps attention.

Why critics groan:

• It can breed formulaic storytelling.

• It’s obsessed with commercial beats rather than aesthetic or psychological nuance.

• It prioritises structure over voice.

But used intelligently — as a skeleton, not a straitjacket — it’s an immensely effective framework for both screen and game narrative.

Rob Beckley: Insights from a Policing career, Hillsborough & Civic Service Lessons | Podcast

Insights from a Career in Policing: An Interview with Rob Beckley

In this wide-ranging and engaging conversation, retired British police officer Rob Beckley reflects on nearly 40 years in service — from community policing in Brixton after the 1980s riots, to leading the investigation into the Hillsborough Disaster, and later serving as High Sheriff of Somerset.

🎧 Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on YouTube.

We explore:

• The misunderstood role of policing: “Policing is about being there in a crisis — when someone needs action, and needs it now.”

• Rob’s early career in Brixton and how his experiences in Sudan shaped his views on culture and policing.

• Honest reflections on institutional racism and sexism: “Institutional racism isn’t about bad people — it’s about systems and processes that have disproportionate impacts.”

• Hillsborough: what really went wrong, the persistence of false narratives, and why “we can never afford complacency in disaster preparedness.”

• The evolution of crime, the importance of community policing: “Community policing works because people trust officers who know their area and take ownership of local problems.”

• Rob’s year as High Sheriff of Somerset, his advocacy for volunteering, and the civic glue that holds communities together.

• Advice for aspiring public servants: “In public service, you may never know the lives you’ve touched — but the impact is real.”

This episode provides deep insights into policing, society, and civic responsibility — offering lessons not only for those in public service but for anyone interested in how communities can thrive.

Summary contents, transcript, and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Contents:
00:00 – Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:32 – Misunderstandings in Policing
01:57 – Early Career and Reflections on Brixton
05:18 – Experiences in Sudan and Cultural Insights
08:51 – Institutional Racism and Sexism in Policing
18:14 – Hillsborough Disaster: A Deep Dive
33:30 – The Evolution of Crime and Policing
37:20 – Community Policing: A Proven Strategy
41:30 – Challenges of Modern Policing
51:05 – The Role and History of the High Sheriff
54:06 – The Importance of Volunteering
58:16 – Advice for Aspiring Public Servants

Transcript (helped by AI so mistakes possible)

Rob Beckley

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Rob Beckley. Rob has been a distinguished British police officer for almost 40 years, working across, amongst other things, the London Metropolitan Police, the Met, the Avon and Somerset Police, as well as leading the investigation to the Hillsborough Disaster and advocating for citizens in policing.

After retiring from the police force, he has been the high sheriff of Somerset. Rob, welcome. Thank you, Ben. It's a real pleasure to be here. In terms of policing, what do you think is the most misunderstood thing about being a police officer? I, 

Rob: well, there's a range of things where people don't always fully appreciate what's going on and why is it going on.

But the most misunderstood, I think, I would say, is that policing Is there, when somebody faces a crisis and somebody in authority needs to do something about it now and that goes back, that's a philosophy of policing that goes back many years. A fellow called Egon Bitner thought that one up.

But it is, it captures really what people really want the police to be there. They want them there when they face a crisis and they need something of done about it. Now that's misunderstood, not just outside of policing, but inside of policing as well, because I very much do think that if we have, if we fail to respond to that crisis, it actually affects confidence.

A lot in policing. And we need to be geared up to meeting people's real anxieties in an urgent situation. Whether it be shoplifting or a car accident or somebody with mental health problems on the street. We can't just say that's somebody else's responsibility, that somebody's facing a crisis, somebody needs to do something and needs to do it now.

Ben: And I think you started off in your early days of policing around South London in Brixton and went on from there. What are your reflections about your time in Brixton, in policing, and did that shape your kind of overall philosophy and thinking about police? 

Rob: I joined the police having worked a few years overseas, in fact, in Sudan.

And I was really anxious about joining the police because I was worried it would be a. Both a sexist and a racist organization. I was worried about the cultures, but I also felt policing needed to be done well in our community. It's really important that you have good people do difficult jobs serving our public.

So I was anxious about joining the police. Actually, I joined, there were very many good people in it that there, there were some dreadful people as well at the, at that time, and as there always will be in every profession. But in Brixton in particular, it was quite. Tense a lot of the time because it was just after the riots.

It, in the 1980s, it was difficult. But a lot of effort was going into bridging communities and getting to know the communities well, community policing listening, responding, because, that a lot of lessons had been learn because of the, those riots back in 1981. And I saw a lot of real effort going into that community rootedness, a lot more people of color joining the police, which made a difference.

And you could feel that bad behaviors being challenged within the police. And there were a lot of attitudes then that I didn't like. Thankfully many of them are even rarer now. But, cultures have changed a lot. But on the whole though, it was still an organization where many people cared about what they did and tried to do their best.

And Brixton itself, goodness I go back now. I just wish I'd bought some of those houses, right? Yeah. That were for sale when I was a. Constable and sergeant there, because my goodness, I would've done well out of it there. There were places where that you could buy places there that the council couldn't give away.

Now, they're beautiful Georgian houses worth millions. I've been curiously, Brixton is so much more diverse. Even when I was there, there was very much an African Caribbean community and a white community. Not a lot in between. Now it's so diverse. It's so mixed. It's such an interesting place.

It was an interesting place then. But now when I go back and I have been back a few times for different things I really, it's got a real buzz. I, but I do worry. Where do people live? 

Ben: Yeah. There was so much in that answer, which I wanna reflect on it and come back to. So one is. On Sudan.

The second is this some of the criticisms about sexism and racism and I guess Brixton talking about its wealth. The opposite side of that is, is I was just looking up, crime rates have really fallen and in Brixton crime rates actually over 20, 30 years have really fallen. And I don't think the public really really see that.

Yeah. But perhaps circling back to that first one. Your time in Sudan and your time in Africa, how did that shape your kind of thinking? 'cause Sudan, obviously now, back then, I guess still much poorer than this country has conflicts and has things like that, did that shape your outlook on how to think about Britain?

Rob: It did. I think everyone should go and work for a few years abroad in, in a very different culture. It forces not for, but it helps people realize that the norms and behaviors and attitudes we all hold, many of them are shaped by the culture we are in. And it's important to see people think differently and recognize that sometimes the words we put on it.

Are not sufficient to describe what we are experiencing. So for example, in Sudan, a lot of people who visit Sudan fresh visit will say, people are so generous and open. They are, but it's not quite generosity as we understand it, or openness as we understand. There's lots of cultural norms around that of behaviors and expectations.

And you know what it did, it really gave me an insight into the fact that the world is very diverse, very mixed that people's. Behaviors and attitudes can be seen in lot through lots of different lenses and prisms. And I think that helped me actually going into a policing world because I'm very interested in different races, faiths, backgrounds and people's views and attitudes of policing, but also norms and laws and things.

It's, there's, it's never. Always a very clear right or wrong, there's lots of grays in between. And while, the law tends to be fairly right or wrong at least understanding where people are coming from helps you manage the situation, the problem the concerns better. So I, I think my time in Sudan definitely gave me that sort of international perspective, which is why I spoke a bit of Arabic.

So it got me involved eventually in counter-terrorism and issues around that. I genuinely, I'm interested in different communities and cultures. So I ended up becoming when I was an inspector, the lead in the Metropolitan Police for Race and Minority matters. And that was before Stephen Lawrence.

It was just me and a couple of other staff. Now it. Much bigger departments dealing with all those issues, quite rightly, because they're very complex. But in those days, I was a bit of a pioneer actually of trying to consider how policing can adapt to different communities and to the modern world.

Ben:

I was speaking with a friend.

Recently, and she was interested in policing. But she was worried about a couple of comments that you mentioned that you were worried about all those decades ago around these criticisms that the police force is potentially racist, institutionally racist, sexist or, looking at the, the primary stats of the balance on that.

But there have been other people saying wherever you put the bar, it's definitely improved. You obviously need good people to improve it. It's complicated. And actually there were a lot of good people trying to do good things as, as well as bad apples. From where you've been all the way from the beginning to that and obviously trying to grapple with these issues what do you see as the problems are?

Where maybe are some of those criticisms? Correct, or maybe where they overstated and do you really think at its heart the these are racist or sexist organizations? 

Rob: I'm going to qualify. What I'm now next going to say with the fact that the vast majority of people in any organization, the police included, and very much in the police are well motivated, a good mean want to do their best.

That the workforce itself is an extremely well motivated and positive workforce, but institutional racism and sexism exists. It is, if you take the description of what institutional racism is from McPherson the McPherson report into the Stephen Lawrence death it is about institutional ways of operating that the, it's ways of process, of doing things that has a negative impact upon different communities or different races or people.

That absolutely is the case. That it isn't that people in the organization were going around with a racist bent themselves, and that's where there's it's a very difficult phrase, institutional racism because it, the people within the organization feels, they feel they're all being tainted by it, and they feel hurt by that.

The reality of it is, it's not about them as individuals, it's about the way the organization has set itself up and runs itself. And, and an example I used to be when I was at Brixton, a good big example of institutional racism in a way was the way that policing mostly focused on street level dealing, which was mostly done.

Certainly when I was there by young black men, and so the focus of our efforts and activity was on young black men. The reality of it is, 'cause I know this for a fact, there was a range of dealing that was done by white people to white middle class houses. That was almost like a milk round going around Briston.

We never touched that. We didn't even look at it. It wasn't on our radar. Nobody ever complained about it to us, so we didn't bother with it. The reality of it is that organizational focus. Has the impact of puts of, in effect criminalizing more black young lads than white people who are doing a very similar role in the community.

But when noticed that is institutional racism, it's not, nobody's consciously sat there and thought this is what we're gonna do. It's just that we've responded to calls about bit of street dealing. We've decided we would focus on it. We'd put in a, a an, an operation. But the bit that wasn't, didn't seem to bother anybody.

We weren't getting any complaints about, we didn't really bother about. And so that's an example for me of institutional racism and the way it has a disproportionate impact on a certain group of people who, who are predominantly black in, in, in that example. So I think institutional racism.

Definitely sexism when I first joined was writ large. In fact, that was the thing that shocked me most. I think it was a much more sexist organization than it was actually racist. I the curiously in terms of help for victims and support for communities. Many of my colleagues were very colorblind. But there was a little bit of a sort of sexist, very male or organ organization, very macho in its own way.

And the way it treated women in those days I think was really dreadful at times. But. We've, we now have a position where getting close to half the chief constables in the UK are women. That's unheard of. We just wouldn't have been dreamt of when I first joined. At one point, the head of the Met was a woman, the head of the Association of Chief Police Officers or the National Police Chief's Council was a woman.

And the head of the National Crime Agency was a woman. It's, it the tone of nature eternally to women has just changed beyond all recognition, which is a real positive,

Ben: it is a problem, but it has got better over the decades and it's important to understand that it's around the system of which society, culture, everything into place With that, I think it was a very adjacent example, 30 years ago, hardly any buildings would've been adapted for wheelchair use, right?

You think well. We can't understand why that is. In another context, you could just say that that institutionally discriminates against disabled people who need a wheelchair. You wouldn't have thought any building owner, particularly individually, was gonna be against disabled people. But the system was not set up to think about, oh, there are these people who for very minor adjustments, we could include them into that.

I think it's obviously a lot more complicated with communities and race, but it shows just an example that it's a systems thinking   rather  than an individual.

Rob: It is. You've got to, you've got to lift yourself up above, above pointing blame at individuals and to say, what is it about the organization that encourages it?

For example, in the police world, we're it, you can't have somebody going out and dealing, say with a car accident on the street and say and have a nice facilitative discussion. You, they've got to be quite directive, quite controlling, and controlling in a positive way. Control a crisis, a situation put order on chaos.

That's what people look to the police to do. But it means that you tend to get people who are more directive, people who are more who have that command about them. Which you want them but you don't want them to be like that all the time. And that's the challenge.

Trying to find a balance between what you need for the role, but also you can't have them going. Into some communities and just being directive to them all the time. And hence sometimes, cops can rub other people up the wrong way because they do go and do that. It and one thing I wouldn't, there, there are still far too many instances of racism or sexism in the organization that are actually very personal.

There are people doing it but I would say compared to when I joined it's such a different world and a positive world. I'm pleased about the progress, but there's more to be done.

Ben: And. What do you think we could do about it Now given all of these programs and things in it, is there, I guess there's never any kind of magic bullet around it, but what are your observations about the things which need to improve?

Rob: Very interesting this because people have heard, perhaps of Louise Cases report. She wrote a report recently that talked about the misogyny and the homophobia and the racism in, in, in the organization. But her, what's worth reading in her report is the first third analyzes the systemic managerial issues.

That create more problems. So bit of like your example about how if people putting up buildings are actually required to, to address these points, then actually it would make life so much better for somebody with disabilities. And her point was, and I wholly agree with this, that actually there's a lot going on in the way policing is organized and run.

For example, those people who deal with the crisis, those response officers are often the newest people. In the organization, the least experienced, and yet they do the most critical job when somebody needs it. And she quite rightly reports that leads to sometimes bad or certainly inadvertently bad behaviors that could be prevented if you just had more experience there.

But we take the more experienced officers off and put them off to counter-terrorism or to serious and organized crime because, they've, they're experienced, they can deal with it. But actually the most critical stuff for the public. At the ground floor and needs, that needs to be done really well.

And she, she made the point that if you do the basics really well, if you've got the experienced officers doing that, then a lot of the rest will fall into place. And if you've got good, experienced supervisors dealing with those response calls and those day-to-day grind of things, actually they'll make sure that behaviors are right and that police officers don't feel beleaguered and therefore start behaving in ways that cause more problems than they solve.

So I think it's, it, there's a lot in. Valuing those who did the most difficult role in policing, which actually is the response role. 

Ben: I guess there's an issue there in terms of money and experience. 'cause you see the same in, in doctoring and nursing actually junior doctors need that senior doctor for quite a while.

So 1, 2, 3 years. So they can look at all of these cases and incidences in the same as the nursing, but senior doctor's time, they're more expensive. Do they wanna do the ward rounds rather than the con consultation? Yes. No, that's a good parallel and where that is. But I take that point that maybe if we could draw for some time some of the, those really experienced a police to then mentor the more junior ones to see some of these, because you don't have those incidents so often that they're not necessarily happening every day, but over a month you have a handful, which then you could go.

I think coming back to the systems piece, I'd be interested in your observations about all of the work you did around Hillsborough. So obviously you learned a lot and there was a systemic failure around that. I'd be interested in your reflections about perhaps what the public should know and what perhaps the public has missed from that, the learnings and the reflections over that time that you saw and maybe for those who you know are listening outside of Britain who might not know of of Hillsborough that much, you can offer a little reflection of how it came about and what we've learned.

Rob: Hillsborough was a dreadful football disaster where 97 people. Lost their lives back on the 15th of April, 1989. It it was at a football match at semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest Shefield Wednesday, football ground, Shefield Wednesday being a neutral venue where the two teams could meet for that semifinal.

And and it was held a lovely sunny April day. There were there, there's a lot of issues that weren't dealt with at the time that caused much grievance to the relatives and friends of those who died and wholly justifiable grievance. And at the time. After the disaster, which was had, was multifactorial in its causes.

And I'll come back to that in a second, but I'll just say what happened after the event where 97 people died through crushing. The very early on the narrative was that the fans had exacerbated or caused it themselves. The one thing I can say and that narrative well partly dispelled over many years because it's been very well reviewed, very well looked at by inquiries and investigations.

What I can say though is while there's absolutely no evidence to show that fans contributed to the disaster, and I'll explain a bit about that in a second. Then that narrative still persists and so unfairly persists. I think it's dreadful but even today, despite everything, I will sometimes meet people and they'll say, oh, what were, what were you doing?

And I'll say then towards the end of my time as a career in the police, I've investigated and followed up all the Hillsborough things. And they'll say, oh yeah. But it was the fans, wasn't it? And I still get that even today all those years later 36 years later, where when it's been gone through with the tooth comb.

But the causes were as I say, multifactorial, the main one was a failure of policing. It was a failure of command, a failure of knowing about what, what had gone on in previous years and managing that. A failure of recognizing some of the risks and the issues a failure of experience.

The person put in charge had virtually no experience of doing it. And a deep complacency. South Yorkshire Police who were policing it. Felt that they were experts in policing football. Frankly, they weren't, they were fairly poor at it in, in, even by the standards of the day. And it was a number of turnstiles had been closed, and this is, the club had did this, had done that.

They hadn't properly talked about it through it with the police. The police recognized those turns, styles had been closed but didn't do anything about it. And what happened, because those turns styles were not open that year, and they had been the previous year, you had thousands of people trying to get in.

Through a lot less turns stars and actually physically they couldn't have gotten in time. It wouldn't have turned through and turned around quick enough for people to get through the maximum rate's, about 700 an hour. And it would've required towards about two o'clock. It would've still taken almost two hours to get everyone in.

So from two o'clock onwards, the. The crowd built up at that end of the ground, which was called Leins Lane. It was it was a problem growing in plain sight and nobody did anything about it. It was ignored. There were assumptions made that it's it's just Liverpool fans coming late. It's their fault in effect.

And no consideration and no planning was done before or at the time to manage that. And eventually it got so bad. The crush outside the ground got so bad they just opened the gates and let everyone in again, taking no. Plan or contingency to do it. They went in, there was structural failures in the ground.

Again, another factor that was beyond the police, but the police had a bit of engagement in that, that exacerbated those problems. The sign signage in the ground was dreadful, so everyone who comes in, rushes in when they opened all the gates, let them all rush in, and everyone went straight down the tunnel, straight onto the stands.

And there was a significant crush where people died. The response afterwards was. As poor as the management of the game. And the the, it was headless chickens, in effect. Nobody took command. And that ran throughout the night when the loved ones were looking for their, the people who had passed away and were trying to find them and going to the hospitals and heading back.

And it was it's heartrending, absolutely heartrending to hear the stories of the families and what they went through. And so in effect, it was a multiple failures, the ambulance service didn't cover themselves in glory. The the fire service did very well. The but the police service in particular failed the structural engineers for the for the stadium.

There were some significant failures there, and the club itself were failure. There were failures. And but the complacency and then the force narrative and the lack of command and ownership and accountability for it has exacerbated that cri, that disaster for many years. And the fact in effect, the establishment doubled in on itself.

And I don't believe there's an entity such as the establishment, but what. But it was a time, 10, 20 years earlier, you had the avan disaster and nobody was held to account and there was no, there was an inquiry, but it was, there was no accountability there at all.

By the time this disaster happened in the late eighties, there was a lot more accountability, but it wasn't ingrained in the system. And generally because it was seen as Liverpool's Liverpool problem happened in Sheffield, I don't think it was dealt with particularly well. Certainly not by the coroner, certainly not by the some of the people who had to investigate it, and at the end of the day, it wasn't dealt with.

And the wounds remained for many years with the families who campaigned to reopen the inquests, which they did. And that happened. And then I got engaged back in 2016 after the new inquest gave a unlawful killing verdict and they needed an a senior officer to lead the investigation into the unlawful killing.

And that's when I came on board. 

Ben: So it seems very fair that Liverpool still to this day, really ban I think it's the Sun newspaper, but certain newspapers for peddling that false narrative for where it is today. And I'm intrigued, obviously with all of those failures and then your investigation.

Do you think today we have learned from it and what are those learnings which are maybe part embedded or maybe if there are any learnings that we could take to heart more than we do? Interesting. 

Rob: You, you say this is what I've been, I'm still engaged a bit in trying to shape up a document that, that that we put back to policing to, to say, look, these problems could, might still exist.

Let's be clear. An awful lot has changed since 1989. All the disaster. Issues have and now so much more sophisticated and organized the football, if you go and command a football match, you have to be accredited, you have to have a lot of experience and have done it and been tested for it.

There's a lot that's moved on since then. But I think one of the dangers as we saw, so there'd been two recent, relatively recent instance that ring the alarm bells. One was the Manchester Arena bombing where frankly the response was seen was dire uncoordinated no real command and control.

And many. Mistakes that you saw at Hillsborough reemerging after the Manchester Arena. And the other one was the Euro Cup final. Back in, was it 2020 when there was a near miss that was a near miss at Wembley That could have been a similar Hillsborough type event with crushing and death.

And actually for that matter, people say it was in France and it's the way the French do it. But of course, the French game where the Liverpool crowds were treated dreadfully as well was another example. I think there's still a danger of complacency. There is a challenge. That because events where there are deaths of say, up to a hundred or even more, are so vanishingly rare.

We don't practice it, we don't try it out. And I think we need better peer review and inspection of our ability to respond. It's like pandemics, you have to prepare for a pandemic because if you don't, as we discovered you're right, you can be right on the back. Foot.

And so that investment seems like lost investment. But when you need it, it's ideal. The same with disaster management. You've got to try it out. You've got to test your procedures. And I think we need better ways of testing our procedures for big disasters, because one day it will happen.

Ben: I think that's your point, that it is rare, but it is going to happen. As opposed to some things where you can think, okay, there's vanishingly rare. Yeah, but like you say, we're still seeing. Near misses. And the magnitude of when it does happen is not only for the people involved, which might be in the hundreds, but these, all these follow on facts both to sort of society and how we think about that.

So I think that seems really right, that we maybe should test the procedures more. And again, when he hasn't happened for a while, that sense of complacency, which is probably a human nature thing, but we need to perhaps build in against that. So I'm interested so that plus perhaps some of the public perception on crime, even though as we noted the large crime statistics are down in London, there is an issue on knife crime and the things has called in recent years.

Critics, which have called for a kind of defund the police type narrative. I'd be interested in what you think is maybe fair about that and what do you think people get wrong? I think at the very high level, obviously if police have less resources, you're gonna get less policing, which is actually not the intention.

But it does hint at some of these things around maybe complacency or problems with the system, or some of it is perception because actually if crime's down, why do the public not feel safer? They actually, if they were more say, rational or the news was different, they perhaps should feel safer. So I'm interested in what you think of that of those critics and what we should do and what we could learn from it.

Rob: Going back to what, where I started about policing actually from my perspective, hinges on a good response to somebody's crisis. Now that can be a crime, but it might not be a crime. And. Police while they have an impact on crime, if you arrest the right people, that takes 'em away and it stops 'em committing crime.

But on the whole, the causes of crime are much more embedded in society than things the police can deal with. And I think I think crime, if you really want to deal with crime and reduce it, it's not just the police by any stretch. And it's not the criminal justice system. It's actually society, it's communities.

So going back you mentioned Brixton and you were dead, right? When you said to me a few minutes ago that Brixton crime levels have dropped dramatically in 30 years. They have, when I was there patrolling, we had about a hundred robberies, street robberies. A week. A hundred. Can you imagine street robberies?

That's people being robbed often at night, knife pointed their wallets and their less mobile phones in those days, of their goods. And and. Now it's a handful. It's, I dunno the exact figures now, but it's, at one point I did meet somebody from Brixton and asked him, I said, oh, we have about one or two a week, some, a maximum.

So it, the scale is different. What's gone on there? To a certain extent it's a slightly more affluent society, but it's also, schools are better now. Those schools in Brixton have improved dramatically in 30 years. Thankfully, inner city schools are better kids necessarily better behaved in general.

But I do think kids get a bad rap. I think generally kids as a whole, not a, not always a popular thing to say because people don't want to believe it, but kids are more respectful, they're more thoughtful, they're more polite than they were when I was a lot younger. I was probably contributory to it when I was a young person.

They, it's a, it's, I think we've gotta be really careful about demonizing young people, 'cause most of them are really good kids. And there is a problem with knife crime. There was a problem 30 years ago that wasn't recorded. Because when all those robberies were often involved in knives and we never ever recorded it as a knife crime we do now.

So you've gotta be very careful about saying, oh, it's got worse. It might, we forget how grimy the eighties and nineties were when I was, the graffiti, the fact that your car, if you left it anywhere, would be broken into, that the experience of the general public back in the eighties and nineties in inner city London was dreadful.

And fearful. It's actually a lot better now. Peop but I think it gets amplified and it gets amplified through social media. It gets amplified through newspapers, it gets amplified through people with. Agendas no pe that sort of dispassionate, thoughtful analysis is gone.

People want to shout from rooftops and create an agenda. So my, my, so crime, I think we've gotta be really careful. Crime on the whole. Certainly the crime we experience in a day-to-day level is so much less than it was when I was a junior police officer. That's not to say crime doesn't exist because of course it's gone onto different platforms.

It's gone on to the internet, it's gone on to fraud. There's a lot more of that around. But I, and that, we can discuss that further if you want, but because policing isn't well set up to deal with that. So there is a gap there. There is crime. It's actually not on as much in the public sphere as it used to be.

People believe it is, but I think that's a nature of some of the public discourse. And I do think we need to pause and ask ourselves what sort of society we live in. We live in quite a good society. In the decades I've been a police officer, some things have got better, some things have got worse.

But overall, I don't think we're any worse. The, as a society but people feel more anxious because I think it's being amplified so much. 

Ben: Yes. I would go so fast to say versus the eighties and even the nineties, that things have got better, things have got worse, but on net things have actually got better.

And although there's been challenges, and I don't want to diminish them, but I think we see that in crime overall, it's down. We see that in health overall, we're living better. We even see that in poverty. Yes, there's still. A lot of poverty and far too much, but actually the rates have gone down. Education scores are up.

So I, I actually think there's that, and to your point, when I was growing up in London I was probably allowed out into the late eighties and the nineties. My parents would definitely have said, oh, like Shaw Ditch Hackney. Nope. Brixton Really? Maybe Nope as well, unless you had a really good reason.

It's unless you knew Brixton, I didn't grow up South London, then it's no reason to go there. You'd look obviously outta place and you'd be a target. I'm interested then maybe putting it all together a little bit over your 30, 40 years, what do you think has worked?

And why, and what do you think maybe today if you had an opportunity to change or improve what would you do? And maybe you could do this in the context partly of policing. Like what are the things which have worked to get actually those crime down? And where do we still have to go? And perhaps you could also bring in some of your work on.

Civil society or thinking about that, because that speaks to the point that you mentioned of well, policing can perhaps get better and needs to still a lot on the crisis part and we, we should address that. But the causes of that crisis are these other aspects. We can talk about mental health.

I dunno where you draw the line. Obviously if you've got something having a mental health crisis on the streets, then yes, the police probably should be involved at that level, but they're not gonna necessarily solve someone's chronic mental health issues over built up over decades. That's an example.

And I'm interested in that because there does seem to be at least in this country. A feeling still of civic pride, I think. And there is perhaps more engagement than the critics might say, but it is also a little bit disjointed and hard to bring together. So anyway, policing what's worked?

Rob:  I think in, in describing what works and what could be better, in a way I'm reflecting trends in our society as well. That cause challenges for policing as much as everyone else. So what works for me is. And has a very strong academic evidence base is local community policing, neighborhood policing, that link with communities does work.

It's not cheap, hence it's been willow out in recent years. 

Ben: How does neighborhood policing work?

Rob: Neighborhood policing is where you have police officers who own their patch they're there sufficiently consistently in order to deal with the problems, to pick up problem solving to pick up an issue, not less, let it lie.

So if you've got a shop that's constantly getting kids in nicking stuff, it can actually the local officer. Would feel sufficient ownership and be regular enough in that community to be able to say, yes, I'll do something about this. I'll know who it is. We'll deal with that. And and it, it, lots of people ask for this.

They say, we want to see a cop on the streets. They often don't quite know what they're asking for, but I think what they really want is somebody who knows their area, knows what the problems are and is doing something about it. And that seemed to work. That does work. It brings down crime. It increases confidence.

And it works effectively, not just with police, though. You, it works really well when all the other agencies. Are aligned similarly you, there's some, been some fantastic work over the years. Again, very evidence based where team, multidisciplinary teams, it sounds a bit medical, doesn't it?

But it is, you've got the housing officer as well as the police officer, as well as the the local council and others all working in an area and deal with. Both the police or the offenders or the different problems that might be developing. And one of the big real pluses, two of them actually, one was the Crime of Disorder Act in 19 80, 19 98 that gave a responsibility on all those different agencies to work together to prevent crime that was a sea change and made a big difference.

All the reduction in crime that was claimed by others in the two thousands in the late in the 2010 to 2015 period when crime was really seemed to be re, re reducing, I'm convinced, came about because of the work that was kicked off in the late nineties about local problem solving, community policing.

It, that made a big difference. Sure. Start the, which was a multi. Disciplinary response to young families and kids and helping people regardless of your background, regardless of where you are helping you in sort of your kids grow up in the community with lots of support. That was, that I think made a fantastic difference to communities.

You could feel it in communities where Shore start was operating, where there was good neighbor policing all of that. I think the lesson is that worked and the lesson is that was all dismantled just as it was about really kicking in where the results were starting to show. And politicians unfortunately have very short term agendas.

They have a, have look. I know it's a bit of a cliche, but it's true. They're not there thinking this investment will get crime down in 20 years time. But that's the way you do it. You get the kids now and you work with them positively, constructively. Not because they're troubled or problematic, but because as a society we want to bring them up.

And that will make a difference to crime because believe it or not, the peak offending age is 15. That's when most people will commit crime in the, in, in society. So get the kids at five, at three, at one and help them grow up well and you'll prevent crime. So that's the positive, which sadly has been a bit dismantled in recent years.

Budgets and other things. But the other reason it's been dismantled is because we are policing and this is where we could improve. But it's less about improvement is about us thinking differently. We I'll give you an example. When I was in, in Brixton, I was, I remember having to be supervise an investigation in the academy in Brixton, which is a large nightclub.

About 5,000 people go there. There was a rape there. And I arranged to have a an appeal. We had about 10 maximum witness statements. We had a VHS tape from the entrance to the to the academy. And we had the forensic medical examiner's report. And we did a bit of local inquiry. On foot in the area.

And that probably took me and a couple of other people a week or so of investigative effort. On and off we're doing some other things as well. A similar crime. Now, every single person in the academy might have a mobile phone, ev that's potentially 5,000 pieces of evidence to examine and to collect.

You won't, but you do need to, you need to assess and judge and work out how you're gonna manage all of that 5,000 pieces of evidence. There will be about 600 hours. Of video, DVD, footage to, to view potentially. You've got masses of information from oyster cards, from other digital information all in our, in the environment that could all help you with that investigation.

Now that's helpful because it's probably more chance of arresting somebody, but it's also deeply problematic because it would take, it does take many people, many hours of work, days and days to go through it. Now people say, oh, AI will do that. It's not doing it at the moment, and it's soaking up hundreds of hours of work.

So at the same crime today. Is exponentially more costly in time and effort and money than the one I dealt with all those years ago. And people don't realize that that when I say exponentially, I really mean it. It's by factors. Hundred. Of time and effort. And not just of the officers in Brixton, it'll be lots of other departments having to get involved.

Departments that never existed in my time. All those departments need staffing and need experts and people who can do stuff that we never had the forensic examination now so much more thorough and could, will involve many more hours of effort and time. And as for the interviewing, interviewing the victim is so much better but time consuming.

And it is better, people will be put through a better experience than they did when I did it, if I'm honest. But it's just costly. It's time. So when people say we don't see any officers and stuff, I can tell you they're all beavering away, but they're beavering away on stuff that didn't exist when I was a lot younger and.

We are not geared up yet to managing that deluge of digital evidence. We don't, we still struggle to wade through it. A simple shoplifter, people say, what's going on about shoplifting? I could deal with arrest and deal with a shoplifter in an hour and a half when I was a pc, arresting straightforward one.

But, do all the way through to charging and being out the cell. You'll be lucky to get it through in two days of one person's work. Lucky and probably longer of things. So when people say the police aren't dealing with shoplifters any longer, if you arrest a shoplifter, now the amount of work involved is again not exponentially, but certainly scale of 10 times what it was when I was a young officer and that.

Is costly, and we haven't increased the numbers of officers proportionately to that demand. And that's why when people say We don't see a cop, I can tell you why not. It is not that they're twiddling their thumbs. They are, they're chasing their tail often. You I believe me, and I've tried it, you try going to say what looks like a straightforward job, but actually it turn, you've got to chase down, say, an internet provider to get an email trail or something like that.

Ben: That’s a fascinating observation, which I wasn't aware of, but makes complete sense, I guess at the, that society level, putting your two observations together. A society has to ask a question as to where it wants to spend. Its limited. Time and money. If, maybe take the slightly easier example of the shot lifter versus the more, more serious Brixton crime you were there before.

If it's going from two hours to 40 hours of time, say something like that. Maybe some of that time is valuable, but certainly the extra 38, maybe not, maybe an extra two or three perhaps on that, and that extra money, it sounds would've been perhaps better spent over a longer term basis going into.

Community policing where those two police officers, rather than having to wade through all of this extra paperwork and evidence would be walking the shop speaking to people and being a presence. But we can't necessarily rebalance that. But that seems to be a very intriguing kind of double observation about where it's gone.

And actually that reflects a lot of other things in society. Like you say, our paperwork and our trends of that, and we are not yet, and we may never get to the state where AI can actually do that for us. There will probably still need to be human judgment and maybe they can make it. 50% better. But if you've got a hundred times you are coming back down to 50 times, that's still quite a lot more effort.

Rob: And we've developed for understandable reasons, some quite complex legal processes. One that is very arcane to people not in the police, but is critical to what I've just been discussing is disclosure. You have to, because of things going wrong in the past, there's now a very strong requirement to.

Put as much give the defense as much evidence as both that, that has any bearing on the case. And to also to explain a little bit why they have, why you've done stuff and why you haven't done the stuff. Of course, why haven't you got all those 5,000 phones and tapped into them?

Because that would tell, find, you'll find out my client's innocent if you did that and that sort of thing. So you, you end up with this massive information with people spending days and days. I had in my team for Hillsborough, almost as many officers. Dealing with disclosure for court as I did, dealing with the investigation itself.

And these are experienced cops doing it. Now you could argue it's non, but you do need the investigative mindset to be able to work through what you disclose and what you don't disclose and understand the investigation well enough to make those choices. But they, they went through half a million documents and pieces of evidence to, to be able to say that you can have that and you can't.

It's got, again, as I, I use the word exponentially, but it's true, it's exponentially greater now with so much digital evidence and people having to wade through it and decide what's gonna be disclosed. You're right. There's that nirvana of ai. But I've yet to see it emerge. Lots of people say it will, and I think it will in some respects, but it'll create its own challenges.

Ben: Yeah. Actually that disclosure point's another really. Really hard one because we can see there's been miscarriages of justice. 'cause there weren't disclosure, I don't know what the number is. I'm gonna make a guess that it's that it was a small number, but obviously to any one individual case, it's extremely important to try and get it right.

But then the amount of disclosure that you've then had to do versus those numbers, miscarriages of justice. That's a very hard thing to balance. I can see, yes. And I can see how it's hard to roll back on some of that disclosure, but this is, I dunno what the economists would call it.

Not quite the opportunity cost of things, but. Those a hundred hours spent on disclosure for a little bit of benefit, maybe no benefit. If it was there if it had been spent on say, community policing, you'd actually get a lot more bang for your buck. But you can't do that because those are the missing.

Police hours, which we don't see any more

Rob:  Yeah. And you say right, Ben, actually, that there's so much about our society where we wouldn't want to roll it back, but we undress, we, we fail. I think sometimes take into account just how much that costs us. There's no way you'd say that.

You just can't do vettings say of people. But the amount of vetting and the complexity of vetting at times can feel a bit overwhelming. And yet you do need some safeguards. Yeah, you need safeguards because of stuff that's happened but the safeguards can also paralyze. So it's finding that balance all the time.

Very difficult. Yeah. 

Ben: And maybe there's some evidence that it's gone slightly too far the other way and in, in many domains. This is, like you say, it is interesting when we talk about the police, about its challenges and opportunities. 'cause actually that broadly reflects a lot of other things in society because actually policing reflects, the problems and challenges of society today.

Great. Maybe moving on to our last couple of questions. You spent the last year or so or a little bit further back as high sheriff, perhaps you'd like to comment on that, and I think your theme was around civic engagement, so you get a very intense year of doings and things around that.

Yeah. But would you like to reflect on that and then any other current projects that you'd want to highlight? 

Rob: Thank you Ben. I'm what a great conversation, roved across so much and I feel we've only scratched the surface of some stuff. But yes, I've, I was very fortunate and honored to be invited to become the high sheriff of Somerset.

For those who've never heard of a high sheriff or just think it's something with Nottingham and Robin Hood. The high sheriff of sub set, the high sheriff in general, the, it goes back actually to King Alfred's days. The sheriff was the Shire Reeve, the representative in the Shire of the Monarch.

And that's where it started from. It's the oldest secular role, civic role in, in the uk. And as a sheriff in, back in the sort of late nine hundreds, thousands, 11 hundreds, 12 hundreds, in those times you were in effect, the kings. You acted for the king in the community. So you raise taxes.

You, you did law and order. You generally, often, the, in effect the police, the judge, jury and execution all in one. There's lots of it. It you exercise the king's power and. That ran for many years, albeit it gradually diminished because of course, the King, king Henry the second brought in juries and judges and things like that.

And so gradually over centuries, the role of high sheriff changed dramatically. That you weren't, that they brought in Lord, left tenants in 1585 in order to because actually the high sheriffs were meant to raise the army, but weren't doing a very good job of it. And so Lord left tenants were set up in effect to raise the army on behalf of the king.

Occasionally queen, and it was a queen then. So it's, it. So over, over the years, the role is much less. In fact, it was, and it was made a year only by Henry III in 1258 because he felt. High shares. Were getting a bit too powerful. In fact, in, in, in the Magna Carta 69 of the 121, I might be just slightly wrong on those numbers of clauses in the Magna Carta were about high sheriffs, and most of it was about their overreach and about using their powers arbitrarily and things like that. High sheriffs weren't always popular and certainly when they were collecting taxes, Stephanie weren't. Now it's a very honorific role.

All of that responsibility for law and order and tax collecting and everything else is long gone, but it's still, you're the monarchs representative for law and Order in the, in, in the county. But also you're asked to support civic society and volunteering in the community. And that's the thing I particularly focused on in my year was volunteering.

The people who give up their own time, particularly young people because we face in this country might not realize it, but a real crisis of volunteering. In there, there is, it's the lots of figures I could quote, but the stark one is, in the last decade, routine involvement in volunteering has gone down from 27% to 16%.

People who would routinely volunteer as measured by the British Attitude Survey and British the through statistics. And on the whole, many counties like Somerset still do well because there's a lot, an elderly population who volunteer a lot, but a lot of the older people having to look after grandchildren or, bought dogs and having to walk their dogs and things and time, that time they used to spend volunteering has definitely diminished.

So we face a bit of a crisis in this country on volunteering and I I use my year to promote both awareness of that fact, but also what could we do in Somerset about it? And you, I convened a volunteers Faires. I convened a volunteers conference where Deborah Mead and the Dragons Den star, she came along and did a fantastic skit on how businesses can support volunteering.

And she and. Somerset has a strong approach to try and counter the trends in volunteering. But that's, it, I did my little bit for a year, but only a year because Henry iii limited my time. And but I've, I got enormous. I, it was a privilege but I got a lot out of it by just being able to know, you can, just saying thank you to volunteers and sometimes being able to give them a high sheriff's award for what they've done.

Lifts, lifts them. You can see such and it's glue in our community. There's it I'm still in awe of just how much people do in our community. The statistics can be a bit depression, depressing. I think they underestimate what people do. Because lots of people will say I don't volunteer.

And then you discover actually they go and clean the church every week or they or they go and help their local neighbor and take her or him to hospital. Every week and things like that lot, it's the glue that holds our society together. And long may it continue and I think we should really celebrate the fact people participate and do stuff in our community.

Not put up too many barriers. We talked about bureaucratic barriers. There's a few there as well in volunteering. People are worried about taking on young volunteers, sadly, and yet youngsters need to get the volunteering habit. And people get anxious about safeguarding and I say no.

Safeguarding should not be a barrier. It's something to be aware of, but you shouldn't prevent you from doing stuff with young people because young people are our future. We need them to volunteer and participate in our community. And I will continue. Post my high share of review, and I do continue to try and support that work.

I do a few other things as well. I've got a Bishop Tutu Foundation, I'm a trustee of I, I do some work in Northern Ireland with the Independent Commission on Reconciliation. And I've got I've now, because of the work I've been doing on with the high shares on the High Shares Association, council su trying to support this continue and roll out some of the thinking that we brought in Somerset more widely.

So I've got some great projects and work on the go now, not least all being able to come and talk to you, Ben, this is a real privilege and a joy actually. That sounds excellent. I, 

Ben: I really concur. My, my mom volunteers and we try and do things and things, and it is one of those things, you can't really force it.

I guess that's the thing. There are some people say, oh, should we bring back national service and the like. And I don't think that really works. It's if you ever forced to read a book it never really works that way. But if there's things that we can do by engendering leadership and showing that actually the value that can bring, I think that's incredibly important.

Yeah. So last question, we can maybe split into two parts, and this would be around any sort of life advice. Thoughts that you have in your career, in life. And maybe one would be if you had any advice or thoughts to someone who was interested in joining the police or maybe has just joined the police.

What would you say thoughts to a young police officer or someone who was interested in joining? Or we could also widen that out to not just the police, but anyone a young person today, obviously we have the call to do volunteering, but any thoughts that you would want to share?

Rob: That's a big, an open, yeah, an open field there. Ben I think I have had a career that I've got so much out of, and I think policing is a really important public service. So to, is teaching, so to, is. Being a probation officer or a prison officer or a a, a nurse, a nursing assistant, or a doctor or, those public services are critical to our society.

I think public service itself it's important we honor it and respect it and encourage it. And I think in, it costs, that's the challenge. And people you've mentioned that a bit earlier. You've gotta cut your cloth a bit around stuff. But nevertheless, I think as a society, we've got to recognize that if we want good public services, we need good people doing it.

We need to encourage them in. And you can make a difference. You, there's, for me, a. There's loads of people I will have touched in my policing life, who I will never know. I will never know the impact I've had on them, but I've had enough people talk to me about things I've done to realize I have had a bit of impact on some lives, and probably many more than I'll ever know.

And I would say that about anybody in a public service, you make a difference in people's lives. Most people you'll never know you've done that. My dad was a teacher. It was only after he died that a number of people came to me and said, oh, he really turned me around. He got me to understand maths, which was no mean feat.

And and I think I, in a way, you need to be self-reliant. You need to be self-motivated and recognize that you're never gonna get patted on the head all the time. But actually just have that sense yourself of what you're doing is important and good, and do it to the best of your ability. And I think that's driven me in my career.

I've not really. Spin there thinking somebody must come and pat me on the head. Although when it happens, it's nice. I do very much think, I think that's a decent enough job. I've done my best there. And I think that's what should, you need a lot of that self actualization I think in, if you're going to succeed in many public service jobs because people aren't gonna come along and pat you on the head all the time.

But nevertheless, you can make a difference. And so that's driven me and I think could drive anybody else. And don't get put off by what you read in the papers. All organizations are much more complex and diverse than they appear in the way they're sometimes presented. Policings definitely like that.

It's a very. Interesting organization in so many ways, and you can make it better in your own way just by being there and part of it. So I would encourage anybody and also encourage anybody do recognize you're part of society and you have a responsibility in society. Pick up that responsibility and do something about it.

Ben: That makes a lot of sense. So public service, you may not be immediately rewarded, but you will touch a multitude of people. Those that you will never know. And organizations are complex, but by stepping up and being part of it, you can definitely make a difference. 

Rob: Perfectly summarizing.

Thank you 

Ben: On that, on that note, Rob, thank you very much.

Rob: Thank you Ben, and I've really enjoyed it and thank you for giving me the opportunity to give you a bit of my philosophy of life, but also I'd be very interested from anybody who listens to this, if they ever want to converse about any of this.

Very happy to get in touch. Always happy to discuss these things.

Samuel Hughes: Architecture, Beauty, and the Future of Cities | Podcast

Samuel Hughes is an editor at Works in Progress and an expert on architecture, urbanism, and planning.

“We treat age as the value, but often what people are really protecting is beauty—they just don’t want to admit that’s what matters most.”

We discuss the feasibility of mass-producing beautiful buildings through good materials and proportions, the decline of ornamented architecture, and why maintaining industrial skills matters for long-term infrastructure projects.

The conversation explores Japanese zoning and urbanism, the impact of culture and geography on city design, Berlin’s mix of rent control and street grids, and the idea of “gentle density.”

“Most individual buildings in Tokyo are pretty ugly, but the overall streetscape is often nicer than in Britain or America—urban form matters more than facades.”

Samuel also shares his views on greenbelt reform, the importance of mixed-use urban density, and how civic and institutional pride once shaped even the most mundane buildings.

“In the 19th century even pumping stations and hospitals were built to be attractive—today our institutions too often forget that civic pride shows in the architecture.”

We touch on underrated cities like Dresden and examine future solutions for Britain’s housing supply crisis.

“The real breakthrough will come when communities see that allowing development makes them richer—turning adversarial planning into a win-win.”

Finally, Samuel reflects on how policy research can meaningfully shape public infrastructure and urban planning.

Summary contents, transcript, and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Watch the video above or on YouTube.

Contents
01:02 Mass Producing Beautiful Buildings
01:43 The Decline of Ornament in Architecture
04:37 Tokyo’s Urban Design and Zoning
10:05 How Long Should Buildings Last? UK vs Japan
16:13 Philosophy, Beauty, and Emotions
25:53 Public Policy Trade-offs in Practice
31:41 Berlin: Rent Control and Urban Planning
36:32 Housing in Europe: A Historical Context
38:02 Modern Housing Markets and Trends
41:50 Rethinking the Greenbelt
44:40 Planning Authorities and Their Role
50:40 Overrated and Underrated Urban Ideas
1:02:03 Dresden: Lessons in Urban Reconstruction
1:05:03 The Future of Britain’s Housing Supply
1:08:40 Career Advice on Policy and Design

Transcript (AI assisted so mistakes possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm excited to be speaking to Samuel Hughes. Samuel is an editor at Works in Progress and has been involved with the Think Tank Center for Policy Studies and the Create Streets movement. He has worked in a number of roles around architecture, urbanism, and planning, and he posts prolifically on social media channels highlighting architecture and design.

Samuel, welcome. 

In the UK or even globally. Can we still mass produce and build beautiful buildings?

Samuel: Yes we can. I mean, a beautiful building, like in a way it's not that difficult to build. You can do it with good materials, good proportions a bit of greenery, good urban form, that, that has never become that difficult.

There's some stuff, so I think I. One of the ways that people traditionally made buildings beautiful through the use of applied ornament of various kinds, that has become a bit tougher. Not because it's impossible to mass produce ornament. It's extremely easy to mass produce ornament. And we used to do it all the time, but because the mass production has stopped.

So I was talking to, um, some guys in Germany about this recently. They used to cover their buildings in, um, ornamented plaster, this automated plaster stucco work. And that was extremely cheap in the 19th century. The figure I've been told don't quite how reliable this is, but the figure I've been told is that it would add 15% to the sales value of a building and cost only 2% of the build cost.

So it was totally ubiquitous. But today, because they've stopped doing that for a hundred years and all the factories have closed and all the production chains have broken down, it's pretty expensive. It actually, actually does require expensive handicrafts today. Oddly there's been, for this particular good, there's been a technological regression over the last century as mass production has declined and handcrafts are now the only way you can do it.

So for that for that pathway to beauty, it's probably harder to mass produce it now and the costs have gone up. But that's, and that, that's an easy way of making beautiful things. That's a way in which, like, cheap job builders in the 19th century mass produce beautiful stuff without thinking about it too much.

But it's not the only way to make beautiful stuff. And you could find lots of like clever designers today who make beautiful buildings without use of applied ornament.

Ben: It's really interesting that we have, this is one of the arguments for industrial strategy or keeping industrial processes that in and itself might not be adding as much value.

But once you lose the workforce or the skills. It can be quite hard to gain back. And then you lose all of these other second order effects that they sort of say the same in in long term construction projects and in infrastructure. There is a, there's a technical level of skill which is useful to keep in the workforce even if they may not be as productive.

Samuel: Yeah, I had never thought of that connection, but that is, I mean, yeah, that's correct. That's true. Yeah. It's, um, and there are a few cases, so like there's one factory, maybe there's two factor, two small factories that still do cast stone ornament. So it's basically a kind of crush stone. You mix it with a little bit of, of, uh, cement and it looks remarkably similar to stone is much cheaper than this kind of card stone.

And I think there was one of those factories survived through the 20th century doing basically garden ornaments because people never completely stopped buying like little statues of nymphs or whatever to put in their gardens. And now, now that classical architecture has revived a bit in, in Britain.

They're mass producing quite a lot of, they, they do work for like the, um, the little towns that the king has patronized, poundbury, and sedan. But they survived through the drought years making little garden statue statues. That wasn't an industrial strategy, but it is an example where like the survival of something in a special way then meant that like a little body of skills and infrastructure was still in place, ready to be scaled up when demand for the, uh, for the primary good returned.

Ben: Yeah.

Samuel: Yeah. Very interesting.

Ben: I think you have once lived and researched in Tokyo or in Japan. What did you learn about Japanese zoning or Japanese building and, and culture and planning, either firsthand or, I know also there's been some work, uh, come through works in progress on thinking about Japanese design.

Samuel: Well, there's a lot to say. I mean, it's an amazing Japanese cities are. Basically like the type, they've got lots of problems, they've got lots of flaws there. But overall, they are basically like the Titanic success story of the 20th century cities with amazing infrastructure and with mixing of use and with, in their funny way, like high quality public space and the flourishing street life and all the rest.

But what can I say about, I think you will notice when you are in Japan, here's one starting point. Most built individual buildings in Tokyo or any, any Japanese city except Kyoto, are pretty ugly. Like they're actually worse than the average building in a, in Britain or in the United States.

But the overall effect they have, like the overall environment of walking down your average Tokyo Street is generally a lot nicer than the. Characteristic the average street in Britain or North America because of the urban density, the way the streetscape is defined, the quality of public space, the lack of car domination the, and the sort of richness and interest of urban life in Japan.

And so it does, it is the great example in favor of, this, the idea that urban form is more important than facades. I'm famous for thinking facades are quite important. I may, I really annoy people by going on, but, but like the example of Tokyo shows that although I, you know, yes, for sales matter, yes, Japanese cities probably would be nicer if they were prettier, but like you, they have basically created wonderful flourishing places out of lots and lots of ugly buildings.

And that's an interesting thing that we should bear in mind in terms of the institutions that created it. They have fairly, they do have a zoning system and have had one since 1920s, I think pretty early on that they introduced one. But it's a fairly liberal zoning system, so they tend to allow a greater range of uses and a greater level of density.

Tokyo is famous for, it doesn't really, doesn't provide on street parking off street parking. People are allowed to provide it for themselves, but because land is so expensive, they generally don't, which is why car ownership is so low in, um, in Japan. When Tokyo and rural Japan, of course, everyone has cars transit, um, and amazingly good rail systems.

They've done this thing. I'm working on this at the moment, the, um. The system that we did with the Elizabeth Lion, with Thas link, where you take these old Victorian railway lines that run to the edge of the city center and then stop. Because in the 19th century, they didn't have the technology to tunnel them under.

And then you join them together and create an integrated metro system by basically mostly you're just reusing your old, like decrepit, Victorian suburban railways. But by linking them together, you make them more interconnected. You increase the frequency and capacity. Tokyo's done this to, I think, 35 suburban railways, so they've got the equivalent of, it depends exactly on how you count them, but something like 15 or 20 crossrails that they've, and this is part of the great secret of like why Tokyo's rail system is this extra, like the best in the world, this extraordinary monument.

So yeah, I mean, I could say there are many more things I could say about, about Japan, but like, it's a very fascinating example of how. Cities can be made to work, at least given the starting point that they had.

Ben: Yes. I, I think a lot of city design of things, policy and the like, uh, influencer obviously, but a lot of it seems to me culturally and geographic specific, like Japan has come that way through a series of events which you are essentially not really gonna replicate in a lot of other countries.

Yeah, and I agree. So walking around Tokyo and, and some other places I would agree that actually the facades in Tokyo are not. People would prefer a lot of the facades in London, but you're true, there's somehow urban design and a repetition of this. And in some ways it harks to the fact that the, you know, in this country, the Georgian box house or even the Victorian box house was a pretty box and they just replicated, I think you, uh, I picked up a tweet that you said or something, which, and I replicated maybe half a million or a million times.

That's right. And lo and behold, it actually you get a kind of more interesting facade. But for them, we would've called it at the time a kind of cookie cutter approach to that. And that's kind of interesting. But in Japan, I also fascinated by, they don't necessarily think that their buildings are gonna last a hundred or 200 years, even though a bunch of them have.

And part of that is thinking about earthquakes or wood and, and part of that cultural cultural aspect. And then this interlink with transport because the rail is brilliant, but it also interlinks with a very dense bus network as well when you go around Tokyo, which then allows you to have. No cars and these very cute, walkable community neighborhoods, of which there's a bazillion because Tokyo is actually, uh, amazingly large around that.

So it's the kind of interlinked policy with all of that. But I wonder about this idea about how long you think a building's going to last. 'cause also some of our new buildings here, because of really the technology we now embed in some new buildings, they maybe not thought of trying to last 500 years and 200 years even, of which obviously some of them.

So I dunno what you think about the length of lasting of your building and how we should think about that. And both Japan as an example of where they haven't necessarily thought about it being a, a really long time, although some of them do. And where we are in the uk a thing

Samuel: that I have often thought is we, so a thing I pointed out about, I often point out about Georgian architecture is.

It's relatively placeless. And it's mass reproduced. And it's boxy. So these three things that people always say about contemporary British house building, oh, they're like boxes that could be anywhere and they've been churned out, by this company. Those were all, those things were all totally true, maybe even more true of these extremely celebrated buildings in the 18th and 19th centuries where, you know, basically there's like one facade reproduced 500,000 times all over England.

And most, yeah, if, you know, if you really know the stuff, the details, like building regulations meant you've got slightly different buildings in Bristol to Liverpool to London, but they're very similar as similar over a long period of time and over, over space and then the like. So people there, I think they are landing on oh, it could be anywhere, or, oh, it's too boxy.

Or, oh, it's. Been mass produced and they're struggling to find what they really don't like about these buildings. And they've landed on those things, but those probably don't really explain what they dislike. A lot of the time what they really dislike is just the buildings are ugly, but ugliness is not seen as a like respectable thing to talk about.

Too subjective, it sounds a bit dated or whatever. So people don't want to name that as the thing that's gone wrong. And so they find these other things which are proxies for ugliness, and they focus on those. And I think they obviously ly sincere, they sincerely believe it's those things, but if you actually test their reactions in different cases, you realize that's not what's motivating them.

I think something like that can be true with some of this building to building to last stuff or some of this fascination with old buildings. We know in, in Japan, I mean this has changed a bit, but historically in Japan, they didn't have the same idea of the continuity of materials being the important thing about a building.

And famously there's still, there's still at least one Japanese temple, which they demolish and rebuild every 30 years. And they've been doing this for a thousand years now, temple which they see as a thousand year old building and as an important piece of Japanese heritage, even though at any given time, the actual timbers will be no more than 30 years old.

And that used to be very generally the view in Japan. I think all temples were treated that way. I think Western influence has changed that to some extent, and now there's a more mixed picture. But that was, that's, that's an, an old view they had of heritage and that would probably have been closer to the view of heritage in Europe in the 18th or 19th centuries before Rus and arts and crafts and so on, which shifted it to more towards like, it's the actual materials that matter.

And I have, I can, I dunno if I can have any evidence of this, but I have a sort of a, a hunch that again, with age, part of what people really care about here is probably beauty, but they don't want to talk about beauty. So they talk about age and part of the huge support that the conservation movement has in Europe.

And this sense, you know, people really feel now, like basically any decent building from the 19th century shouldn't be demolished, uh, and shouldn't maybe even really be seriously tampered with. And that I think is probably partly because people feel like we've got a finite pool of beautiful buildings.

We can't really add to it. It's just like this pool we've mysteriously inherited. And every time we lose something from it, it's gone for good. And like our stock of this just continues to decline. So we should be extremely protective of it. And these like. What are actually like the low end of 19th century building the workers cottages from 19th century, these are, they were a huge achievement at the time, a huge step up in housing quality from what people were moving out of.

They're not great buildings. They were built to a very low standard, like in the 19th century, they would've been delighted to knock them down and put something higher, better quality in place. And yet we now feel like, yeah, I know, sure, but they're not gonna put something nicer in place, are they?

They're gonna put something worse in place. So better stick to the, grim, poorly built to up two downs. So I, I think with all of these things, I'm sure people partly care about, really do care about the it feeling local, it not being a box, its actual age. I'm sure these are all genuine values, which people care about, but I do think they all get a big injection of.

Additional support, which is in fact like concealed love of beauty that people don't want to acknowledge. And so they, um, they promote a proxy for beauty instead.

Ben: I hadn't heard it articulated so well in terms of this thinking around beauty. It does remind me of a couple of things. One is your anecdote from Japan, which I think is true about how they used to or still rebuild buildings.

Is it, is that a Greek philosopher ship? So if you have the same ship and replace all of the planks, is it really that Yeah. The ship of thesis. Exactly. Is it really that ship? And some people would say yes, and some people would say no. And it I could see that's exactly that temple if they rebuild it.

And they obviously said yes, it is the same temple. So they took that view.

Samuel: There's a whole branch of philosophy called ology about that question. Extremely boring field. But they certainly, the Japanese appear to have a different folk meteorology of buildings than, uh Yeah. And you, it works for them.

Ben: They believe it to be true. Um, and actually one other reflection is on philosophy. So I know you studied, I think, analytical philosophy, uh, in your younger years and I did skim some of your work, your thesis, and I think if it's true, if I read it correctly one of it was around the work on emotions.

And how you describe beauty just then led me to think, so I'm probably gonna completely mangle this, but one of the ideas that you had on looking at emotions is that sometimes we think about emotions and there's a kind of rational aspect to them and we kind of think like, okay, this is a rational response and it's proportionate.

But one aspect of emotion seems that it's either underrepresented or overrepresented. So say the emotion of grief, we feel really strongly and potentially if you're gonna be very rationalist about it, you would say maybe that's not helping you, you know, live your life and that. Um, emotion might be too strong.

And you had some interesting thoughts about how you might reconcile those two views of emotions. But interesting when you're talking about beauty, then it led me to think that actually there is a, there is almost a rational part of us or there is some emotional part which goes, yeah, we can say where something is very beautiful or very ugly.

And we do understand that. But there is another part where we are unconfident of saying that or applying that to an emotion and say, we feel very uncomfortable with that. And so we go to some physical thing like you say, aid or the materials used or it's use or, uh, something like that. So I was interested in how much your philosophy has influenced your thoughts about beauty and the place and whether I've just thought about that on the spot, whether what I've just said had any, uh, reference or things to your philosophy at all.

Samuel: That was about right. Um, I, it's been a long time since I've actually worked on, like personally done any research on, on analytical philosophy. So I, it's rusty now, but yes, I, um, I certainly do think that aesthetic and emotional responses can have a kind of speaking slightly loosely, but can have a kind of knowledge encoded in them.

And people may often be sensitive to a whole range of truths or values in the form of their emotional and aesthetic responses, which they maybe don't have access to intellectually. And one of the problems that we have in public policy is to. Try to do justice to some of those kinds of reactions when we are not good at talking about them.

Uh, and it's particular problem. I mean, there's, there's a few different things going on here, but it's a particular problem for public bureaucracies when they come to deal with this. They're very, you know, for understandable reasons, they want to be able to deal in things that are very clearly public, where there's clearly quantifiable data, there's clear ways of arbitrating disagreement.

Now we do have ways of arbitrating disagreement about emotional or aesthetic questions. Like people spend a huge amount of time arguing about whether they're right to be angry or whether, you know, which piece of music is better or whatever. So there, obviously there are ways to talk about these things, but is is in some sense true that they're less straightforward or they're, you know, their, it's not as.

It doesn't come in a format which is readily put in a, in a government document. And so public officials are very uncomfortable with dealing with that kind of thing. But that doesn't mean that kind of thing doesn't matter. And so that does, there is a tendency for those kinds of values to be overlooked in policymaking, I think.

Ben: I completely agree. I see it within healthcare, which is one of the domains. I look at a, a reasonable amount. Uh, and I always do this in a public policy philosopher person in the street, uh, dilemma, which the government always faces in terms of a healthcare budget. And that is we have this idea of a life year or a quality adjusted life year, and we price it those various economic ways to do a kind of statistical life price.

This isn't really the price of life, but they go say, well, 20 to 30,000 pounds for a life year is good value for money for our healthcare budget. And for instance, treating a diabetic meets that hurdle. No problem. So let's do lots of diabetics because cost benefit analysis suggests we'll save lots of diabetic lives.

And then you are faced with something like the preterm baby or the person who's born with a genetic disorder. And when you do the same sort of framework on costs, uh, you end up with a hundred thousand to 500,000 pounds for costing. And so if you're completely cost benefit, you will, well, let's never save those.

'cause we can always save more diabetic lives. And we're a constrained budget, so we're, we're always losing lives anyway because we need to spend money on, on somewhere else. But if you propose that to people, they go, Hmm, that doesn't feel quite right. We still want to save some preterm babies. And in fact, if you ask the person in the street, they would go, yes, let's save some preterm babies.

Like if we, if we had an infinite healthcare budget, you, you would obviously do this and these other things. And so they've actually had to kind of try and get that into their thinking. Whether you wanna call this. Virtue or pluralism or something, this other form of a representation of soci of a society preference.

Say if that's what you want to represent, because we do have a preference for saving some. In fact, we could save them all preterm babies at half a million versus the diabetic at 10,000, even though we know that in pure life value years that isn't correct. And actually you have a range of things, and that's a kind of very clear example which people can think.

But I actually think it is a similar case in aesthetics, uh, when we look at urban design and whether we do civic planning and pride. And how much of that is worth, I think

Samuel: So I'm speaking totally beyond my, uh, whatever field of authority I may have, but I'm sometimes impressed by some areas of British healthcare policy where the government is relatively, some of these quality-adjusted life year programs, they.

Prepared to make a call on how much worse does that make your life, right? This kind of disability, this kind of pain, this kind of and then we'll make public policy on the basis of these what are ultimately going to come down to like judgment calls of someone saying, I reckon this is worse. That, and that seems to me to in fact be basically a responsible way to make policy.

Like they are act they, yes, it's very unpleasant that we have to make these trade offs. It's very unpleasant that we have to make them based upon judgment calls where you think, how bad is blindness relative to using, losing your leg relative to being in this degree of pain all the time. Or to like, but those are the choices we have to make.

And I like suspect if we looked at the implicit trade offs that we're making. They would be totally insane. Like obviously vastly more money being spent on something that's less important in this context and vastly more being spent in that, like trade-offs that nobody would endorse if they were consciously required to make them, but which are made because they're being made by like different single issue bureaucracies who have been given a mandate to make a decision on something just in respect of one characteristic that it has or something like that.

Whereas healthcare policy, uh, seems to me to be made in a, a somewhat more intellectually responsible way. But yeah, that area of healthcare policy anyway, like,

Ben: so I, I would concur, I would say around 80% of it is very much weighted too. A cost benefit analysis of quality and, and other things go into quality.

So it's quality adjusted, pain adjusted disability adjusted life years is another way of looking at it. And when you do have something which is orders of magnitude and there's quite a lot of assumptions go into it. But if something's at 10,000 and something's a hundred thousand, then the 10,000 thing is most of the time going to win.

But interestingly I put these difficult use cases of right where there is a limit to it where you have a society preference, but you are, you are completely right actually a lot of healthcare. And actually that is the work of a lot of healthcare economists doing that. Although, interestingly, bringing it back to transport and planning, a lot of that initial work was done via a road transport philosophy.

Uh, which is that for every mile of road that you build, you are gonna have x million of economic value. But on the other side of it, you are gonna have more accidents and maybe an amount of environmental cost and you can actually price that. Roughly. And if your orders of magnitude out, then maybe it shouldn't be something you do, but it's also the other way.

If you've got an orders of magnitude, a really, really high economic number, then maybe you are making, uh, maybe you are making this trade off. And that's the difficult thing when you actually come to like things like, yeah,

Samuel: no, I think that's right. And the

Ben: like,

Samuel: highways engineering is another area where it's done by engineer, a kind of specialized engineer.

And we might disagree with some of the assumptions they make. We might think you are weight weighting these values in the wrong way, or, but they are, they do have like a consistent system based upon assumptions, which may be sometimes mistaken, but which are not like patently insane. And they do make trade offs in a kind of responsible way.

And I've also, oh yeah, I'm gonna say they're actually doing this seriously rather than just like in a sort of like crazy ad hoc way by contrast. And they're doing it in good faith as well. Yeah. The um, the. Cases we get. We had brouhaha, which you might have followed about the, um, the BAT tunnel proposed for HS two.

So this was HS two, the huge railway running, which, uh, gradually being built between London and Birmingham was going to run near to a colony of a kind of bat, which has some sort of protected status, be genes bats. And it was thought the bats might sometimes collide with the train. So Natural England is effect, it's slightly more complicated than this, but effectively required as a mitigation a hundred million pound bat tunnel that would stop the bats from getting to the trains.

It's not, again, it's not, it's never very clear it would actually have this effect. And you, the implicit trade-offs in terms of the amount of money that there's only a couple of hundred bats in this colony and, the, even if it was saving all of the bats, the number of the amount of money going into saving one bat.

Yeah. Compared to the amount that, uh, the number of humans that you could save in Britain, let alone if you spent the money internationally, like huge numbers of human lives being sacrificed on a, for the tenuous chance of saving a bat. This is a totally insane kind of policymaking that has arisen here.

Yeah. But it's arisen because natural England, you know, it's like good faith. They have a legal obligation to only care about one thing in this context, damage to protected species. And it's not their job to make, oh, weigh that against other values, how many bats per human, et cetera, et cetera.

Like they are just, no, this is the only thing that we are here to do and we are not going to let you build this tunnel until you have made these steps to avoid this harm. So completely insane trade-offs arise in a situation like that. And you just think if we were being. You know, if a particularly intelligent kind of alien were analyzing human societies and they were comparing on the one hand, you know, the NHS working out how much treatment it's going to give to, and the highways engineers working out cost benefit now for road along with these like totally insane trade offs that the British state is also making at the same time in these other, I think this is a very strange, the British state is a very strange thing, the way it can be, act like a fair in its clumsy fashion, fairly sophisticated and fairly rational in some contexts, uh, and yet also aggregated to something which is completely crazy in other contexts.

Ben: No, I, I completely agree that there is this trade off in there. It's the same. I'm particularly interested in green infrastructure and the arguments you make about wind time per turbines because they will kill birds. But obviously you've got to offset this around it. I don't know about good solutions.

I guess ideally you want a good faith decision maker somewhere within the system who's empowered to look at that trade off and then in good faith. Just decide which, what should be more important or not. And if you can't put it as a decision maker, 'cause essentially that should probably be your politician or, or minister, but maybe they can delegate it to a technocratic solution.

You could end up actually with the UK's nice. Within the health system, this National Institute for Clinical Excellence, but on big infrastructure projects. Or you would have a look at their down domain. So wind turbines and tunnels would be an exactly great domain for them. And then these are the five big questions.

And then we have a committee of five who would look at that and Nature England could submit and other people could submit, but they then have to in the round say, is this good for the country or not? In the same way that we do on diabetic medicines versus preterm babies versus this. And they technocratically look at it and go, well, in good faith, we think.

The best thing for this country is A, B and C decisions, and that they're empowered to do it. I, I think you could empower that within a politician. There's lots of political economy reasons why that's tricky. So the next best, I think would be this and time limit. Got six months to submit everything you have on these eight major questions where there are trade-offs.

They'll have three months to decide it. They're gonna decide it in good faith. And then once that's done, that's it. Let's not have any more reviews on that decision. 'cause these are five experts, or 12, or however many you wanna do and do it. That

Samuel: I think, and the good news about the, you know, what the, um, the highways engineers and the NHS committees show us is that it's actually not impossible for the British state to do that.

Like, it's not, it, sometimes it will be ministerial judgment. Inevitably, there are so many decisions that have to be made that they can't all be made by Aries state. So it will need to be alienated into a process of some kind. But like, it does, like also it's still. The key thing is the decision is made by a body who is responsible for all of the different values that are affected here, like effect on humans and effect on bats or whatever the case may be.

Effect on economic growth, effect on the environment, effect on birds and effect on our ability to produce renewable energy. And then they have to make, like do their best to make a sane trade off between these values. And I just like in the cases where cases like these NHS committees or the highways engineers where they are making those trade offs consciously and trying to do it responsibly, I think like the evidence seems to be, we sometimes disagree with them, but they're not like off the charts crazy.

Yeah. And so they'll come to, they're people, you know, not so different to us. They'll come to judgments about it that are not so different to our judgments. The important thing is just that like someone actually makes a conscious call on the trade off and tries to do it in line with the, like, receive rationality of the, and with the framework and the

Ben: governance

Samuel: and

Ben: Exactly.

So I, I know there's a lot of anti sentiment against technocratic solutions and wanko at the moment, but I actually think Nice. Which is this, the health body which looks at it, given all of the constraints, actually does really well. They look at it, they have a thing, their budget's maybe not as high as we would wish, but these are the constraints.

They're under uhhuh. Thinking back to transport planning and the like and maybe going via other places you've been, I think you've spent some time in Berlin or in Germany, and I think Berlin mixes, uh, rent controls. Is it this Mitch Spiegel and street grids? I think Prussian age street grids.

And they're quite permissive on some forms of alterations. So I'd be, I'd be interested in what you think about this mix of rent control and street grids and how successful these policies are, and whether I would say they're kind of culturally specific, so I'm not sure how much you could import to Britain or other countries, but to the extent that you saw good things in Berlin, what would you like to export to Britain or other cities?

Samuel: I mean, I think rent control is a disastrous policy and has always been disastrous wherever it's been tried in. But in Berlin, they didn't really have, so the municipality tried to impose rent controls or did impose rent controls a few years ago. But there was litigation against them and eventually the German Constitutional court decided that it's not an area over which the Bunes lender have jurisdiction is a federal matter.

The federal government has some very limited, uh, rent control policies. I, I, a few weeks ago I was looking into, I was in Berlin actually. I looked into how this worked and I, I don't think I will get the precise details right if I, but it's, so there's some kind of second generation rent control system but it doesn't like rents and Berlin are not much below or maybe not really at all below their market level.

It's a fairly, it's actually a not, it is an elaborate song and dance that doesn't have that much effect in practice.

Ben: Yeah, it's true. When I've looked at it and people looked at it that it was a, it is a sort of pseudo rent control. That's right. The interesting thing about it, actually, we're gonna go off on the, to another tangent, is it to my mind, it actually intersects with a slightly different social contract that long-term tenants and long-term landlords have in the German market in Berlin and, and others.

But it's the way that they're organized. So it's not social housing, but it's the way their landlord thinks about it, but also that quid pro quo, as you can see it as an extreme, if you're a landlord of student housing, you do not necessarily expect your students to treat your property in a way that a long-term owner of that property might for, you know, various reasons, age and transience of tenancy and with our assured.

Shorthold tendencies, say in a lot of British cities, they tend to be six months or six to 12 months. Again, it's sort of in between. We have got some longer and some longer thinking around that. But German tendencies, and again, this is an average, tend to tilt towards this longer term, but there is a little bit of, we, the rent is maybe not gonna be as high as you would have a shorter term, or we'll say, you know, Airbnb in a hotel.

But the quid pro quo is you are going to look after this property or think about this property a little bit closer to thinking about it if you are gonna be owning it for 50 years or, or a hundred years. And essentially my view about the pseudo form of laws or controls they have is embodying a little bit of this.

Unwritten, the social contract that you have between landlord and tenant, of which some of it is embodied in law, and actually you, you see it in London, in, in different ways, is of where we had the tenancy or, or, or potentially how the Great Estates have looked at some of their the way that they look at their properties, but also their relationship with tenancy and the age of that tenancy.

So I've kind of gone off on a tangent there, but that, that's one of the things I think is kind of interesting about the German form of looking at this land or tenant part. I would, but also these alterations and street grids and everything

Samuel: else, I would find it very interesting as, so I'm basically, I'm not gonna give you a good answer on tenancies because I, I find it a very interesting subject.

I have never looked into it very systematically, so I can tell you some. Here are some random interesting facts about the history of tenure in Germany. So at the start of the 20th century, Berlin was almost entirely a renting city. It was over 90% renters, maybe over 95% renters in the actual era, like jurisdiction of the, um, the city of Berlin.

You couldn't have, so what, like owning a flat was, I think legally impossible? I think it did. There was some limited system for it in, uh, the 19th century, but I think it was then got rid of, in the Burges Gazettes book, the, um, German civil code that was introduced in, at, around the turn of the century.

So you could only rent an apartment unlike in, I mean Britain, it was, people mostly rented apartments for a long time, but there was the leasehold system which created, there was some option for having a building where like one person owns the whole building and then the apartments are in some sense also owned separately in this kind of communal sort of complic.

That just wasn't really possible for Germans. There was like someone who owned the building and then there were a bunch of people who rented. I wasn't aware of. And France. France had, um, the system of the modern French system, Cote, which is their equivalent of share freehold, basically, um, didn't exist at all in the early 20th century.

Gradually develops in the course of the 20th century, but it, they were entirely rental societies for flats. Obviously homes were more complicated, houses were more complicated picture. The other thing is most of the, like continental countries have always had a larger share or have for several centuries had a much larger share of their population living in flats than us.

And they have. So it's still, now this is, it's a more complicated people picture than English. People have a, uh, have an oversimplified view of this on which content or Europeans all live in flats and English people live in terrorist houses. And that was kind of was true in 1914, but is far more complicated now.

And like Paris has enormous suburbs. German cities have considerable suburbs made up of detached houses where people are under occupiers. So it's, it's much more complicated than, but the crude simplification is still have some validity. There are still, you know, the cause of French and German cities and still more Spanish, Italian cities are all flats and lots of like families and like the middle and upper classes of these cities are based in flats, in inner suburbs.

And so a whole bunch of institutions have developed to suit those people. Whereas in England, like you had a little, you know, small number of flats built in the 19 mansion blocks, small number built in the interwar period, but very, you know, two sort of tens of thousands, maybe a couple of hundred thousand overall post-war era.

There is no private sector, flat building and all flats built for social housing. And then flat building takes off again in like the eighties and nineties and has been quite a lot of it since then. And that's mostly targeted at. Basically at yuppies like un the childless young people who want to live in inner city areas.

And so the whole, like this immense market that exists in continental countries for the family apartment and all the institutions that families look for, like they care so much more about security and about being settled in one place than yuppies do, who are often quite happy to move around. A bit like that's developed over a long period of time in German speaking Europe.

So they had no option of shared ownership at these building. They do have that now, but they, for a long time they had no option of shared ownership. It had to be done through renting. And they had a huge market of middle class families who also wanted to be living in apartments. And so you can see why under those conditions, renting institutions for private renting would develop that gave greater security of tenure.

Um, and that were very long termist in their approach.

Ben: Yeah. And the kind of things that families would. Families would want. It's interesting. I hadn't heard it like that. That makes a lot of sense to me. And it's quite fascinating. I also think that this way of house building that we've done over the last few decades, because we value internal utility and aesthetics.

So internet, maybe even air condition or how your kitchen looks, uh, and we put value into that, or house builders put value into that, so they won't put the ornamentation because yes, ornamentation has a little bit of a return, but the return on upskilling, your walk-in shower is much larger. And so actually some of our aesthetic value has gone into the internals of houses.

And you know, if you looked in the internals of houses a hundred years ago they're not as valuable as the internals today. So I, I do think some of that value has gone that way.

Samuel: There's some lifecycle stuff here. Yeah. So there's some, I don't know this stuff at all. Well, I'm not sure. I'm not, I don't say this with much confidence, but I people, what I'm told by developers is if you are.

A yuppie buying a flat, you're probably fairly relaxed about the exterior facade of your flat. Like it's really, you probably don't vest your identity in it. And what you care about is location and some like internal conveniences then, like the real, the age where people really care about what their home looks like is like the central family period where you, like your household is an institution and you want to project that to the world.

And that's where people want to, you know, wanna move to conservation areas and spend loads of money doing renovations and plant their front garden and all the rest. Um, and then elderly people, a bit more of a mixed picture. And sometimes because of the, like, um, because life gets physically harder in so many ways, although when you are, you know, very old, physically harder in so many ways, you sometimes have to start caring a bit more about internal conveniences again.

Yeah, and that's, I've been told that a number of times by developers and it kind kind of makes intuitive sense to me. And then you think maybe one of the things which has happened in modern Western cities is the relative shares of those different groups of the population have changed. Like we've got lots more young child that unmarried people living in flats.

We've got lots more elderly people living for long periods with challenging physical conditions. And the share of like I am an institution, families has fallen. And that might be one of the factors. I don't think this is like my general theory of it, but I think that might, might be one of the factors that drives changes in the built environment.

Ben: Yeah. For sure. Okay, so coming back to England there's some who argue that this green belt idea needs to be re-looked at because it was put in so many years ago. And there's some parts of the green belt, which aren't as green as, as maybe advocates think. Obviously there's urban scroll as an issue.

Um, uh, if you had control, what would you think of the greenbelt? Would you redraw it and what urban forms would you like to see around that? Or would you, would you have a completely different idea about how we assess how we do our urban planning?

Samuel: I've always been a moderate supporter of greenbelt reform.

I, I, you know, we were a bit of an anomaly internationally. It's like French and Germans. Spanish and Italians don't have green belts. I mean, they have some forms of urban containment, but this idea that London has like completely stopped growing in 1939, growing outwards in 1939 and still today like.

The edge of London is where the builders laid down their tools when we went to war with Germany. And you can find unfinished streets where the, the road just goes out into nowhere and stops because the builders were confident that when the war ended, they could finish the street. And in fact, it never happened.

Like I don't, this is an insane situation to now does that mean that we should just like, let all cities grow outwards in a completely uncontrolled, unplanned way that we should have, like ribbon development and sprawl and we should grow in the way that Los Angeles has? Good, no, I certainly don't think that either, but like that's not the, those are not the two only alternatives.

There is a possible world where we protect the downs and the Chilton Hills, the national landscapes, and where we manage outward growth so that it takes place along railway lines and comes you know, something like the form that Metro Land grew at the end of the 19th or the early 20th centuries where like.

Mixed use middle density settlements around railway stations with good links into London or into other cities in the cases where there's demand for growth but with clearly defined boundaries with preserved rural areas to give people access to green space. A kind of like, um, a the 19th century you think is a starfish city where you have like legs of arm starfish have legs or arms, but like, uh, the starfish arms reach out, but they're areas of countryside between, and that's how kind of cities like Copenhagen, for example, have managed their growth since the second World war?

I, I have no, like grand plan for London worked out, you know, ready to go for what I'd do if I had a dictatorial powers over greenbelt reform. But yes, I do support a, a moderate version of greenbelt reform in four cities where there's, um, enormous demand for, uh, additional housing.

Ben: And a technocratic committee could probably do this quite well as well.

This trade offs okay, let's protect this. Let's not,

Samuel: or yeah. I mean, it's gonna be some, yeah. Some kind of planning process. Yeah. I'm very much, I, to some extent I've changed on this, but I am, um, I consider myself to be extremely pro planning. Like I do think that, uh, building stuff there are endemic collective action problems, and often you can only solve those by having some kind of planning authority.

The problem that we have is that planning authorities like. They end up with funny incentives. They get captured by one, one little group of the community, or they serve the interest of one neighborhood against all the other neighborhoods or these kinds of, so you end up with various problems with your incentives and principal agent problems and these kinds of, and so you end up with like a bad kind of planning.

But the solution to this is not tear up the planning system and go to a kind of like, panarchy that you get in low state capacity countries. The solution is to try and perform it so that to the, you know, greatest extent possible, we end up with, with good authorities making good decisions about Yes.

Ben: I, I think even most, although not all classical liberals, free market advocates suggest that you put in, transport and other public good infrastructure, you know, as your minimum and, and that's planned. And then, uh, you know, they do want. Remove zoning to a, a wider extent and, and point to some developing nation countries, which are built organically quite well.

But the, particularly on, at, at the very minimum where you put your sewage or waterworks and your transport is quite important there.

Samuel: Yeah. I mean, how 19th century cities developed in Europe, right. They weren't completely unplanned in lots of countries in Germany and in to some extent in Italy and in Spain and United States.

They, uh, the state completely planned the street network and just, uh, you know, that there are maps where the state said, this is where all the streets are going to go. In some cases, they then compulsorily purchased the land that would be the street network and laid out the streets and just left the landowners to then gradually develop it there.

Lots of transport planning went on, some other kinds of infrastructure planning went on, but it was nonetheless, overall obviously a far more liberal system and, and one that was far more pro-development and. London grew from 1 million people in 1800 to 7 million people in 1914. And those people, the amount of housing each person had, you know, greatly expanded at the same time.

So it was a tremendously like expansionist. Expansionist and, and, um, in a sense permissive system, but not a completely unplanned system.

Ben: Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. Works in progress is associated with Stripe. Patrick Collinson seems to have a fascination with pumping stations, the Pacific pride perhaps hidden in 19th century pump station infrastructure.

What do you make of that aesthetic obsession and what maybe today would be a civic upgrade equivalent?

Samuel: Yeah, I don't fully understand. I've never looked into it properly. What happened with these, I mean, some of them really remarkable and even remarkable interiors in these buildings. You think, well, why were they investing in the interior of those buildings?

Did people go and visit? I don't know. So I, I'm too largely ignorant of this topic to comment on it very authoritatively. There's clearly a wider pattern though that like 19th century, certainly public authorities and also private ones to some extent, did invest in these buildings. And it was seen, it was expected of them that they would do this.

It was seen as like, part of, if they didn't do it at all, they would look ridiculous and people would like mock and feel like slightly betrayed by them or so. And that does extend to pretty mundane buildings, like in the extreme case, pumping stations, but also to like hospitals or a famous, you know, if you see a really ugly building in Britain today, you've got like really, really ugly, like maximum ugliness.

You know, it's probably a hospital and that's, there, there were some factories, you know, some university buildings might be as bad, but it's a, it's a, hospitals are often, whereas in, you know, in the 19th century, these hospitals, they were not necessarily particularly elegant buildings. In, in inevitably a hospital has to like, stack floors on top of each other and it has to have lots of repetition in it.

And this kind of, and it's got very complicated functional requirements, which mean you have to make compromises and trade offs. But they're like basically attractive buildings that, uh, still if, you know, when they get converted today, people turn them into luxury flats or something. That's pretty interesting.

Yeah, and that's, uh, that is one of the great questions, you know, like why, like extremely rich people will always be able to patronize exquisite buildings and their tastes will change in various ways, but I, they're always going to produce some interesting stuff. But how it was that, that it was a kind of a norm for institutional bodies, both public and private, to produce stuff that was generally pretty good and was sometimes really spectacular.

That's, you know, that's a bigger more puzzling question in a way.

Ben: Yes. Exactly. Can't be completely answered. Although I do think part of it is the internal aesthetics part. So hospitals have to spend so much more on their on their budget, on the machines and stuff inside that they don't think about the outside.

And then some of it I think is in the pride of the workers. So if you see Victorian sewage works like the brick work in the tunnels, some of it is actually quite beautiful and no one's ever seen that brick work. So there is, there was some element of this is how this is how it's done. Um, and maybe there is something on that.

But again, famously and. Patrick has, I think, two British telephone boxes in the Stripe offices. And he points to one as being beautiful and one is not. But actually that the value of, particularly if it's not gonna cost you anything differently about that beautiful design, is a very large intangible, which then could say that, and actually programmers talk about this a little bit.

Beautiful code actually does mean, does mean something. Anyway, I'll have a little bit of underrated, overrated. And then a, a couple of last questions if you like. So I'm gonna throw out something to you and you can say underrated, overrated, or you can just give a little comment or you can pass on these things.

So you'd be very bad at this. Yeah, we've had quite long rambles and things. We might not be very good at this, uh, short form, but we give it a go. Underrated or overrated charter cities.

Samuel: I think they're a promising, interesting idea. I'm much I think I would love to know more about is the way that local government worked in the Middle Ages, because basically European cities in the Middle Ages were, and this is maybe a bit of a simplification, but roughly speaking, the King gave, or the central government gave a charter to a kind of a, kind of like a charitable trust or something, a bit like, uh, and this charter gave them certain revenue raising powers and certain jurisdictional powers over a certain territory.

And then they're like, well, off you go have a go at getting a city going here. And these survived in many countries, right up to the 19th century in municipal corporations. They were basically charter cities, right? That was like how the cities of Europe developed for centuries. And maybe one of the things that distinguished them from Asian cities, which were, you know, also obviously existed, but didn't have municipal government in quite the same way and maybe plateaued in a different way that, so I was like I've never looked into this properly, I dunno much about municipal government before the 19th century, but very interesting that, like charter cities may have been one of the big USPS of Western civilization before the 19th century, and they were extremely widespread and maybe successful, although of course they did mostly get abolished eventually.

So they're like, it seems to be like a frightfully interesting subject, which I don't know much about. And charter cities today, like, can they find any way of actually getting a stable political equilibrium with modern governments? Maybe not. I don't know, but like, definitely like something I find interesting and enjoy thinking and talking about and learning.

Worth exploring. Okay. So moderately underrated. I think that's sounds, yeah, I think that's probably the correct summary of my response here. Low traffic neighborhoods, I love low traffic neighborhoods. I mean, honestly in Islington, I, there's not many things that I would, if the council proposed to remove the low traffic neighborhood from my area I live in is I would be camping outside the town hall and like appearing unshaven and uh, uh, uh, uh, screaming at the councilors and officers as they went in to try.

I, um, I think their value creating. And um, the funny thing is low traffic neighborhoods are. Left coded and seen as, you know, there's a conspiracy of cyclists and woke and so forth, whereas cul-de-sacs are seen as right coded and, uh, planned by all these like, car companies and ignorance suburbanites and so forth.

But they are in fact basically the same thing. And this like totally obvious point that these two things that are like seen because of the way, the idiotic way that our political culture sorts issues according to like cultural, social and cultural coalitions or lifestyle choices or something. They've, like this elaborate fantasy has emerged that we are, there's this u which side of society you're on should dictate whether you are in favor of cul-de-sacs or in favor and they're mutually exclusive and opposed.

And these are the, basically the same thing in both ca, like a cul-de-sac with a pedestrian alley at the end of it that allows pe permeability for pedestrians and cyclists, but not for cars is essentially a purpose-built low traffic neighborhood. Yeah, and the traffic neighborhood is an attempt to create that in a neighborhood that wasn't originally designed for it.

We know that the private market like produces masses and masses of cul-de-sacs like that because people hate cars. I mean, they like having a car to get places, but they hate having cars roaring past their home. That we know that this is like overwhelmingly value creating for residential neighborhoods in a wide variety of contexts.

Of course, we should try to retrofit this into existing residential neighborhoods where it's possible to do so. But all, you know, the flip side of that is that all the people who love ltms should have a more sophisticated view about cul-de-sacs that like, yes, we should try to preserve pedestrian per permeability in these things.

Permeability for cyclists. Yes, mixed use walkability. All this is totally right as a priority, but like the cul-de-sac per se, is a completely rational adaptation of people to, I really, really don't want to have masses of cars driving fast in front of my house and killing my children and creating noise in the middle of the night, and so on.

Ben: Yeah, it's like you say, it's a very equivalent idea and actually intersects with other things. Like I'm I've now seen a, a bit, I think it was based on the Dutch work on these no road marking type systems around, which also work very well with low traffic neighborhood, LTN. And they definitely seem, from me anecdotally looking at it and the data seems to that, that they just work really well.

Well,

Samuel: they vote, that's it. Like, uh, neighborhoods for Living is roughly the translation and they, uh, they have like five mile an hour limits for cars in these residential areas and like overwhelming pedestrian priority that. Yeah. And no markings. And you

Ben: have to be careful. And the, the the Dutch traffic planner person who did that to prove how successful it was gonna be when in their pilot one, uh, walked backwards or walked backwards, blindfolded across the streets to prove how safe it was to be, to like, say, like this is how much he believed in it.

So at least I, I dunno if that's an apocryphal story, but it seems true.

Samuel: Yeah. And they're not, um, you know, I'm not anti car. Like there are amazing technologies and for rural areas and small towns, they've been totally transformative. And those places probably would've just died out or, if it hadn't been for their ex, for their existence.

But, um, but for cities, in the residential area. If you take any journey you do by car, the amount of it that you spend on residential streets relative to arterial roads, like it's so small and the right to drive at 30 miles an hour through that little residential street you start on onto your arterial road and then the little one you maybe end on right at the end.

That has very little effect on journey time in most. I mean there are some exceptions to that, but in most cases very little. Um, exactly. So, and yet it has so much effect on the safety and the immunity of the streets.

Ben: Exactly. And I think that is where you can do that trade off. Like you say, there's some exceptions where such an increased journey time, you could say it's an economic cost which may outweigh the trade off, but for the vast majority, particularly at say London, it's so minuscule you're not seeing any economic cost to a few minutes on your, on your traffic time and you're seeing a huge increase in the utility, either via accidents or everything else in the community.

Samuel: Needless to say, there, there will be TNS that cut some journeys, which for some people, you know, does add five minutes or eight minutes or whatever it may be, and you can perfectly well understand why I mean. Those people are the losers from the L tns. I can perfectly well understand why they're not happy, but, you know, public policy does have to aggregate and weigh interests.

And I was, I'm afraid that was the way the cookie crumbles.

Ben: I guess back to planning design, minimum space requirements, underrated, overrated,

Samuel: um, generally a bad idea. The analogy is like, suppose that you had you know, you have a country where there isn't enough food to go around, but there is enough that you can give people a basic ration and they'll survive.

They won't be comfortable, but they'll survive. And you say, no, no, basic ration isn't, you know, people deserve comfort. We are gonna require that nobody receive a ration of food beneath this really quite generous ration of food. And so instead what you get. Is not everyone getting the basic rational and surviving, but like two thirds of people get this quite generous ation on the remaining thirds after to death.

That's basically what minimum space standards. Yes, this is a simplification, but that is basically what minimum space standards do in housing. Poor societies like ours, they say like, we refuse to have anyone living in a small home, but we're not going to liberalize housing supply enough that every, there's enough, you know, enough homes around for everyone to have a big home.

So like, some people will get big or medium sized homes and the, the remaining unlucky people will get nothing and we'll end up with a high rate of homelessness and with other kinds of household suppression when people are, you know, living with their parents or whatever it may be. So it seems to me that I can, I sure it has humanitarian motives behind it, but very poorly thought, thought through and harms, um, intent, like acutely harms a subset of the people whom it's intended to help.

And I think it's, I mostly, I think they're very bad. There may be some small exemptions, but special cases, but, um, but yeah, I generally think they're a bad idea over overrated. Yes.

Ben: And I think actually you can offset, uh, a lot of the challenges with better design of which better design shouldn't cost you actually anything if you think about it in, in terms of that.

Yeah. Be pretty good for many purposes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Okay, last one on the overrated, underrated gentle density. I guess this is the whole Create Streets idea, so it's gonna be underrated, but maybe you wanna talk about how you think about gentle density. Well, it's funny,

Samuel: Benjamin, because in a way, this stuff that like emerged with Prince of Wales whatever decades ago, like actually now, it's pretty mainstream.

If you go to a, if you look at all the British planning documents produced over the last 25 years, whatever, since um, the the famous Compact Cities report, um, report by Norman Foster the, uh, and then through the Urban Design Compendium and the feral review and all these different documents, they're all in favor of urban density.

They're all in favor of mixed use. They're all in favor mostly, but basically in favor of traditional block patterns. And this kind of you look at what's taught any school of planning today, and it will be pro urban density, promix use you know, it will differ with Nicholas. Nicholas creates streets and the, the gentle entity movement.

We'll go a bit further on some of this stuff. A and they will be, then they have the, the content con controversial stuff that creates streets sympathetic to traditional architecture as an option. Whereas, you know, lots of people in the planning establishment think it's prestige and bad and so on. But like the basic urbanism of gentle density has become mainstream now and is no longer like a niche thing, which is only being campaigned for by Prince Charles.

So yeah, probably still underrated, but actually now like generally highly rated. And the question is that why do we fail to deliver it in practice rather than like, are we, should we be in favor of it? Or not becoming our mainstream idea,

Ben: but execution, Paul. Okay. Yeah, that's right. And then last couple of questions maybe continuing sort of on underrated is what would be your most underrated or potentially favorite.

Building or piece of urban planning or design,

Samuel: The one I bang on about at the moment, I mean, this isn't exactly a, a, this isn't exactly a building or a piece of urban design, but I say that my, my, my underrated thing I bang on is the city of Dresden Preston, I think is the most underrated city in Europe.

It's, um, that's the, I mean, I haven't been to every city in Europe, so I'm not really qualified to make that claim.

Ben: Postwar reconstruction or No?

Samuel: Partly so some, but it's got lots of, partly just because it's in a very beautiful part of Europe. Saxony is a, like a lovely area. It wasn't part of the grand tour and then it fell under communist rule, so it's not really like in England and France, people don't really know about it but it's like, it's extremely beautiful.

The Saxon Alps dressed in and beautifully situated in this V by a floodplain with the hills rising above it. It was then in the 18th century, they accidentally invented porcelain, an al uh, a Saxon Alchemist who was trying to invent the philosopher stone. Inadvertently worked out how to create porcelain, which previously could only be imported from China, and it was hugely fashionable in the 18 mice, mice and porcelain, which still the thing people know about that.

And so it made the electorate extremely rich and the electorate spent all this money on extraordinary art and architecture, which is still all so much of which have survived or was reconstructed. Interestingly, much of it was reconstructed by the communist government after the Second World War, a completely forgotten chapter in, uh, in history.

And then over the last 2002, there was a referendum in Dresden, um, on whether they should rebuild the city center. And they decisively won for the pro rebuilding people. And since then, they've rebuilt the famous Protestant church, the Kyia, um, and they've rebuilt lots of the urban fabric and it's, you know, been.

Beautifully done to an extremely high standard. Uh, and so it's now this what was once one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and it is extraordinary. They call it Florence, on the elbow in German. This extraordinary center of art and culture and which some of which survived, uh, always reconstructed immediately after the war and some of which is being rebuilt now.

And it's also, you know, it is got a superb tram network and, uh, and generally like higher up and immunity is a very nice place to be. So I, I am like a bit preoccupied with this city and kind of buttonholing people and going on about it at the moment

Ben: and best than underrated. And that's the one where they redoing facade.

So they had plain enough facades and they're putting it back. No.

Samuel: No, it's actually, so that's happening, um, a bit all over Germany. Everyone, some of that is happening in Dresden, but in Dresden it's, it's mostly just fallow land. They, there's, I don't think the recon, I'm not sure a single building has been demolished in the reconstruction of the Dresden City Center because there was so much like plots that had never been rebuilt after the war dressed in the communist government didn't, it wasn't, all bad in its urban policy.

Interesting. But it hadn't, certainly not been concerned to rebuild a density center. And so there's just just empty plots where they could put stuff. And so it's mostly just been building on empty band. Not either retrofitting existing buildings or demolishing modern buildings and rebuilding new traditional ones.

Ben: Okay. And then thinking out to the future, and backwards. So if it's 2050 and someone has asked you what finally fixed Britain's housing supply issue, what do you think would've been the institutional reform or the things that we could point to that would've would've fixed it over the decades?

Samuel: That's, uh, probably a bigger question than I can ask at the end, answer at the end of a podcast, but I think broadly speaking, I think the answer is so I constraints on development.

I have like far more sympathy for nimbyism than most people in the housing reform movement. Like I think random, many kinds of development have genuine negative externalities and they really are like a pain and devalue the homes of the. You know, of neighbors and it's totally rational for people to want to manage change in their neighborhood, to ensure that neighborhood values are preserved and to ensure that the investment that they've made in this place is not destroyed by irresponsibly, by their neighbors.

And we should certainly not wish for that instinct to die out in the English English people because it's so important as a way in which places are created. So I'm, a lot of the emotional tone of standard nimbyism is, I think like morally wrong and also just politically wrong because like people will fight so hard to protect these things.

They've managed in the space of, 50 years, in the first half of 20th century, they managed to impose these stringent development controls all over the world. Their success is total, uh, the huge YB movements in various countries have basically failed to make much progress against them and will probably continue to fail because the interest they're up against are so strong.

But like this interesting thing has happened, which is that in some parts places with an acute housing shortage, new housing is now extremely valuable and the right to develop new housing is now extremely valuable. And so you see these interesting experiments in places like well, I mean there are big examples in places like South Korea or in Israel or in part parts of the United States where you give communities the right to up zone themselves to allow more development.

And they realize if we do this, if we allow more development in this area, we all become drastically better off because the floor space prohibited by development control. Has become steadily more valuable as the housing shortage has got worse and worse and worse. And at a certain point it outweighed the immunity value that is preserved through development controls.

And then, and that was, that point was in fact passed long ago in many of the world's great cities. And now like your home, your property becomes 400% more valuable if you upzone it. You make millions of pounds if you upzone it in many places. And then the underlying coalition of interest starts changing.

And people start thinking now, actually, even as we had an interest in the past in preventing and controlling change, now maybe we have an interest in enabling change. So I think trying to build those new coalitions of interest that, that the housing shortage has potentially made possible and trying to create win-wins rather than having an adversarial approach to planning reform.

I think that is where the great durable shift may come from rather than from the kind of reform that we do that we've traditionally attempted. Using people's self interest. Yeah, that makes sense.

Ben: Yes, that's right. Like

Samuel: incentives do actually

Ben: work. Who knew? Great. And then last question, do you have any life advice or career advice or any other thoughts, current projects that you wanna share, um, with listeners and viewers in terms of a career in thinking about design or think tanks or anything that you've done that you would suggest to listeners?

Samuel: I certainly don't have any advice for a career in thinking about design. Like I don't, I seem to have evolved one, but I certainly, you know, never expected to and have no understanding of how it happened. I, um, policy, I would say it's, you know, you can work in policy and achieve nothing, but you can achieve enormous things.

It's amazing how in Britain. You like all the center right think tanks employ fewer than a hundred researchers, the left wing think tanks, if excluding the TBI, which Tony Bar Institute to put a special case. They're even smaller. I to the, employee 80 research, 60 research or something like that.

And those people are mostly, you know, in their twenties. And then there are some people who work in government, you know, tens of people who work in government as government advisors. It's a tiny world, a tiny world of mostly very junior people. And those people do make up after a fashion, the intellectual pipeline that reaches the British state.

So like working in that, you have scope to be incredibly influential. The amazing thing is that it's not, you know, like billionaires haven't noticed that with trivial sums of money. They could. Basically like take over this pipeline and like dominate the stream of ideas that reaches at least one of the two sides of British politics, which has really not basically, I mean, there's some limited examples of that, but basically hasn't really happened.

Kind of fascinating that's the case but like there's so little money in it. There's so little so few people involved that it's a remarkably easy career to have impact in. So if you, if you're interested in public service and and interested in doing work that, uh, that really matters, I've had like total confidence in commending working in policy to people

Ben: that, that sounds very impactful. Yeah. That, um, public policy influence either being on the research side or I guess being, if you can make it as a public intellectual or doing that, is, um, relatively few people influencing quite important policies and things. So yeah, that's right. Possible to make a difference.

And with that, Samuel, thank you very much.

Samuel: My pleasure. 

Tim Mak: War Reporting Journey in Ukraine | Podcast

Tim Mak moved to Ukraine in 2022, a day before war broke out. Tim, a former US investigative correspondent, decided to stay and start up his own reporting at Counter Offensive. He now reports from Kyiv. 

“People didn’t connect with my coverage of war crimes — they connected with the dogs I saw in the street. So I built a publication that leads with people, not just news.”

On the podcast, Tim discusses the day-to-day life in war-torn Kyiv, focusing on the chronic stress rather than immediate physical danger residents face. He recounts his critical role in documenting human stories from the war front and shares his personal journey, having moved to Ukraine right as the war began. We  touch on the operational challenges and ethical considerations in war reporting, the importance of human interest stories, and how new technology like AI affects journalism.

“We misunderstand the cost of war because we’ve lived in peace for so long. But if we go back — which is far more common in human history — the devastation will be immense.”

Tim talks about the broader geopolitical implications of the conflict and his hopes for the future of independent journalism.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on YouTube.

Contents

• 00:25 Life in Kiev During Wartime

• 03:10 Tim's Arrival and Early Experiences in Ukraine

• 04:57 Launching The Counter Offensive

• 05:24 Human Interest Stories and Subscriber Growth

• 09:50 Challenges and Ethics in War Reporting

• 14:14 The Power of Individual Narratives

• 25:42 Independent Journalism and Future Prospects

• 34:55 Geopolitical Reflections and Ukraine's Needs

• 44:34 Final Thoughts and Advice
  
  

Transcript (AI assisted so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Tim Mak. Tim is in Kyiv in Ukraine. He left his role in the US as an investigative res correspondent and started the counter Offensive, and this essentially is a war correspondence, open notebook reporting live from Kyiv on the human stories from the front.

Tim, welcome.

Tim:  Thanks so much for having me

Ben: Tell me, what is a day in the life of Kyiv today? What does that feel like?

Tim: It's an interesting question. I think when friends and relatives envision what I'm doing in Kyiv, they think I must be dodging mortar shells on the way to the bakery to grab a loaf of bread or something like that.

But the kind of average. Life in Ukraine and the cost of it during wartime are a little less physically violent and a lot more chronically stressful, right? And so what I mean by that is the real kind of physiological and mental strain comes from not knowing whether you'll be safe over and over and over again.

Until you leave the country, if you get the chance to leave the country, it's the strain of anticipating the next raid, anticipating the next round of gunfire, anticipating the next explosion or drone kamikaze, drone bombing, missile attack, and so on. And that's the real strain. We know that, for example sleep deprivation can be considered on par with torture when done in a long term, on a long term basis, has been used as a tool to torture in warfare.

I wouldn't say it's as acute or or as as deliberately used in this fashion, but it is the effect of living in a war zone long term is never really feeling safe, never really getting a good night's sleep, and that really drags out. And it's, I don't say this to put it spotlight on me in particular because this is millions of people all across the country that are experiencing a very similar phenomenon.

Ben: Sure. So it's tilts towards a slow drip water torture than a kind of acute, or there's more of a series of acute, which makes it feel really chronic,

Tim: there are acute experiences, obviously for those who are at the very sites of the attack. But keeping a city about the size of Chicago, if there are several dozen attacks, as devastating as they are, they may maim and kill people, but the chances of you being in the particular spot where these these explosions occur are not extremely high. O obviously it's life changing and for some wor life ending and terribly traumatic for the people acutely, specifically at the places where these missiles and drones explode.

But just by the law of of num of large numbers, it's very unlikely to it's very unlikely to hit you in particular. It's the strain of it, the, it's the not knowing, it's the uncertainty.

Ben: That makes a lot of sense on that front. You landed in the Ukraine just as the war was starting. What was going through your mind just before an Intuit and I guess that kind of changed Yeah.

Your outlook on the World, on Life,

Tim: I got tapped to come to Kyiv. I was working for a major American News at the time as an investigative correspondent, and I got tapped to come to Kyiv because of my military background. I used to be a US Army medic and, i, I got sent to Ukraine in case of war might break out.

You may remember in 2020, late 2021, early 2022 that the that the Biden administration had been very public about what it expected to be an invasion of Ukraine. But but they had also said that it would happen in mid-February. So by, by the time the invasion actually occurred, there was a lot of skepticism that it would ever occur.

So I arrived as it happens the night the invasion began just a few hours before the bombing first started. And I remember getting a call at 3:00 AM from my editor saying, you better get downstairs. Something is happening. And I was just so beset by jet lag and confusion that I did the only thing you'd really ever do when you wake up, which is I remember walking into the bathroom and beginning to brush my teeth and looking at the mirror and thinking what is happening?

I remember just brushing my teeth and thinking what is going on? And that's how my Ukraine experience started. I thought that I would be in. Ukraine for two weeks. And now I've been in Ukraine for, about almost three and a half years now. And so it totally changed the course of my life in ways that I didn't expect.

After covering Ukraine for a year for this American media company I I left and I started my own company called The Counter Offensive, which as you mentioned, covers human interest stories of the war, and then. Nine months ago, we launched a second publication called counter Offensive Pro, which covers Ukrainian Defense Technology and Regulation.

So two very different publications taking two very different aspects to reporting and writing about the war. 

Ben: And on the human interest story, which I guess is the kind of more person in the street, consumer orientated one. I think I saw you're up to definitely over a hundred thousand subscribers.

Now obviously there's a free and a paid sort of version, how has that gone and how's that accelerated

Tim: 152,000 and change, but who is counting? How's that going? It's interesting it's been a real struggle. I didn't ever get into this thinking that it would be a business, that it would be successful that would, it would have any longevity.

I launched it thinking it might be a side gig that I would do as I freelance for other, major American publications. But it took off, I think because it featured a kind of war correspondence or foreign correspondence that was a lot more personable, was a lot more intimate and included all the sorts of things that typical, quote unquote serious journalism or mainstream journalism would've left in that reporter's notebooks.

That there was a, that for me. There was a real intent to pull back the curtain and I'll take a step back. During the first year of the war while I was covering covering Ukraine for NPR, what I found I. I would tweet out all sorts of things that I saw, even dogs that I saw on the street and how they were being treated.

And with apologies to all the serious journalism I did about war crimes. About about the battlefield, about the siege of Kyiv. People seem to connect with the human characters and the vignettes and the people who illustrated the news stories more than the news stories itself.

And so that was the whole concept that I brought to the counter offensive, is that we're not gonna tell you the news. IE what happened and leave it there. We're gonna introduce you to someone who went through. Through the news and by learning about this person, by, by profiling this person, you're gonna read this and learn the news itself.

That the human side gets elevated and the who, what, when gets put in a secondary position. And it's been really interesting to see it. Now we're the number one we're the number one substack in the international category.

Ben: That's amazing. From the feedback you were getting via social medias and the like, and what made you decide to stay in Ukraine? Jack it all in, stable or as stable as any kind of journalist job might be in, in the us I. Stay in Ukraine, report this way, change your life. Was, were there other elements which went this is reporting on this human interest story is I'm in the right place at the right time, if not me, who or what went through to say, okay, this is it for the foreseeable future, I'm here.

Tim: I think the answer is a lot less heroic than that. I think. I think it's a lot of it had to do with. What I wanted to do with my life and the trajectory of my life. And I remember after the first year of the war, or close to the end of the first year of the war, was wrapping up. And I I I moved to Los Angeles, which is something that I had said I wanted to do for a long time.

I loved to surf and I I love the beach. And I remember sitting there. And being able to surf as much as I want or sit on the beach as much as I like, and just being miserable, reading about all these things happening in Ukraine, knowing that my colleagues and friends were out there and me not being anywhere near it and not being done with telling the story and feeling like I had other ways to to bring attention to what was happening and.

So I thought, this is about the time in my career. I was 30 35 or 36 at the time and and take a big risk. And if it all fails, I can go surfing for nine months. That seemed like not the worst plan. And that's what we ended up doing.

Ben: Wow., I guess there's always that option to just break free and go surfing.

What are surfing is relatively cheap, which makes it a perfect hobby for employed. What are the stories that have stayed with you? 'cause as you note you've covered so many in and many individual narratives, you track down this. Anti-aircraft missile brigade. I think it's the Russian 53rd, which was pretty notorious.

You covered a jazz club in Odessa, which decided to stay open. Syrian doctors who've come to Ukraine and could go on and on. But I'd be interested in any of the stories either of now or those which have stayed with you or you'd wanna comment on.

Tim: I think the one that that I'll never forget is this 10 month odyssey that I had trying to illustrate the difficulties to solve war crimes during this war.

So I basically, there have been tens of thousands at the time, there were tens of thousands. Now we're well into the six figures. Many thousands of war crimes that have been committed since the invasion began. So many. So that there's a real question I think, about whether or not these crimes will ever be properly investigated, adjudicated and the perpetrators brought to justice.

And what I wanted to do was see if. On my own, I could solve a war crime, highlight a single incident of injustice and see if we could find the perpetrator as an exercise for demonstrating how difficult and solving all of these war crimes could be. So we ended up focusing on, someone named Alexander Brazos, who was someone who was killed in the very early stages of the invasion. And when we first heard about it, we didn't know who killed him. We didn't know when he was killed. We didn't even know his name. All we knew was that he had been killed on the side of the road in a very small village, two and a half, three hours outside of Kyiv.

And no, no one even knew his full name. We started from the beginning and we tracked down his name, his family. We figured out what he was doing. We figured out where he was going, where he was driving. On that fateful day, we figured out the Russian units that happened to be in the area at the time.

We narrowed down the various commanders that were in charge of that unit and ultimately were able to present something of, of a kind of theory of the case about how all of these events occurred. And this took 10, this took 10 months for a single case, and there are tens of thousands, over a hundred thousand now cases.

And so this exhaustive effort that needed to be taken just to address one particular. Issue of injustice has always stuck with me. The thing is, I'm a former a former medic and an EMT, and so I don't really get that shaken up when it comes to images of blood, gore medical trauma, that sort of thing.

The thing that has always stuck with me is the grieving people who. Who carry their kind of liquid sadness around with them. And as they tell their stories, they pour a little bit into your cup as well. And I've never really shaken the emotional impact of meeting the family, understanding their story, trying to do a little bit to.

Shift the thing forward and understanding how much of that grief and sadness has proliferated to millions of people across this country as a result of war. It really put home the costs of invasion of violence of, of these state sponsored. Attacks that occur on a regular daily basis in Ukraine.

Ben: It was a really moving piece where you can see a lens of the whole through the individual story. Any listeners wanna look it up? I think there was the, it was the village near Nova Bassen, wasn't it? That's the piece. That's the piece you are referring to. Yeah. And with that, I have this thought on your focus on human stories.

It seems to me your. Almost making an argument that these individual narratives might matter more than the frontline maps, or there are, obviously the big agencies are doing the frontline map stuff and you get that and that's, important mix, but that these individual narratives are underrepresented.

They get lost. They will be lost. There is no way with hundreds of thousands of crimes that even as. Significant. Probably only ever, probably no small percentage will ever really come to light or get prosecuted. And yet people want to hear, or we maybe need to make, need to hear those type of stories.

I'm interested in your, that sort of theory of change, I guess on the power of the individual narrative and how maybe we are now set up for a time to do that. There's. Adjacently citizen journalism, I guess is a little bit, okay, you've got kind of social media, but this ability to actually report on the ground if you want to do the startup costs from doing that is possible and you've shown that.

So I'm interested in that. So it's the path of individual narrative, but mixed with the kind of technology and platform and ability to actually showcase that now.

Tim: I think those there, there are a couple separate but obviously as you point out related questions, so let me take them one by one.

It was obvious to me even two years ago. It was obvious really to most people. I think that as time went on the news of the, and the shock of the war in Ukraine would pass on, and that people would, I. Tire of daily reports in which they were told, oh, the frontline has moved from this village you haven't heard of to another village that you've never heard of.

But human beings are storytelling creatures. What we wanna hear is that interesting. I. Yarn not a yarn, an interesting story, an interesting narrative. One that touches us, that moves us, that interests us, that saddens us or makes us a little bit smarter or wiser. And mostly that comes through stories about people and being able to introduce you to characters.

Thousands of of miles away. Much of our audience, the vast majority of our audience is outside of Ukraine. 86% of our readers are Americans, Canadians, or in the uk. Introducing you to someone. Giving you a reason to care about them or relate to them in some way, seeing yourself in their shoes and creating this connection of empathy is a much more compelling way to bring people into a story than saying on Thursday afternoon, the frontline move from X Village to Y Village.

And that was always my approach. I think we're a very. Character led news organization. We introduce you, a person that went through this thing by learning about that person. You learn about the news rather than the other way around.

Ben: But your analysis is also through that lens quite deep and insightful and brings through.

Nuance I mean something adjacent. For instance, your recent piece on how Zelensky uniform changed to go and meet Trump. I think in the mass media outlets, there was a line or two on it. People would notice it, but you have a whole explanation for what this really means, and we know actually that fashion and these statements and symbols are extremely powerful.

When people meet, it's weird that today the global power symbol of important men is wearing a suit and tie actually, whether you are the Chinese leader, the Russian leader, the American leader, you, you have. Honed in on a suit and tie. And so the fact that Zelensky has a black T-shirt thing is that, but you provide that analysis.

You put it in the context and things, and I know that's not the character led one, but that's the sort of analysis that seems to me that comes through and, is enabled by independent journalism to do that. It would probably be a bit odd for the front page of the FT to have. A thousand words on fashion.

Although actually I think maybe that's what should

Tim: I think the ft would devote 2000 words on this, but it would run like a week later or something like that. Like I wouldn't put that it past the ft a at all to do something about, zelensky chic and the new power outfit being much more casual and, during wartime, because I've observed that in Ukraine, by the way, which is a separate point, but it's a good, it's a good point, right?  I was first made aware that Zelensky had shown up in a suit on social media, and I thought that's interesting. And I shared it with my team and we started making all sorts of jokes in our kind of WhatsApp group chat.

And the next thing I think is like. Why don't we, why don't we run something on this? It's super interesting. It gives you a window into into both cultural differences and diplomatic power and how that's expressed through fashion. It's this exact sort of thing that you are, as you point out, you're free to do when you are not.

When you like, like I'm sure it could be done for C Nnn, but it's just, it's not it's not what they would focus on. The CNN would lead its coverage with the NATO summit, the diplomatic implications the statements and speeches deals made. But we have the freedom to take a totally different look at it and explain what what zelensky.

Decision to wear what that means for the state of us Ukrainian relations. And not in a petty or trivial way because I think it's not petty or trivial but in an interesting way that kind of chose how diplomacy and geopolitics is evolving.

Ben: And I wanna pick up on the story I mentioned earlier as well of the jazz club.

Odessa, because that's another theme through your work of the struggles of normalcy in a time of war and chronic stress. There's other things around I was reading the stories on the dog and the things, but I was really interested in this jazz club in Odessa. But just the sense of how.

How do you try and be normal with a sense of chronic stress over you? What are your reflections on normalcy or not?

Tim: What do you mean?

Ben: In terms of how you see Ukraine trying to be normal and what those efforts look like and how you, I guess how you feel being normal or not, or, maybe you wanna reflect on the jazz club.

Tim: Like when people ask me what it's like in Ukraine the easiest ways for me to try to describe it is it's that you have to try to get used to it. That you have to find some sense of normalcy in your life. And the easiest analogy I can make is the way that we all adapted after the COVID pandemic is that first, the first.

Period of time was super alarming and isolating and confusing and anxiety raising. But over a period of time, over a period of months and even years, people just got used to putting on a mask and people just got used to fewer public events that it just became interwoven with our daily lives.

And in the same way. Jazz doesn't stop. Pa I live near a basketball court. Basketball games don't stop. People continue to date. They continue to be passionate about the things that they were passionate about before the war. But in the context of. The ever present threat of violence?

People change the nature of their lives, whether they have to move their they're internally displaced or persons or refugees abroad. There's a ton of dynamics. But one of the things that keeps us grounded and connected to other people who are not in a wartime situation is the normal things that we try to do.

To grasp onto to feel like there's still some hope for the future. That there's still some way for us to return to entire normalcy.

Ben: In fact, you might date more fiercely in a time of war. I think that's perhaps a trope with it. I wonder, do you ever have to come across around, I suppose I would put this in the ethics of war reporting and how those ethics, have changed over time with.

Social media with misinformation, with the ability to also, people to take photos and post it. And that I guess I always saw that through the original lens of war reporting, particularly through photography, where photographers really had to in the olden days say do we take a picture of this?

And if we have taken a picture of this, does it really get reported? And then that's exploded. And I'd be interested if you and your team have had to think about that in times of the type of stories that you wanna cover or how you cover them. And is that still a changing landscape in the face, of social media and disinformation?

Tim: I think it's absolutely a factor, particularly in the age of both social media and in the age of, of camera phones, right? That you can capture things all the time, many times without asking for permission. And the appropriateness of using that information, whether in text or in photos is questionable.

I'll give you one example. We've had a lot of debates among me and the reporters on my team about whether to use photos of grieving mothers at funerals. Is it appropriate in such an intimate and and it's a revealing moment of course, but it's also, a very private moment for some and the opinions on that run the whole spectrum.

Some families encourage the posting of such photos. Other families really object to it. Some families. Approve of it, but then reject the captions or some wording. All of this is grounded in grief and so understanding the appropriateness, and there's no easy answer by the way. There's no easy answer at all.

There's a question of whether we should include, we're doing a story right now about about the Ukrainians whose job it is to prepare children for burial. The question is, should we post? Photos of of dead children. Even if they were professionally done and with permission.

These are all difficult questions. To which there are no easy, and these are the kinds of questions, by the way, I'd expect it to be had in any professional newsroom. But it is I'm afraid not one of those things where I can give you a easy up or down, but these are the kinds of ethical conversations we're trying to have all the time.

Ben: I'm glad you are having them and that you echo that other news organizations are having them. I think there's a suspicion sometimes amongst the general public that perhaps our organizations have let slip slightly on how they think about reporting and the even though there's some resource there.

I'd be interested in what you think your biggest challenges are as an independent. War reporting body, is it funding access, safety and that type of thing. And I guess this intersects with one of our threads as well, is. How good a place do you think independent journalism is in, have platforms like Substack and things enabled this to flourish or Actually with the squeeze that we've had in all across media, people don't get newspapers the same anymore.

And you could talk about local news has gone down. I know this isn't really local news, it's a different niche. It was that, although you've got little other niches coming up as well, so I'm interested in what you think about that both. From the lens of an independent war reporter, but then also what it just means for independent journalism.

Tim: Yeah, I think the there are a lot of great news concepts that existed 15 years ago that if Substack had been around these publications would still exist, right? There, there was and the I think the concept now for creating sustainable media operation is to provide exclusive information that people are interested in paying for.

And thinking of this as the primary lens through which you think about, should I open a publication if it's meant to be? A sustainable and break even to profitable organization is do I have exclusive information that is unique from everything else that is out there and that and would people be willing to pay for that information?

And if so then maybe it's a good idea. Or at least it's the, it's got the markings of the beginning of a of a good idea. You and I talked a little bit when we. When we saw each other in London about about the future of AI and what this means for writing and information gathering in general and, the key the key role I think for for reporters in in a kind of large language model world is information extraction and presentation. With a huge emphasis on the extraction part is are we asking questions other people aren't asking and delivering answers that other people aren't getting.

And if you're not doing those things, it's gonna be hard. Sta Substack you already see due to its success is becoming both very popular, but also very very heavy. And there's going to be some moment, I don't know. Whether we're at it, whether it will be some moment in the future at which it, it will hit its kind of apex inability to support writers.

And at that point people will have to make hard decisions about who, who to support and who not to support. And, I think it's absolutely gonna come down to uniqueness to creativity and to having exclusivity over information that you alone will have that is valuable to the people who are paying for it or interested in paying for it.

Ben: Yeah, I think, I guess if you chart this. You had the days of blogger, you had the days of WordPress, and they peaked with them. And I can see Substack doing that. And it's interesting this idea of, is it a unique information? Is it a unique view? Would people pay for it? I have a few thousand on my personal substack.

It's definitely unique and it's definitely interesting. I'm never gonna ask people to pay for it because there's no way I can switch on the last bit. It's oh, this is interesting. Spend the thoughts for free. I'm not sure I'd pay a. A pound for them or a dollar. But yeah, there is that. I think it goes into the ecosystem.

I'm interested in what your own writing process is like, or I guess you can also take it from the editorial writing process of the team and on. Counter offensive, but you could also take it as an individual level. When you're doing investigative work, do you write in notebooks? I guess you've got long form and shorter form as well in long form investigation and things.

But are right by hand, put it into computer. You like writing in the morning. There's obviously no good there's no consensus way of doing that, but I'm interested on personal view and then the editorial view is. This long form you're trying to hunt down these personal stories, things which capture your mind, like a case or an animal or a scene.

And then these slightly longer things you must discuss it in team and then you decide to go. So I'm just interested in how that whole process works for you guys. I.

Tim: Let me start by answering a question you asked earlier, what are some of the main challenges of being an independent journalist?

And one thing that I didn't realize was that I was starting a business. I thought I was getting into it to I. To do some journal to do journalism. But what I ultimately accidentally did was I launched a new startup in a war zone. And and what I'm sure you know is that when you launch a startup, you are in charge of marketing and the big legal questions and the accounting.

If you have time, you get to be involved in the core actions of whatever business that you're in, right? You are you're dealing with the landlord for the office space, and you're sweeping the floors and you are, I. You, you are in charge of every little detail because of the size of the team.

And you don't realize when you work for a large company just how much stuff is taken care of for you without you, you're noticing it. And so that, that is a huge challenge. That is a huge challenge that if you become an independent writer, you are suddenly responsible for it. Every part of the production process.

And there are lots of parts of the production process you have taken for granted. You didn't realize were being taken care of for you by people unseen and unknown. So that's part of the answer to the question, but, to answer your most recent question, I think so we have a team of about eight people right now, and we meet in Kyiv for editorial meetings on a regular basis.

And we'll just shoot ideas back and forth and try to decide what stories interest us, which stories should be put on hold. It's a kind of back and forth of this is something that, that I'm pitching, sharpen this, drop that it's a really dynamic. It's a really dynamic phenomenon that most news organizations are have in some way, shape or form.

Ben: And ultimately you say go no though, or someone does.

Tim: Yeah. Basically I'll, so we have some left the role of an editor. And I'll have a final say, but we also have someone whose role it is to vibe check. So we have someone who we call the vibes editor who basically makes sure I.

That the idea is good enough to pitch that the resulting story has the key elements of human interest and narrative and and kind of strategic importance. And then and then it eventually makes both the idea, firstly and then the final copy makes its way to me eventually.

But to answer your question, one thing that I explained to. Our mostly young reporters is that there used to be a day where you would record your interviews on this. There was even analog, but I, by the time I started reporting in 2009, it was mostly digital. This digital device separate from your phone, and then in order to get the quotes and information off of it, whether it was 15 minute interview or one hour, you would have to listen to the entire interview over.

As long as it took, and then manually write out every quote and actually oftentimes double checking these quotes for accuracy. An hour long interview would often take two or two and a hours to transcribe, and this is the way you would, this is the way you would produce journalism. That it was not at all glamor and black tie outings.

It was mostly listening to your tape over and over again to make sure that it's right. Nowadays we just use AI and we double check it, and we click on a bunch of spots on the screen and it's reverts back to the, to that place. We make sure that the transcript is correct. We pull out we pull out the things that interest us.

We leave the things that don't, we double check the things that interest us or we'll use, we leave out what we don't. And the process is extremely streamlined as compared to what we used to do. And, I think we're a lot better for it. Let's, lets you focus a lot more on the creativity element, getting new stories, finding interesting characters, and a lot less on the mechanics of and the logistics of putting a story together

Ben:

Upload on the sub stack and just press go. So there's also less, you don't have to do newspaper, rollers and all of this type of stuff. I don't know how old….

Tim: You think I am Dld, Ben, but I never had to do newspaper. I got into journalism in 2009, which was well into the, my first jaw was at a vlog.

So it was always, it was it was always. It was always that way for

Ben: me. Yeah. I last kind of few questions. I would thought we'd do perhaps just touch a little bit on crystal ball gazing. Maybe just taking the whole of. Geopolitics from your point of view, I guess this is a cluster of questions, which I think, what do the people of Ukraine need and where that might go?

And I guess if you talk about today, with the end of June you have more wars going on, obviously you've got the Middle East. The US under Trump is still being the us You've still got China, Russia and all of that. And I saw somewhere, it's slightly hard to count, but if you look at geopolitical conflicts, I.

They're at an all time high on a kind of 10, 20 year view. They may be slightly lower than a hundred years ago, depending on where you do that. I was also looking at somewhere that the small conflicts, I say small, but they seem probably pretty large to people there in Africa kind of considered civil wars and the like are also at all time highs and those type of things.

And there is a perception that the world has become. More fragile, a little bit more splintered. And you have got a kind of deglobalization effect at least versus the last five years, maybe not, versus the last 20. I'd be interesting on what your vibe take is, and if you have any particular views on what is needed what we could do with needing, and then what is maybe the thread of where we're likely to end up.

Tim: A lot of, let me take your questions in order. So what does Ukraine need in the near term? Two things, people and air defense. One of the one of the great advantages that Russia has in the, in, in strategically is that how much bigger it is, how many more resources it has, and how many more people it can draw from in order to engage in this war of aggression.

And Ukraine is desperately suffering for people. Is that and it's hard to judge anyone for not wanting to die or risk their lives. It's a real, it's a real challenge right now. Ukraine is trying to deal with that in some part by technology. But ultimately you need people.

And Ukraine has had there are all sorts of domestic politics involved in why, for example, the conscription age is at 25 and not at a lower age. But that's one thing that Ukraine needs is more people. Another thing is Russia has, is now producing 500 drones per day that can attack Ukrainian cities.

It can produce many more, missiles that will be launched at Ukrainian Cities. Cities. What it needs is methods to shoot purely defensive weaponry to shoot down these drones and shoot down these missiles before they kill innocent civilians on the ground. That's a technology that Europe and the United States has.

But a lot of Europe. And many officials in the United States have been reluctant to provide that kind of those stocks of weaponry to Ukraine. And that leads to the broader question, which is I think the the war in Iran and other conflicts is they're, they seem to be proliferating around the globe.

They're making countries wonder maybe I need to keep. Additional stocks for myself should things go really bad. All of which is bad news for Ukraine as it fights an ex existential war. And I think that's what Putin is fundamentally counting on is that people get distracted or otherwise worried about other things and and leaves Ukraine.

To fight on its own, which will be a very costly thing for Ukraine. I don't think ultimately Russia will succeed, but Ukraine's defiance will come at much higher cost if it's not supported by its allies. And the world getting a lot more dangerous. I think. I think it's obvious that it is it is becoming more dangerous.

I think that, Amer that America pulling back from World Affairs as it is trying to do now with some limited, with only limited success is is a net negative for the world. I think that American leadership led to a much safer world than a world without American leadership. And that the rising.

Polls of Russian power, Chinese power those are very dangerous things for all of us. And some confrontation between these polls is gonna be very is likely to be very, violent and unpleasant and traumatic for millions, if not billions of people. I think we can all see in slow motion the world is becoming a more dangerous place.

There are of course things that we can do to pull back from this, but I don't see us working really in that direction. I'm hoping. I'm hoping that Ukraine can serve it as an example, both technologically and economically and politically as to how, as to what you need to do to survive and retain your sovereignty.

I hope that people are learning lessons from what's happening here. But I'm worried that they're not taking seriously enough the risks and they're not getting prepared fast enough. I don't. I don't say any of this to say that that global conflict is at all inevitable, but I see us going down a very dark path.

Ben: Let me ask a question on the kind of ups and downs. What, if anything, gives you hope or sparks of hope? And on the other side, is there a risk or a factor that you are seeing, which you think is really being. Underestimated or misunderstood by people at large.

Tim: I fundamentally believe that the same country that elected Barack Obama is the country that elected Donald Trump. We're speaking today on the 10 year anniversary of a very famous speech that Barack Obama gave in Charleston after a white supremacist, walked into a black church and shot a number of people during a Bible study.

And I rewatched that speech today. Because it was the 10 year anniversary and it popped up in my feed. And and I realized that there are some deeply unifying forces in America and across the free world. And it's not so far removed from us to, to find those things that unite us against tyranny and authoritarianism.

I think we, you and I have both grown up in relatively peaceful times and the people we grew up with may have. Not realized what a blessing it is to live in peace and to live in a time of relative economic prosperity and innovation. If we go back the other way which has been far more prevalent in the history of human affairs, it's gonna be devastating and destructive and and terrible for us all.

But we don't have we don't, many of us do not have a living memory of these these kinds of events. And I do think. There are ways for us to impress upon others, and my project is one very small sliver of trying to bring you into what it's like to deal with war. And what I hope is not only for people to support Ukraine, but also to understand these are the consequences that have come on a personal level, not just the war moved from this village.

To that village. I want you to understand the village. I want you to understand people who were in the village. I want you to understand the culture that was destroyed and the lives ruined as a result of that, in hopes that it not only spurs you to some action with regards to the present situation in Ukraine, but also understanding the cost of war so that we don't head down this dark path.

Ben: That seems very clear to me. We misunderstand the cost of war because we've lived in peace for so long, but actually there's. Perhaps you can make the argument that in the free world we have more in common with what one another than our differences. Even that, although it might not seem like that, I would ask maybe for the final couple of questions I.

Anything you wanna reflect on in terms of current projects? Obviously this seems to be all consuming, but there might be other kind of seedling, current projects you want to mention and maybe current projects into the future. Where might you be in a few years? In 10 years, or maybe even next year as perhaps, or you can think about?

Yeah. Anything you wanna talk about? I hope I'm surfing. I hope I'm spending a little bit more time surfing. Yeah. On current computer projects. I'm I really hope that I can devote more times. There's no surfing in Ukraine, otherwise I'd never leave. But on a more on a more serious level, we're expanding our coverage into into u both Ukrainian defense technology and European Defense Technology.

Tim: What we've done is create a trade publication here in Key called Counter Offensive Pro, and we cover. The latest battlefield concepts, the regulatory environment for western investors and defense companies and allied governments. And so we do very technical in the weeds reporting on on cutting edge.

Technology from the front lines. What we're planning to do is bring this concept to the rest of Europe with a focus on Brussels and national capitals to help understand the huge generational problem and and promise of European re armament as it spends. Hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make itself too resilient to invade in the future.

And that is a real challenge and a part where, you know a project which I hope to be of some very small use in providing some information that will make that process a little bit more efficient by doing journalism and reporting on the tech and on the regulation, that's something that I hope to launch soon.

Ben: Excellent. And final thoughts. This is the open last question is do you have any thoughts or advice for people listening? This could be advice for people who might want do a startup or a career or journalism or might be thoughts or advice to politicians of the world or anyone about what they should think or do or any form of life advice.

Any final thoughts from you?

Tim: I guess I just but I try to chat with young journalists and folks, especially if they reach out and ask for some time and that they're frequently asking for advice. And lately I've been thinking a lot about what what AI will mean for for the field of journalism.

We talked, we touched on it very briefly, and. For people in these sort of white collar jobs. I think the kind of key question career wise is what can I do that AI can't do now or very likely in the future? And I've been spending a lot of time thinking I. What can I provide? What kind of value can I provide?

How does my career look in a career where, I've been very pride. I've had a lot of pride for the way I write, the way I put together sentences and paragraphs that's going to diminish over time. The uniqueness of that or the value of that. So what's the point of having a reporter around what's the point of having a.

News publication around what can I provide that no one else can that, that adds value to people's lives. That is gonna be a big question for, not only writers, but accountants and paralegals and all sorts of other research types or p people who did work that is now easily replicable by by large language models.

That's something that I've been thinking a lot about and encouraging others to get well ahead of now before they're forced to think about it.

Ben: That seems like excellent advice. Think about the things that you can do that no one else can, or perhaps that you can do and you can do easier and that everyone else might find really hard including the AI. So with that, Tim, thank you very much. 

Françoise Girard: Feminism, Activism, and the Power of Storytelling | Podcast

Françoise Girard is an activist and founder of Feminism Makes Us Smarter. We discuss Francois' journey from studying law in Montreal to becoming a feminist activist in New York. Francois shares experiences from her work with the Open Society Institute and the International Women's Health Coalition, elaborating on the critical role of grassroots feminist movements in effecting societal change. 

“Taking a feminist, intersectional lens helps us understand the world better. You can see trends before the regular commentators do.”

The conversation touches on misconceptions about feminism, the interconnected nature of various justice movements, and the importance of long-term, flexible support from philanthropists. 

“If you want to track the health of a democracy, look at what’s happening to women’s rights. They’re the early warning system.”

Francois also highlights the power of storytelling in activism and reveals her creative process behind her writing. 

“When we walk out of a play, we’re more in touch with our feelings. That’s how movements grow — through stories and emotion, not just policy.”

“Each of us won’t solve it all, but if we all do something — even something small — that’s how things move. That’s what gives me hope.”

The discussion concludes with insights into successful campaigns, including the decriminalization of abortion in Ireland, and practical advice for individual contributions to social change.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on YouTube.

Contents

• 00:18 Francois' Journey to Activism

• 01:50 Working with International Organizations

• 03:39 Founding Feminism Makes Us Smarter

• 04:54 Understanding Modern Feminism

• 05:41 Intersectionality and Feminism

• 10:35 Theories of Change in Activism

• 22:54 Challenges and Learnings in Feminist Movements

• 31:45 The Role of Art and Opera in Life

• 32:17 The Power of Storytelling

• 36:14 Creative Processes and Writing

• 41:51 Successful Movements and Campaigns

• 49:41 Current Projects and Future Plans

• 54:38 Final Thoughts and Advice

• Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Francois Girard. She's an author, activist, and founder of Feminism. Makes Us Smarter, Francois, welcome.

Françoise: Thank you very much, Ben. I'm really pleased to be talking to you today. 

Ben: How did  your journey to become an activist come about?

Françoise: Ah if you'd do me when I was 15, whether I'd be doing what I'm doing today, I would've thought it would be very cool to do what I'm doing today, but I don't think I would've imagined it. I would've said, how on earth do you become a writer, someone who works with feminist movements globally? I wouldn't have known how this happened.

So basically, I. I studied political science and then I be, I studied law, became a lawyer. I was working in a big law firm but I was always interested in human rights, women's rights, justice, fairness. And throughout my journey as you call it, I did get involved in student politics.

I was the president of the Law Students Association in law school at the University of Montreal. I was, always involved in organizing, with events and year books and plays and, I was always active but when I had the opportunity to move to New York when I was 34, I got married and decided to move to New York.

My husband was already in New York. That was the moment I left Montreal and decided that this was the time for a change. I didn't, I wasn't gonna join a big law firm in New York. I was instead gonna go into, international human rights, international affairs, New York was the place, right? So it was the opportunity.

So I did do that after a while after knocking on a lot of doors. And this was Prego, you couldn't look up people the same way. You had to knock on doors and meet people. I ended up hired by the Open Society Institute at the time the Soros Foundations and I started working on human rights.

In Eastern Europe not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and. Gave away George source's money to human rights groups, women's rights groups independent journalists. We just did a lot of work on democracy. Promotion was very exciting and I learned a lot. And after that joined the International Women's Health Coalition.

'cause my passion was always feminism and women's rights. And I went to see my boss at Open Society and I said, I'd like to. Be on the front. I wanna go on the front lines. I, it's nice to give money to groups, but you're removed and I am gonna leave a comfortable world, leave it behind the world of philanthropy and join a frontline organization.

So I joined International Women's Health Coalition, which later on ended up leading for eight years, and got connected with feminists from all over the world. Working on sexual and reproductive health and rights, in particular, abortion rights, contraception, sexuality, education, violence against women, some of the most difficult, quote unquote issues the most culturally challenging issues in a lot of contexts.

And met all these amazing that I'm still in touch with and just had. An amazing time of it. It's hard but so rewarding and five years ago now, I left the coalition and four years and a year later, so four years ago, I started, feminism Makes us Smarter, which is a communications platform where I have a newsletter.

A podcast. So where I talk to feminists from all over the world about their work, their journey. I also review books and evidence about, what works to combat violence against women, or what works to advance abortion rights. And just putting out there, more voices and more experiences, knowledge that's not often found in the mainstream media.

There's. Not a lot written about feminism in general. Even when women march by the millions, the mainstream press writes very little about it. They just don't find it interesting, or important or I don't know. And and so I felt that it would be a contribution to, to put that additional content out there in the.

In the sphere, in the internet sphere.

Ben: That's amazing. So how do you think we should think about feminism today? What? What do you think is most misunderstood by most people when we think about it? And I think there's some talk about also the intersectionality of it. It doesn't live in isolation, but to your point, there's a lot of talk about what.

Works there are these intersections with wealth and poverty or the fact that, feminism makes us smartest. Societies which are more equal seem to be doing better and all of that. But I'd be interested in your take on what's most misunderstood.

Françoise: I think that when I chose the name, feminism makes us smarter and I like the acronym FMUS because I pronounce it famous, 'cause we're the famous feminists, of course.

So you gotta have a bit of fun. But what I wanted to say is that. If you take a feminist lens, and it has to be an inter intersectional feminist lens, so we can talk about that. But if you take a feminist lens to the world, you start to see things much more clearly, right? Things that seem perplexing or become clear.

When you take a feminist lens, you also see things coming with much more. Preview, so to speak, like for example, I think it's. In my world, it's well known. The connection between author, authoritarianism, fascism, and sexism and the repression of women is that's always gone together, right?

So if you pay attention to anti-abortion movement movements, fighting against gender equality against the whole idea of gender, even then you can see that. Fascist movements are on the rise, right? Because they're connected. And in a way, issues like abortion, control of women's bodies control of women's fertility are canaries in the coal mine of democracy and human rights.

So it does make you smarter to adopt a feminist lands to understand even politics, because you can see. Trends before, like the regular commentators will see them. That's what I've observed. Now, what's misunderstood about feminism, one is the typical trope that feminists hate men. You know that it's a man hating movement.

That we wanna abolish men and so on. And that's of course not true. Many of us have men in our lives, men we love men we spend our daily lives with. What we don't and or what we hate is patriarchy. Like the notion that there's should be a social order that elevates one. Sex, the male sex, or people who are assigned male at birth above everyone else above, above females.

People who are assigned female at birth or people who are non-binary and so on. Like the, this idea that, the male should rule is the problem. And it leads to many other problems including violence, war, domination, extractive capitalism control over nature by, by, by man. That is, there is some of the things that we wanna fight against.

And the other thing that I think is misunderstood is that if we adopt a feminist approach, I. We, everyone will benefit. Like people assume that only women will benefit, but in fact, men also are oppressed by sexism and patriarchy, right? The idea of being a man today is very narrow, right? You must be strong and domineering and you must be.

Taciturn and stoic, and you must resolve all your conflicts through violence and domination. And for a lot of men, of course, this is very oppressive, oppressive of their own nature, their own sensibilities. It's of course very destructive. Because then, anytime there's a problem, you have to punch the other guy or, lobb a missile, whatever.

It's not conductive conducive to, to, to peace to building society, harmonious society. So I do think for a lot of men becoming feminists would actually be empowering for them. So that's one thing. Then the intersectional part is that of course, because when we say patriarchy, the patriarchy as its practice now is not to elevate all men.

Although all men can, participate in the patriarchy. But the patriarchy that wants control over our society is the white patriarchy, right? The white, cisgender, straight. Patriarchy and the Christian patriarchy this is what in the US for example, we're facing, these are the people who wanna dominate and they definitely are of a certain makeup.

And so our feminism has to be able to analyze that. And it's not just okay to say, we wanna abolish patriarchy in general. We have to really analyze the relationships between. Racial justice, environmental justice gender justice, economic justice and feminism to be able to have a proper analysis of what's really going on here.

Ben: So activists often talk about a kind of theory of change, the mechanisms that they think they, the levers that they can pull in society today to impact some of these changes for the better. And like you've alluded to some things over history seems to have worked, some things have perhaps not worked as well.

We can learn things from other. Types of activists, like disability rights activists, and you've said race and all sorts of things. So I'm interested in what you think the main theories of change you have at the moment. What you think is working or maybe should work or you're interested in.

Françoise: Yeah, the one thing that's. Always been my guiding light is the notion that, the famous quote by Frederick Douglas, the 19th century African American writer and social reformer that he fought against slavery in the US in the 19th century. And was someone who worked for rebuilding, reconstructing the US on equality principles.

And he had this famous saying, power concedes nothing without a demands. It never did. And it never will, right? And so what that says is that we have to organize in movements and, in community-based groups and so on to demand. Equality and justice. It's not gonna happen without a fight, and it's not going to happen without us demanding our freedom and our and demanding justice. So for me, my theory of justice is really grounded in social movements, in community organizing. And there's. Have plenty of evidence that's what really makes a difference for change.

Certainly in feminism there's been a lot of interesting research on violence against women and what has worked in various societies to move the needle on violence against women. What has spurred governments actually act on violence against women, which is so pervasive and there's this fabulous research by a professor.

Called Laurel Weldon. She's at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia and Canada. And she and a colleague Malan, Toon put out this research where they looked at data from 70 countries around the globe. And what were the critical factors that got governments to actually do something about violence against women.

And after they took away all the, left-wing governments presence of women in parliament, whatever, they controlled for all the variables. The one factor that was critical to moving the needle on violence against women was the presence of independent, organized feminist movements. Right? When you had a feminist women's rights movement that was pushing the government to act on violence against women, that's when you saw action.

Without that, it didn't matter. What philosophy the government espouse, and what you know, whether it was a developed capitalist economy or a socialist country, a richer, poorer, it didn't matter. The one thing that mattered the most was the presence of feminist movements pushing government to act.

So that's, it's not just my say so, my belief or what Frederick Douglas said, it is actually. Evidence-based that with social movements change is possible. It doesn't mean it's inevitable, but that is the critical factor that must be the secret sauce that must be there.

Ben: In an ideal world, how would you think about shaping society?

So if these movements are successful or is there any particular. Policy or idea now. 'cause our utopia might be a little bit away. But policy or ideas now you think would be, are really vital to think about enacting and how do we get, from there to our ideal world?

Françoise: Oh my goodness, there's so much that's on fire right now, literally and figuratively that.

It's hard to pick one thing I just wanted to add, because you mentioned disability rights, that I do think the disability rights movement. Has said something, one of their slogans is very profound and important, which is nothing about us without us, and that's also then been adopted by other movements including the HIV and AIDS movement.

And the feminist movement, of course, believes that deeply. You cannot. Make the change without the people most affected at the table. And bring them in and actually give them leadership. Not just bring them in as a token or listen to them on the side, or, consult with them, but the, the decisions being made over here.

It's really. Co-creating the solutions with the communities in leadership. And so if I had to change anything, it would be that, to really take that seriously, like really bring people in to co-create and imagine solutions and enact them long term and really stay the course tho that would be one of the things that I think we.

Make the biggest difference and there's so little of that being done. It's pretty shocking. But of course there's many other things. Healthcare, of course, that's been my beat. Sexual and reproductive health control of women's bodies, ensuring that half the population can control their body.

Fertility are not subject to violence can make decisions without coercion. That would be hugely important, including, girls, early marriage, forced marriage. The gamut of things that happen to girls at an early age is. It's just terrifying. So if I could change that, I'm sure we'd be in a better world, but that's the not the only thing we need to do, obviously.

Ben: Sure. And but to your point you'd need to include everyone and then downstream these things happen. If you can't get that level of inclusion with all of these groups, then you probably don't even get any of these downstream and they wouldn't be sustainable. Yeah. So we could go on and on about the things on fire, as you say, but maybe we should just flip it and.

And look at some of the silver linings. And maybe I would ask what are the things which give you hope right now? Are there things that you find inspiring or things which you think okay, here's a little spark. We should continue to work on that?

Françoise: Yeah. I'm always inspired by feminist from all over the world and their bravery and creativity.

A few years ago I was impress. Many of us were by the Argentine women's movement fighting for the decriminalization of abortion in Argentina, which was a tall order, right? Argentina was very conservative, macho, historically Catholic country that had lived under dictatorship.

All that leaves a lot of. In society if you want. That leaves a lot of things. In the political apparatus that, that make it difficult to advance women's rights and equality, gender equality in general. And they campaigned for years and we, when we were at the International Women's Health Coalition, supported them even when it looked completely farfetched that this was going to be possible.

And they came to us. Yeah. Again, like listening to people, they came to us and said, we wanna. We wanna campaign in in the Congress for decriminalization of abortion, but we are from all over the Argentina and the provinces of Argentina. And it's hard for us to come to Buenos Aires.

We need a small apartment in front of Congress that we can use as a base. But no donor wants to fund rent, because the donors have all these ridiculous rules. And they said, would you do that? Would you. Find a little apartment that we can use as a touchpoint. And we said, yeah, sure. Yeah. And this was years before the decriminalization actually happened and we said, yeah, we'll do that.

Yeah, we understand what you're talking about because we're activists ourselves. We know what it takes, what kind of sustain action and presence and lobbying and how you need. And so we did that. And in December, 2020. Congress voted to decriminalize abortion in the first 14 weeks of pregnancy, and then the president signed off on it.

Then it was after, terrific mobilization that basically took over the whole country during the pandemic no less. They were amazing. And they had the green scarves and they did all these marches and it was super creative, also very visual, very. With music and singing, and it was intergenerational.

You had older feminists, like what they call the historical feminist, less historic as the older 85-year-old feminist with the young teenagers marching together. It was beautiful and moving. So that gives me hope. The creativity and the ingenuity and the. Patience and determination and fierceness of feminists from all over the world.

And then of course, today what we're seeing rise up in the US this movement against fascism, which comes out of all, many previous and existing social movements, including Black Lives Matters and movements for environmental justice. That's all. It's all coalescing and then re reorganizing and morphing.

But that's where we saw we had the No Kings Day in mid-June. That was incredible. Impressive. Big all over the us, not just in one city, but all over the US in places where you wouldn't expect people to come out and say, no Kings here, fascism is un-American, where, it was beautiful.

So that gives me hope. Yeah.

Ben: And like you say, you started your own podcast not too long ago. How's that been going and what are some surprising things or anything that you've learned from doing your own podcast?

Françoise: Oh, I, first of all, I love it even more than I thought I would.

It's so much fun because you can talk to many people you wouldn't talk to otherwise. And a friend of mine a few years ago told me, Francois, of course, because I was surprised people would agree to talk to me. Even people I didn't know. He says, but of course they'll talk to you. You are now the media.

You're the media. When the media calls you, most people are flattered and they're like, you wanna speak with me? Oh, great. And people have. A lot to say incredibly rich experiences of activism, of, or, they know many things about what works on the ground, what change is possible what bravery there is out there to advance women's rights.

And so there they've got a lot to say that you would never read in the regular media. There's very little in fact about women's rights, even when, the women's march happened in. In 2017, there was really not that much reporting on it, considering how big and transnational it was. So it's it's important I think, to put that out there in the internet, in the conversation, more voices, more experiences, things that regular media would not pick up otherwise.

I learn and people have amazing stories to tell, and the part of it about storytelling I think is really important. They will talk about their journey, what they learned along the way. People are quite candid also what things didn't work what they wish they'd done differently. It's a real learning experience for me as well as I think for the listeners.

Ben: That's, yeah. That's a good question about what what we would've done differently or any learnings that you have. So maybe I'm gonna pass that one back to you as well, is over your feminist journey, are there any things you really wish had gone a different way or some sort of learning that you'd, you'd pass on to future generations as to how to think about this movement building?

Françoise: There's a couple of things. One, I, on the, per my personal level, I wish I had. Listen to myself a little more, like when I was getting tired as a leader, I wish I'd passed the baton sooner. That would've been smart. And I think there's, in any social movement or any, like in politics, in, in business, there is this.

Sense of, being essential, irre, irreplaceable, critical. I think we have to do away with that, the pro protagonist moa, as they say in, in Spanish, which is the idea that you're such an important figure that, if you lead, it's gonna be devastating and, maybe not right? If you pass the button in there.

In a responsible way maybe sooner would be better, and we could use, different leaders at different times. So that's the one thing person. And

Ben: the system and the organization has gotta be able to survive beyond the founder, otherwise yeah. Not there, right?

Françoise: That's right. And so of course you've gotta lay the ground for that, but don't assume that. They can't do without you. Don't assume you're so indispensable. Put the conditions in place and then pass the baton. Also because this work is very tiring and you have to realize sometimes you do get depleted and maybe you're better, your best ideas are behind you, and be honest about that.

The other thing on a totally different level for funders of feminist organizations and of any social movement is we've gotta learn to trust. The movements much more than we do. Like funders, please. We need to trust the organizations, the leaders. We've gotta give them long-term flexible funding.

Stop trying to control things that you can't control. It's the illusion of control, of course. 'cause you're not on the ground and you cannot be there to. See what's really happening and most of if you've done your due diligence and you've, the organization, they're not there for nefarious and they're there to advance a cause often that great personal cost, so trust them, right?

Don't micromanage them. Give them the five year grant. General support and just send us your annual report and we'll visit you once a year and we'll chat with you a few times a year on the phone and we'll get out of your way. And that's been one of the biggest problems. I think our side, if you want the progressive movements have had to contend with is that there.

Philanthropic sector and the government donors, the overseas development assistance is way too micromanaging, controlling, asking for interim reports all the time, et cetera. Which, with key performance indicators and log frames, whatever, that don't mean anything.

Honestly, there's such a waste of time that's not. That's not productive. When you're leading a campaign, let's say to decriminalize abortion in Argentina, you have a lot of twists and turns, you know you have a defeat in parliament. Then six months later there's an opportunity again, the road comes up again where you know, if you are having to report on very tight metrics that don't allow you flexibility, the ability to.

Once again fund, the lobbying effort, even though you've already funded it once, you know that if you don't have that kind of flexibility, you won't be able to pivot and do the things you need to do when you're really pushing for change. And if I look at the right wing in the US and globally, the same is true in Europe.

Their donors get that. Their donors give them 20 year support. Help build institutions, give them lots of money to try different things and fail. And they trust them, like they trust them, that they do wanna bring on, authoritarian and Christian role and they're all on the same page and, and give them room to experiment and try different things and it makes a difference.

That what we're seeing now in, in. The Western world is and elsewhere is the result of that trust by right wing donors. For our right donors, we need to learn those lessons. Yeah.

Ben: Yeah. I think there's a lot of. Elements of truth on that, particularly when you take a movement, which has got an end goal.

How useful are KPIs? What are you gonna do Num number of calls on politicians. That's not gonna be a useful metric for them. And I think if you have a guiding purpose, a guiding North Star, then there is and I think there is a little bit, there's two things I picked up is particularly with smaller.

Organizations or grants. And, smaller can even be few million or tens of millions, but they're not actually that large in the grand scheme of things.

Françoise: No.

Ben: We're not talking about billions that the paperwork surrounding it is just. Outta proportion to getting on the work that you have to do.

So that's a number one thing. But the number two thing that I picked up is the people who are super great on all the kind of paperwork stuff at the margin, and it's slightly less effective than the people who are just really useless at the paperwork stuff, but are going out enacting whatever it is the thing that you want to enact.

Yeah. And so by putting such high paperwork burdens on people, either you having to hire. Specific people to just do the paperwork thing, which isn't the active purpose that you want to do. Yeah. And then it slightly tilts to the less effective people, maybe even on the borderline of fraud, because you're very good at just doing the form and you end up having to spend 80% of your money on the form, which is then you go why wasn't the majority of our money spent on this other thing as well?

You asked us to do all of the Yeah. Forms and said, this is what you have. So I,

Françoise: that's right. There were grants that at the International Women's Health Coalition we were contemplating applying for, but then we found out that from other people who'd received funding from that donor that if you did take that money, you'd have to hire a full-time person just to deal with them, deal with the donor, fill out the forms, and, send them their, log frames with their.

Indicators filled out. And and when you accept that kind of funding, you also end up inevitably passing some of that onto your grantees. We were funding grassroots groups and we thought, no. Are we gonna keep calling the group in northern Cameroon that's fighting against child marriage to ask them, how many meetings have they had and how many girls were there in these meetings under the tree in that village?

And is this. Reasonable. And frankly, no. So we had the luxury of saying no to some of these donors. But it's easy to get trapped into that as a, as an activist group, and it does take you away from your core purpose.

Ben: And the last one, I would say that on the grant giving side, for philanthropists or organizations listening in, is that the decisions take too long as well.

Yeah, like a by committee, and B you had the information you needed. You probably had it over two coffee chats and a call. And then you asked them to produce this 10,000 page, 10,000 word. Probably not quite 10,000 pages. Feels like 10,000 pages, but 10,000 word. Form or whatever, and you're getting no incremental value for that.

So I gave some a micro grant program, a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars to individual activists or people trying to make a difference, and I have a call and decide within 24 hours and you give them the money and then we're like, oh my God, I just can go and do it.

And then I say. Tell me in a year whether that worked or not, and yeah. Yeah. A good half of them. It hasn't really worked, but it's fine. They tried something. Yeah. And another half actually they went in, they went and did something and they did it fast. It either works or it doesn't.

You're, a report's not gonna help us like that.

Françoise: That's so true. Yeah. No it's just mind boggling sometimes. Yeah. And then they say, okay, then we have doc dockets only twice a year. I'm like, where's the urgency? Yeah. There's no urgency. The world is literally burning in you all, are very comfy, meeting twice a year. Oh, wow. Yeah. No, yeah, exactly. There's a real disconnect.

Ben: If there's things happening, you should, you can make these decisions fast. Good people can make the decision fast. And I think we can we can and should learn from that. So we met through art and theater.

We have a, yes, we do. We have a theater company, improbable, which does operas. As well as improvisation. So we have that in common. So I'm interested in what role does art and opera play in your life? And we touched on the role of storytelling in general, in movement building and in, in convincing people.

So you could touch on that, but I'd be really interested in how art has influenced your life and opera, and how does that kind of intersect with everything you do?

Françoise: Yeah. Getting back to storytelling. Years ago I had the privilege of spending time in workshops by a man called Chris Rose, who actually lives in Britain, who used to work for Greenpeace.

And he's a campaigner and trains people in campaigning. And he's the one who made us understand those of us working in the public health program at the Open Society Foundation that. Facts don't move people or very little. And people, you can give them all the statistics in the world.

What moves them is stories stories that connect with their own values and their emotional, makeup. And that's of course, again, you know what people like Joe Rogan and all these guys on the manosphere understand. They really are very adept at telling stories that connect with the grievances that some men feel, right?

It so storytelling and narrative. Is what people remember. And then you can hook a few facts to it, to the story, but it's, the frame has to be the story and the emotion and so on. So that's how you move people on political issues, for example. And so I think that's where arts and opera and theater connect for me, because that's often how you can pass if you wanna use it for political purposes.

Of course. How important message is important. Stories are conveyed. And I don't know that's always the reason. Let's say Puccini wrote an opera but often we, when you read the story of how the opera came about, it was about, the revolution in Italy and wanting to fight authoritarian kings and wanting to support.

The movement for liberation and democracy in Italy, so there's several of it, of the operas like Tosca that are, that have the subtext of liberation. So it, it worked that people went to see the operas at the time and they understood what he was saying, even though it was a story that allegedly didn't have an immediate political purpose, but they understood.

They understood the message. And I think music, bypasses that sort of rational side of us and really reaches us in parts of our brain that are truly connected to our emotions. And so opera and I found in particular is something that really will bring out an emotional connection to the story at hand.

And often you'll find yourself. Crying, sobbing in an opera in a way that if you listen to facts about tuberculosis, you wouldn't. But when you see Mimi dying in lab, you know she's dying of tuberculosis. You do feel, my God, we can't allow people to die of tuberculosis.

This is too cruel, right? So there is lots of way in which opera like conveys messages. Very powerfully and directly to people. And it's, it brings up, I think, our humanity, our compassion, the our connection with each other. When we've been at a play, with we, we've both on the board of Improbable and we've been to the place that they put on we come out feeling like better people.

Now we're more in touch with our feelings and our. Or Yeah, or dignity or humanity or care for others. It does make you a better person, I think, to engage in the arts and to open yourself up to the range of emotions that theater and music, connect you with. I do think it's. It's a plus in the world.

So

Ben: it allows us to engage and imagine other world and other people, I think. Yeah, very much agree with that. Yeah. And you've written, I think you've written your own book or books and been involved in creative projects, so I'm interested, do you have a particular creative process or when you are creative do you ride in.

Notebooks and think over the day or your morning or evening person, or do you use post-it notes or how do you do it? I like asking people there, there seems to be 1,001 different ways of doing creativity, but I'd be interested if you have a particular process or things you like to do.

Françoise: Yeah I haven't written a book. You know me, there's a book somewhere in there, but it's not yet a reality. What I write is a newsletter which I write every month. I used to write it twice a month, but now with podcasting, I do it once a month and I. It's about different things. It's about a topic in women's rights.

Could be something very current the battle over abortion rights in the us or it can be something that's more of a feature. So I went to The Gambia last month to meet the activists against female genital mutilation, and it's a battle that's been going on for years now, and, I wanted to hear how it was going, so that's more of a feature piece. I also review books that I find inspiring writing about feminism. I. Or stories about women that I find inspiring. So sometimes I'll put out a digest where I've said, I've read this book, I just wanna share it with you on here's some of the things I'm thinking about.

And I've done a few of these on the writings of Bell Hooks. The African American queer writer professor who who died a few years ago, who wrote about feminism, about love about. Community about organizing, about what it's like to be a black woman. She had a lot of incredible writing that feminists will know, but a lot of other people will never have heard about her.

And so I wanted to put that out to, connect people to it so that, so my process is it's painful until I sit down, but once I'm at the table, it's fine. Once I start. No matter how I start, I'm good. Yeah. Then I can just write, I get in the zone and I'm writing and it takes, it takes to write one newsletter will take days.

I, I spend hours on it. It must be 20 hours, 25 hours on one piece. That's 3000 words. Because you really wanna. And there's so many things I could be saying that I've gotta take out and just keep my story, my narrative, more simple and keep out all the intriguing details I would like to bring in.

So it takes a lot of work just both to put it together in a way that makes sense narratively, but also then. Pair it down to the core and then, work on all the sentences. And English isn't my mother tongue, so I've gotta do some work, additional work to make sure it, it's okay.

And then there's, the dreaded typos that are always creeping up and so it takes a lot of work, but. Once I get going, I'm okay. What I do before that is often I've been reading something and so I just take notes and I put it in a FA folder. I write the notes or a copy, a link or a paragraph from something that I find interesting.

I put it in this folder. So I've got a few things to get started with, but after that, after I've read that, I just start, I just start writing and then,

Ben: and you go immediately. To digital, essentially you're taking digital notes and straight onto that, or do you do a little longhand piece? No

Françoise: I love longhand, but I just end up doing digital even though I'm not a good typist.

And I, I wasn't an early adopter of anything, but yes, no I do it.

Ben: And do you general, do you generally edit sentences and paragraphs as you go, or you're a little bit more we need to get the flow out and then you edit sentences and paragraphs? Once it's all written or is it a mix?

Françoise: It's a mix. Like I'll write, three, four paragraphs, then I'll stop. Then I'll go back and rewrite, reread, and then fix it a bit. And then leave it, then continue, then go back. Then I, this paragraph needs to go first and then, it's it's written. Yeah. I go back over and over to make sure it's exactly what I want.

So that it's easy. I was very impressed early on in my student life by George Orwell's essay on the politics in the English language when he said, you've gotta do all the work. Like your reader should just, read it and it's easy. You've done all the work, you've taken out all the difficult, the difficulties.

It's gotta be smooth. And your point has to just. Pop, right?

Ben: Yeah. That's the, and

Françoise: so that's what I'm trying to do.

Ben: That's the great problem with the vast majority of philosophers actually, and also economists. I think Not all economists, but most, they don't write with that clarity, so we can't really understand, what it is with their ideas even.

Yeah. If they had it.

Françoise: Yeah. Great.

Ben: I agree. Last last few questions. I wanted to go back to your thought on what makes successful movements. And I was very intrigued. You're talking about the feminist movement, particularly in Argentina, but maybe you'd wanna highlight a movement or two, or a campaign or something which you thought was really successful and what really made it successful.

And I can see probably a lot of it. Is in the context of the people in the place that might not directly read from things to things. But having looked in the inside of some of these things and I think people looking on the outside don't get to see how well A, how much effort was in there, and b, the sort of.

I guess operational groundwork about how these things come together, and I just wondered if you had any insights to offer. Having seen some of these things about you know how the movement comes together. Yes. They do seem to be points of leaders. They do seem to have these messages. A lot of it is about the storytelling and emotion.

Sometimes they have these symbols. Green scarfs, rainbow colors, I this and that interplay between the storytelling, the leaders, but the community a as well. I'm just fascinated if you have any observations on what makes successful movements or activism and and insights you might have.

Françoise: Yeah, since, I've worked a lot on abortion I'll mention another such campaign. But you know what I'm saying I think is applicable to other topics. The campaign to remove the prohibition against abortion from the Irish Constitution. That a few years ago that was an incredible.

Efforts by women in Ireland, women and men. There were men involved as well. And it really, it was sparked by the death of Savita Halvar that young dentist who went to the emergency room because she was miscarrying in Ireland and was denied, an abortion because there was still some fetal activity even though the pregnancy wasn't viable at that point.

If you're miscarrying at 18 weeks, there's nothing to save, right? But the Irish medical establishment denied her an abortion and she became septic and then she died of a massive infection completely unnecessarily with her husband by her side, pleading the doctors. And the medical personnel to do something.

And that was a very tragic story in 2012. That, was a shock, I think to, to Ireland, frankly, and to the Irish women's movement. And they, they realize this is the moment, like we need to act because this is intolerable. It's been intolerable for a long time, but this is intolerable, but this is also.

A symbol of everything that's wrong. So they, you gotta recognize the moment when there is that spark, right? You have to have preexisting organizations able to take that forward. To donors. We were speaking earlier about donors funding long-term general support. If you don't have organizations that already exist and already have been funded, who can grab the opportunity, seize the moment, it's not gonna work.

It's gonna be very difficult. Because set, setting up an organization. In the middle of a campaign is very hard. You need to have some preexisting structures, plea again for finding structural organizing. But there were some feminist groups and groups working on abortion and, in despair for a long time in Ireland.

And they saw the moment, okay, this is the moment that will, it's a story, it's a narrative that is very clear. It's outrageous, it's unacceptable, and we can use that to make change. And then what they were very clever doing is. Starting to get testimonies from people who had been forced to travel to Britain or who had been prevented from traveling to Britain to get their abortions, who had to give birth.

As teenagers people really scrambling to get, put the money together to try to figure out how they were gonna take the boat. The difficulties families face with. Children they couldn't take care of. They really managed to get all the different stories of people who had children that they couldn't take care of.

Those that were able to obtain abortions in very difficult circumstances. And then also the people who needed the kind of care the maternal care, the miscarriage care that were being denied that care because of these abortion laws that became all encompassing and. Prevented the proper practice of.

Obstetrics in the emergency room so that lots of these stories were gathered. Then they organized these actions, like for example, they started marching to through towns with suitcases, to, to demonstrate the need to take a boat to, to go to England to get an abortion because you couldn't get it in your own country as a citizen of Ireland.

And so they, these women would march through villages with their suitcases, their wheelies behind them, and. Very powerful stuff that people just, oh God, yes. We're doing this to our women. This is not, this isn't, okay. I. Then apparently they also created these knitting circles where they would knit these little flags, with, a, a ban.

The eighth Amendment was the provision of the constitution that needed to be repealed the eighth, and they were knitting and bringing people in who might not have thought they were abortion activists or that they. We're prepared to campaign on this, but they could join a knitting club and be educated, so this, they had many creative tactics that led to this campaign.

And they brought men in. They had men groups of men campaigning to repeal the eighth Amendment. One of the, 'cause they, it concerned them too. Obviously they're, they're very concerned. In fact,

Ben: one of the things I heard also around that is that they used a process of a citizen's assembly to try and draw in and say, look, if you ask.

A hundred people or a thousand people just drawn from our population, this is what we think now this, time has moved on.

Françoise: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben: I was wondering how you think about that. Did survey as well and things did.

Françoise: Yeah. They did a lot of surveying also to show the change in opinion.

They used all the tactics and when people say, what's the one tactic, I would say, you gotta use a range of things. 'cause some things will work with. In some contexts and some things will work in others, and that's why they gathered a lot of evidence because for the lawmakers they needed to put the report together.

The book report with the stories and the. The consequences. Economic, medical, psychological consequences, the cost to the system. They did all those things. But then they also were able to do the part of it that was public campaigning, which was the visuals the events, the, the gatherings, the marches, the rallies.

They did it at all, right? And and it worked. And it was an incredible event when it happened that, when people were actually going to vote, no one. Could say they didn't know what the issues were and why this mattered.

Ben: Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. Moment in time. Okay. Yeah, very move. I'm very

Françoise: moving too, honestly.

Yeah.

Ben: Great. Last couple of questions. So one is are there any current projects or doings that you'd like to highlight that you're currently working on?

Françoise: Yeah, I've, I'm writing right now about. Control of women's bodies, which is one of my topics. I wrote about female genital mutilation in The Gambia.

I wrote about early enforce marriage, child marriage last year. And I'm gonna keep doing some things on violence against women. There's a couple stories I wanna put out. One about the story of gi, that French woman whose husband was drugging her to offer her to. Random men, and who was raped by at least 50 men without her knowledge in, in that small village in the south of France.

And what I'm interested in, the story is known and these men have been condemned including her husband. He's in prison for doing that to her. But what I'm interested in is the testimony of the man. 51 of them I think, testified at the trial in the, in most of them did testify in their defense.

And the reasons they gave for why they thought it was okay to rape that woman is just remarkable. I think that's a story that I was able to read in the French press, because I speak French and that I don't think people in the English press have. Know about because all those testimonies were not translated.

So I wanna write about that. It's pretty shocking, including lots, several men saying it was her husband, so I had permission.

Ben: Wow.

Françoise: yeah, you, it's okay. You can rape a woman if you're her husband. Tells you it's okay. It's just in today's world, in France,

Ben: yeah. Could definitely have a documentary piece on that.

Françoise: Yes. It really makes you think, it's hard it's not cheerful, but I think we have to look at it straight on, this is what we're talking about, what we're talking about. The need for feminism. Yeah. And then on a lighter note, I'm interested these days in the question of fashion and politics.

There's a really interesting book I'm I wanna get into about how the French Revolution fashion changed overnight because you couldn't wear. You know that the court used to wear, so that brought in the black suit for men, and the cotton clothing for women. And because you could no longer.

These expensive silks, even if you could afford them, it just wasn't done anymore because, politics had transformed what you could wear and not wear. It's really interesting. Yeah. So I wanna look into that.

Ben: Yeah. I, fashion has a, much bigger say as well, like movements and things and symbols and like you say, in the knitting.

Yeah. And the one on the politics front, which I've always noted I have no huge insight as to what it. What it means. But for instance, if you are broadly speaking a powerful male world leader today, you pretty much wear a suit and tie. There's a little exception. So in India you might have a near suit.

Yeah. But that, but like all of, so whether you are Xi Jinping or Putin or Trump or any of the European leaders, they're all in a suit And Thai, whereas. 200 years ago. Even if you think of elite males or just elite court, I mean they were all males mostly. The range of fashion was very varied.

And in this globalization effect, we now think that the pinnacle of male power is a suit and tie. Get up. Yeah.

Françoise: Yeah.

Ben: Which is extraordinary to think and, but also it's un, I find it's really interesting that both China and America and Japan will wear this as their things. There's a little bit more variety in women's dress.

But even there, it's narrowed and it's just interesting thing. Over four, 500 years that would not have been the case. The most powerful people in the world all dressed very different. The same, there was a nation state thing, but yeah, so it's, yeah, you show

Françoise: up in your national but there is an exception to that, which is the tech folks, so that's how Elon Musk can show up in a, the black T-shirt and, the tech lords can wear.

Something different. That's the new power uniform, new.

Ben: Exactly. I I guess it isn't counter-cultural, but it's counter something that, that simple and in fact those sort of statements are worth something. Anyway,

Françoise: we're thinking about yeah, exactly. We're thinking about

Ben: W with that and, how Yeah.

Those symbols that where people wear them or not, and then conform or don't and what it means. Last question. Do you have any life advice, career advice, or thoughts that you wanna share with listeners?

Françoise: I've been interested in the book by Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian who just put out a book called Moral Ambition, which is, don't waste your talent.

He says, make something of your life. And I think that's something I really agree with. In other words, we can all make a difference, for the world, for better, and. And we shouldn't all just be bankers and consultants and, tech people, although that's, you gotta earn a living.

And that might be your calling. But think about what else you can do to make the world a better place. And we can all do something. We can do a small piece, you can do a bigger piece. It can be your life's work, it can be your side gig, but what are you doing to, improve? The conditions of the most unfortunate, what are you doing for the unhoused?

What are you doing for people who are face discrimination? Per pervasive discrimination? Are you working to, green the economy? We can all do something. And when people say to me, ah, it's overwhelming, I don't know what to do. Look at the situation of women's rights or democracy in the us.

I go, no, okay. It's all right. We. None of us will solve it completely, but each of us can do something every day. And we should. 'cause if we all do something, that's how things will move. That's what gives me hope.

Ben: That seems like a great advice that we can all do something, think about what we might want to do.

And we'll do a little something. So on that, Fran, thank you very much.

Françoise: Thank you so much, Ben. It's been a pleasure. 

Sumit Paul-Choudhury: optimism, Navigating Life's Challenges and Uncertainties | Podcast

Sumit Paul-Choudhury has written 'The Bright Side', a book about optimism. Sumit discusses how his wife dying  reshaped his views on optimism, differentiating between pragmatic optimism and blind faith. He explores how having an optimistic outlook, although seemingly against his scientific training, aligns with good mental health. 

"Believing in a better tomorrow is not the same as saying that today is great."

We touch on the evolutionary logic behind optimism, the impact of agency on perception, and how alternate histories can inform future thinking. Sumit also reflects on the role of optimism during personal grief and provides insights into his writing process and the broader importance of the arts and humanities. The conversation closes with advice for optimism in younger generations and an emphasis on appreciating everyday human interactions.

"Postcards from your future self can be more helpful than New Year’s resolutions."

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or YouTube.

Contents:

• 00:19 The Moment That Changed Everything

• 01:08 Embracing Optimism

• 02:58 The Psychology of Optimism

• 04:42 Rational Optimism vs. Pessimism

• 09:39 Alternate Histories and Humility

• 13:20 Leadership and Optimism

• 16:03 Techniques for Optimism

• 20:45 Optimism in the Face of Grief

• 23:40 Teaching Optimism to the Younger Generation

• 26:03 Understanding the Climate Problem

• 28:41 Victorian Sewer Systems: An Underrated Marvel

• 29:41 Debating De-growth Ideas

• 32:07 The Importance of Arts and Humanities

• 34:36 Moonshot Ideas

• 38:33 Existential Risks

• 40:21 Personal Creativity and Writing Process

• 45:58 Current Projects and Life Advice

Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to Sumit Paul-Choudhury he leads Alternity which is a studio that looks at alternative histories and speculative futures. He's also written a book called The Bright Side, which is about optimism. Welcome. 

Sumit: Hi. Ben. 

Ben: You write that you became an optimist the night my wife died.

How did that moment reshape you? 

Sumit: So I think everybody has a moment in their life. Sooner or later.

Preferably if you're lucky later, but when you have to think about whether the world is benign and whether your life is gonna go smoothly or not. And we all have an expectation of that. It's not a particularly rational thing. And in the wake of that event, what I had to face was that the world was not as benign as I thought it would be, or my life was not gonna be as.

Smooth as I thought it would be. 'cause up until that point it had all gone pretty well for me. Really. I had a, pretty, I had a good upbringing, I had a pretty successful education and I was starting to have quite a successful career. And then this sort of happens and you think, actually things are evidently not gonna be that easy or that trouble free.

And so that kind of, inspired as you might expect, a period of some reflection about about this. And one of the things that occurred to me, so I started, there's two things happened. One was that I started to think almost as a joke, I started to say, I'm gonna be an optimist. 'cause I thought of optimism as being quite a silly, frivolous kind of way to, to look at the world.

Not harmful per maybe harmful, but I thought of it in terms of, if you don't really wanna think very hard about the world, you just say, oh, things will work out and that's optimism and that's all that, it really means.

and so one thing that happened was I started doing things that I thought would help. And as I later found out what I hit upon were the kinds of things you are actually supposed to do if you want to be more optimistic or act more optimistically. And I found that they were working, it was started out as a stance, but it started to become a real thing.

And then in the course of doing that, I realized that actually I'd always been like this, that I'd always been an optimist, and that I was actually quite deeply baked into my personality. Which was difficult for me to accept in many ways because I just said, I think, I thought it was a frivolous way to look at the world, particularly with someone who like me.

I was, I studied physics, I trained as a journalist in both those professions, whatever the truth might be. You are supposed to think of yourself as being, a hardened, analytical, critical thinker. Someone who judges things on the basis of evidence and solid argument and so on are not really someone who just thinks things will work out in a particular way.

So there was a real issue for me there to reconcile this kind of newfound identification of myself as an optimist. And what I've been trained to think was the best way to, to look at the world, the best way to approach it. And that's what sort started me down this road. 

Ben: And you distinguish essentially between a pragmatic optimism from this.

Notion that you glossed over in terms of a blind hope, that kind of idealistic, almost foolish kind of hope. Can you unpack the difference and did the sort of face of having to look at that through grief and everything else also help differentiate this difference between a kind of blind faith, hope and where might you have a more rational optimism?

Sumit: So what I got to, and I started to look at this, I think of it in terms of layers almost. So what I found quite early on when I started thinking, looking at optimism seriously, was that it is the default state, not just of me, but 

who have good mental health, who enjoy good mental health are optimistic by default about our own lives in, there's lots, loads of psychological research to the effect that we systematically overestimate our chances of leading a trouble free life. We think good things are gonna happen, so we think we're gonna have healthy relationships and successful careers and, earn more money than we'd like, than our peers and so on.

We think all those things are gonna happen. And we don't think the bad things are gonna happen. So we don't think we're gonna get cancer. We don't think we're gonna be in a car crash. We don't think we're gonna get fired. We don't, and that seems to be very deeply rooted in the way that we look at the world.

And what I found was that there's a good evolutionary logic for that. The simple version of which is if you didn't believe that you wouldn't get our bed in the morning, you have to believe the world is gonna, you're gonna succeed otherwise, why would you do anything, right?

And actually, if you don't believe that, people who don't believe that. Or don't score well for opt or highly on optimism. Tend to be people who have depression. There's quite a big correlation there between those two things. So it's a psychologically healthy state. But having said that, that's where I think we start.

That's what evolution has given us, if you like, and what our base psychology gives us. But of course, we have lots of ways of looking at the world that go beyond that. We have lots of rational tools for making sense of the world. We have lots of ways of assessing what's coming that are more analytical than just our instinct.

And I thought that gives us a, that means that we can build on that basic urge to believe that things will improve. But how do you harness that turn into something useful? And that I think is when you get into the, alright, now you can start thinking about intellectual ways of doing this.

Aren't just hoping things will turn out that are about trying to figure out how they might turn out better and then doing something about it. 

Ben: I guess the rational part of me though thinks so. There's, there is this line of evidence that if you're clinically depressed, you. Judge the probabilities of the real world better than a typical person.

A non-depressed person, like you say is a little bit more optimistic than real world chances. But actually basing it on the real world probabilities is more rational and is therefore a more true way of seeing the world. I was wondering what you would've thought about that, and maybe that also interlinks into this optimism gap that you can see about, depending on which scenario, which framing you use.

I think some surveys show. People can feel good about their own future if they're not the press. So a typical person but tends to actually feel more gloomy if you ask them about society or some other things outside of themselves individually, but on this kind of more culture sector led thing.

Yeah. And I was wondering about the mechanisms behind that and whether we should narrow it and if so, what we should do about it. 

Sumit: There's two slightly different things going on there, but there are, but there's a common strand, which is agency. So the thing that the person who sees the world with with depressive realism essentially.

So the person who sees the world and says the probabilities accurately or seemingly accurately, I should say what that doesn't take into account is the fact that we don't have perfect knowledge about the future. If you had, and this is why I have a problem with the work, with the use of.

People saying they're realists. Because actually if you're being a, if you say you are being realistic, you're essentially, you are implicitly saying. I know how things are gonna turn out and actually we dunno how things are gonna turn out. And I think one of the issues is that we consistently underestimate our overestimate, how well we see the future.

We think that things are gonna be more or less the same tomorrow as they are today, despite the fact that actually I. What actually tends to happen is a lot of the time they are, many days are the same as the day before. But then there comes a day when everything changes, you know? And actually as it happens this past quarter century, we seem to have gone through quite a lot of those, between, so we've got, nine 11, the financial crisis, covid the outbreak of war in Europe.

And so you know, there's quite a lot of stuff that's happened in the last, in living memory. That should suggest that actually sometimes things change very rapidly and in ways that we don't expect. So the thing that I think that you're missing, if you think about what looks like a realistic probability what looks realistic from the here and now is that the future is open and mutable.

And that in two ways, one in the sense that it holds possibilities that we don't know about which is about the predictability of the future. And that obviously varies from domain to domain. Some areas we can be very clear about, some areas much less we can forecast tomorrow's weather pretty neatly.

We can't really forecast an election in three years time with anything like that. Degree of accuracy. And some of those possibilities will be positive. And the argument that I would make is that if you are an optimist, whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, it's, it boils down to self-fulfilling prophecy.

Because, but the difference is there's an asymmetry and payoff one that, in a very neutral way you don't necessarily care about. But as a human being living in the world, you do, if you are an optimist you accept that there are positive possibilities out there. And you might try and steer towards them, not necessarily precisely, but in some sort of way.

That means you're more likely to realize those positive possibilities if you're a pessimist. On the other hand, and should we said that pessimism in this sense is very close to fatalism, it's not doing anything basically. And that means that essentially, yes, you'll be correct, that nothing will happen to previous situation, but that's because you haven't done anything about it and you will not benefit from unexpected positive surprises.

So essentially, being a pessimist, you give up the potential upside. And so that's where that falls down. That kind of idea of agency, the ability to direct, that's also the root of the optimism gap, the gap between how we view our lives and how we view the collective future. Because it's to some degree because we believe that we have control over our own lives, which you know, is true to some extent, maybe not as much as we think.

What we don't believe is that we have control over other people's lives and certainly not how strangers behave. And I think that's why, optimism is strongest for ourselves. And then it gets a bit weaker for our friends and family. Then this kind of a quite a, an odd area in which there are people who we think are agreeable and competent in the lingo.

And we are willing to believe that things will go well for them. Beyond that, it's strangers and we don't think we know how they're gonna behave. We don't believe that they, we can control what they'll do and we become quite negative about what that's gonna, and that's where the gap comes in, I think, between what we think we are gonna do and what we think society is gonna do.

Ben: That model makes a lot of sense for me. I've seen it in animal behavior studies that one of the things you can get into is this learned helplessness condition. So you learn that nothing. You can't do anything and then you stop doing something. But the point you make, which I think I haven't heard it, I.

Quite as articulate as that which you really nailed is the fact that we can impact our own futures. And therefore, even though your probability might be X, whatever you're gonna say, there's not 0.5, you can actually shift that probability by your own agency, your own choice and acting on it. And actually, I think we can probably influence others or influence strangers in societies probably more.

Than we expect. At least we could do within that, which would make sense. I've seen you write as well that you've called alternate history, a tool for humility or essentially looking at these scenarios of that. How do you think maybe businesses, governments, companies, or even ourselves can use what ifs or structured what ifs without getting lost in sort of fantasy type of land, but still being using as a case for say, constructive optimism about the world?

Sumit: I, it's not easy is the first answer to that really. But the and I think the so opt, so we are storytelling animals, it's probably, at this point, every time anyone ever says something's unique about human beings, they turn out to be wrong. But but we do seem to be, at least our capabilities in that respect, seem to be much greater than any other organism we know about, which is double-edged sword because I think it gives us that ability to think about the future in ways that that give us a lot of, a great deal of.

More capacity to plan our futures than any other animal does. We can envisage the future in many ways, which, and the fact that we could do it in many ways, not just one, is is one of our superpowers. The same thing applies in reverse. We can do the same thing with the past, but we don't do it very often.

And I think, it's we do it as a pastime, really. It's everywhere in, in fiction. Alternate histories are really, and, speculative future are everywhere at the moment. The, I think there's varying ways you can look at it. One of them for me is just to remember that the stories we tell about the past are, to some extent, just stories.

It's not to say they don't have a factual basis or that things didn't actually happen because I wanna be careful about not turning this into Revisionism, but the but it's the but what I think we. We tend to do is we tend to construct a narrative that says something happened, then something else happened, then something else happened.

And it had to happen like that. And that gives us the sense that where we are now is where we had to be. And of course when you look at the past, actually, we just talked about, how contingencies have shaped this, our living memories. But the same is also true for history.

And we know about some of these, some of these kind of accidents of history are celebrated. Some of them not so much. But when you get into it, there's always kind of points in which history could have taken a different course. I don't think you need to be precise about what that course might have been.

It's an entertaining pastime to do the, what if someone had killed Hitler when he was a baby, and how would the world have turned out? That's the canonical, alternate history experiment. So you can think that through and you can plot it out. And there are lots of hobbyists who do this with.

What would've happened if the Roman Empire hadn't fallen or whatever else. And you can construct lots of. Interesting, intriguing words out of that. But I think the top level is really just remembering that actually how we got here was not a succession of pre-ordained moves. We didn't get to this point because, things unfolded according to some sort of plan.

We got here because, people did I. People did the best they did. They could. Some things happened that nobody controlled Nature got in the way. Every now and again, you get plagues, you get natural disasters. Buildings fall down every now and again. That sort of thing shapes the course of history.

And if you remember that, it makes you think actually the future is not set in the same way either. And every decision we made remembering that every decision we made in the past and everything that happened in the past led us to where we are, but not necessarily to this specific point.

The flip side of that, and this is what I mean about being humble. This, we are not in a particularly special or preselected place. That means that the same is true going forward. We could go to any number of places from here. 

Ben: So should we be worried about. Panglossian leaders, those who just end up spouting what seems to be almost fantastical nonsense on that side.

Or I guess you need some leadership, something to lead us to a better place. How do we deal with this in terms of a leadership thinking and particularly where I guess we've seen arguably in the western world over the last decade or two, some leaders which might be tilting towards that panglossian style of thinking.

Sumit: I think so there's, yeah, again, it's a double-edged sword because you need people to have clear visions of what they think is possible. And you need people who are gonna able to inspire that sense, that confidence in the people who they have to lead. Which is, again, relatively obvious because who are you gonna follow?

Are you gonna follow the person who says things are gonna be great or you're gonna follow the person who says everything's gonna be wrong, go wrong. I don't have to. So yeah. Excuse me. So optimists are, are popular people like hanging out with optimists. People will go where optimists tell them to go.

It's contagious in that sense, in the sense that people want to do what optimists tell them. I think there's the balance really is when it steer, it drops from being, I. There's a difference between being optimistic and being delusional, and I think it's the delusional piece that is the, or delusional and denialist, really, it's when you insist that your optimistic vision of the future is gonna pan out regardless of the evidence of the contrary.

I. That it starts to become dangerous. All politicians when they get elected have to do so on an optimistic promise. I talked about that kind of, that zone of people that we don't know, but we're willing to accept, the on who's will behalf willing to accept optimism.

Politicians love to be in that zone. Politicians really want to be in that zone of people who are agreeable and who we view as agreeable and competent and whose optimism we believe. That's what they're always trying to get into, and they do it explicitly in campaign speeches and so on. And they have to, because of course anyone who's not in a position, not in office doesn't actually know what they're gonna be able to achieve.

They can't let, so they have to offer up an optimistic promise. And to some extent it has to be a faith-based promise. It has to be this is what I think we're gonna do. Then you get into power and you suddenly discover that, in the words of that infamous treasury note, sorry, there is no money, or whatever else.

And and then you have to deal with reality and modifying it. Where it goes wrong, I think is the point at which people start to say actually still gonna work out. Because with, regardless of whatever else is going on. A lot of the time, this is not particularly obvious from the outside, you just know things are not going to plan.

But it's not. Sometimes it is. And it's things like Covid. COVID is the clearest example I think. We had panglossian leaders on both sides of the Atlantic and the US and the uk. Trump and Johnson re jump Johnson and Trump respectively. And we also have people like Bolsonaro in Brazil, all of whom were essentially at the beginning of the pandemic.

Wanted quite understandably to say, this is just gonna go away. It's not gonna be a problem. Like Johnson said, we'd be done with it in six weeks. Trump just said it would banish miraculously. Bolsonaro denied it existed pretty much. And then they all of them got covid quite seriously.

Of there's no point being blindly optimistic in these circumstances. Reality catches up as Philip k Dick said. Reality is that which when you ignore it doesn't go away. You can ignore Covid, but it's not gonna go away. 

Ben: Yeah. That that's back to reality.

I was reading. On the internet just recently that people have been started to use some of these AI agents or GPT to do this technique of being an ideal parent or being an ideal person. And I was reflecting that this was similar to something you've written around being your best self, that you could be your idolized self.

And I guess this was also a case for optimism. So I, I was interested in. Have you used the technique of being of thinking about your idolized self or maybe even an idolized society or what a utopia might be like and how should we use this, and how useful do you think this kind of thinking might be?

Sumit: Yeah. So I dunno, the chat the chat GBT examples but I can imagine, I think I probably have a rough idea of what you're talking about, but the so yeah the best possible self exercise, I should say there's not a great deal of of evidence that you can change your default level opt of optimism very much.

And I would say that's actually probably fine because we, you grow up with a certain level of optimism for various reasons and and you know how to work with that as it were. So I'm not sure that just generally increasing your level of optimism is necessary, particularly desirable anyway, what I think is useful is to direct it, is to think about the areas, specific areas in which you might wanna be more optimistic.

And that's where I think this thing of, if you don't feel optimistic, you can then bring your intellect to play. You can try and reason through it, and that hopefully will start to make you feel better about it more generally. So the best possible self exercise, which is one of the few interventions that has any evidence supporting it.

It's modest, but it does have it. It's this idea that you should just consciously think about what you want out of your life and you should try and do that. Imaginatively really, it's set aside a certain amount of time each day and, try and come up with a, an idea of what your life might be like if you achieved everything you wanted to achieve.

And some ideas about how you might get there. And the kind of thing about that is it's not, that doesn't sound particularly revolutionary and in many ways it's not really. It's not saying much to say you should do that. The thing that I think is striking about, it's that we just don't do it very much.

We do it once a year at New Year when we make a set of completely unrealistic resolutions, which we then promptly fail to adhere to, and then we give up until the next year and we do it all over again. So actually, although it's not a hard exercise to do it's not something we do very often.

I do think it, despite what I've just said about it not being much rigorous risk evidence. In favor of it. There is evidence in favor of the best possible. It's not a massive effect for me personally. I mean from personal conviction. I think it does work for a couple of, one was because when, during the period of my bereavement is what I invent, one of the techniques I stumbled upon I'm a writer by trade, so I started blogging about what my future life might be like.

And sometime in more or less direct ways. And I found that was really quite a helpful exercise because it helped me to think about, 'cause in that situation, the future just looks like a wall at some points. There's nothing, you can't see anything past, the present day.

So just doing that exercise in alright, so what does this look like a few years down the line? That was helpful. And then I realized that actually, this again, it's one of those things I've been doing. For a long time. And I do think that probably if you carry on doing it, you don't necessarily have to sit down 15 minutes with a piece of paper or whatever and you can write about it.

You can draw, you can there's a technique which people use with communities where they ask you to write a postcard from your future community. So what do you want the place you live to be in, be like in 10 years time you write a postcard to yourself. So lots of ways, but it's about that imaginative conception of what that might be like.

And just the mental exercise of. Trying to think through those possibilities, I think does have a very solitary effect. 

Ben: I love that idea that you write about like postcards from the future. This idea, you can do it from a society or your community. Like you say, you can do it to yourself and also your suggestion that you may have a baseline level of optimism.

Like you said, some level of optimism might be hardwired from some of our biology and neuroscience, but actually to some extent you can train it a little bit, but maybe not. In an overall sense, but in some of these slightly narrower domains, in terms of what you might wanna train, you don't wanna be optimistic across everything at all times, and you end up panglossian.

You can train a little bit of it. And that really struck a chord with me. 

Sumit: You end up with toxic positivity essentially. Just to throw another buzzword into the mix, I think what we, you've, we've seen what happens when people try to be. Overwhelmingly positive all the time, and and it does end up, ends up again in denial. It ends up in denial of, the things that are not making you happy. It ends up in denial of the things that are not making other people happy. So just blindly try, I think. And I think that's where you tend to get to if you just try to be more optimistic.

You just try to be more positive across the board. You can only really do that by pushing away uncomfortable truths. And I don't think that's a great approach. I think being, as you say, being narrower about what it is you would like to, the specifics you'd like to fix, specifics you'd like to think about, that's probably more useful.

I. 

Ben: I'm really interested how you've used some of these techniques, particularly in grief or bereavement and how that has happened because I did a show around death and some of it had quotes from people in grief and bereavement. And I think a lot of them found it very hard to come to this place on, on say, the Bright Side, and yet it seemed to really work out for you.

So I was interested if you think it was just particular to your situation or whether you think some of what you went through could be. Techniques which might be useful for others. So I guess one is imagining a possible future or at least some better possible futures within that. And is there anything else you came to this realization?

Because I think you went through a few things. You went for long walks, you did these other types of, you tried a variety of things, which people do, and yet you still manage to settle on this kind of rational, optimistic route. 

Sumit: I think a lot of it for me, part of it was just that I, as I said I discu realized that I clearly was actually quite strongly optimistic to begin with.

And I think people find different ways to optimism. They find different reasons for optimism. I think if I'd had a family at that point, I might have thought about what I needed to do for their lives rather than my own. And of course, people in that position have a different set of considerations about how they move forward and what they can do.

I had the freedom to. At that point fortunately for me to essentially say I can do what I want for a bit and see how things turn out. If I'd had kids, that probably wouldn't have been true because you have to give them routine and all the rest of it. So there's part of that.

Part of it was another, part of it's about guilt which is not really, it's not directly relevant to optimism in that sense. But when I think it helped but didn't take it seriously to begin with. Because initially I could think of it as this is not something, 'cause I obviously wasn't happy, and I think that if I had thought about it and thought that I, I'm, and thought I was being, doing something that was about.

Being happy or pretending to be happy, I would've found that uncomfortable. But because I treated it as an exercise it was a bit detached from how I was feeling. There's a certain degree of dissociation between my emotional state and my kind of, and this is what I'm doing to get through this.

And from people who've written to me since the book came out and people have contacted me, there's, there are a lot of people who've said. Similar kind of feeling that that, I have to be positive. I have to find optimistic way forward. But it's difficult to it's difficult to say that or to express it because you don't want people to believe that what you're think that what you're saying is I'm over it.

It's done. I'm happy now. 'cause it's very much not that believing in a better tomorrow is not the same thing as saying that today is great. Which is again, actually true for all of the kind of dimensions we're talking about. It's also true of, the world situation, I am I'm, as an optimist, I think the world will be better, 50 years from now than it is today.

But that is not to say that I think today is grace by any means. 

Ben: Yeah. I often express that today's got a huge amount of challenges, yet it is still out of the last thousand years, the best possible time to be born is now and probably the right. It'll be better to be born in 10 years time, in 20 years time than it is today, more or less.

Do you think this has lessons for what we should be teaching or discussing with a younger generation, say children or even younger people? Because I find maybe one of the loops back is I meet some people I. Who I guess I would describe or always describe as being climate anxious or having this anxiety around the world.

And this is why I really feel that some of them are close to learned helplessness and I very much say you've, got to somehow develop your own agency and things around that. And often it makes them feel better because they are suddenly imagining a better world and trying to take steps towards that.

Is there anything else you would perhaps point towards younger people or children that we should be discussing with them? 

Sumit: I think with the younger people, this is it. Difficult 'cause I think that we have, I think we have inadvertently ended up in a situation where we're telling young people about all the things that are gonna be terrible about their futures.

And none of the ways in which things have improved or none of them. That's exaggerating, but I think I think it's very easy as a young person today. And I'm not a young person, so I'm always a bit cautious about saying what I think young people, hear or see or do. But, I think it's very easy to get nothing but messages of doom.

Because of the media environment we live in. It's very easy for that to happen. And it's very. It's, there are lots of ah, what am I trying to say? I think the experience of previous generations in this respect. So there's quite a lot in the book about how I lived in terror of of nuclear war when I was younger, as I think many people of my age did.

And I'm not saying that, that these are the same kind of fear or that or that that just because nuclear war hasn't happened doesn't mean that climate. Like collapse isn't gonna happen. They're both, but they're both problems that needed addressing and they're both problems that seemed intractable at the time.

And I think it would help for young people to appreciate that the situation they're in is not, is actually not unprecedented. There's a lot of messaging to the effect that we are in unprecedentedly dangerous times. And I don't really. Believe that in a way. I think the risks are very real and very large.

But our capabilities are also very real and very large. And our knowledge is very real and very large. One of the points I make a lot of the time is that actually the reason, you know it, is it not better that we know that there is a, the climate is in trouble. Rather than, the situation we would've been in.

50 years ago, the climate was already in trouble. We just didn't actually X Exxon but but most of us did not know at that point that the climate was in trouble. And yes, it, this stuff is scary. And we, and the news is because there's this constant drip feed of bad news. But in many respects, we should treat that as we know what the problem is.

Now we know what the problem is, and when it comes to climate, we actually know what we have to do about it. It's actually, it's not a complic, and at base it's not a complex problem, it's about the level, the atmospheric concentration of certain gases. That's not that hard to understand or to start dealing with the politics and all the rest of it's different.

But, anyway, I'm rambling. Yeah, 

Ben: no I think that's you make some really great points that I think particularly presents in climate and environment. Essentially we fixed the ozone hole, right? We don't talk about that anymore. I remember, when I was growing up, we were taught about that and it was a really big problem and we actually fixed that problem.

And you go back a little bit further in, in the history of London, we had these really big, thick pea super. Events which I, I've only now seen pictures of it because it disappeared and we solved it. And our generation knows nothing about that. And same with some of these other existential risks.

I, I think you're right. Nuclear is a problem. Now we're talking about what? Manmade pandemics ai, existential risk. And actually were so much more aware of them than when we came out of, into the 1950s into nuclear where we had no real. Thought about it within that. So yes, the risks are great or maybe as great as they have been, but our ability to meet that is, is perhaps just as high.

Sumit: There are some interesting history. Helps. Again, I think, and I mean I, I don't think kids necessarily want someone to tell them about, ancient industrial history. But there's probably palable ways of doing it. One of my a friend of mine, Tom Han, who's pointed out he's a studies existential the history of existential risk and existential risk panics, as it were.

And there are interesting reflections. So there is when when people first started talking about splitting the atom way back when, the early 20th century, there was similar kind of rhetoric around, this might destroy the world unless I do it, in which case it will be a limitless source of, of potential for the human race.

And nobody understood its capabilities very much so it was kinda like. It will cure disease, it will provide energy, it will run your car, it will do, it will do everything, and you can't help but look at that now and think actually this is exactly the same. This is this, it's the same conversation as we're having about AI now.

It's it's both cornucopia and apocalypse. Only a few kind of why souls can manage it, otherwise and it could do everything. And none that never turns out to be true. Yeah, 

Ben: and I can see particularly with the ai, if you ask. Certain Americans, they'll say, yeah, we will save the world.

As long as the Chinese don't do it. And then you speak to some Asians, the Chinese is oh, it'll all be great as long as you don't let the Americans do it. So I dunno whether they can both be right or wrong, but some of that anyway, I thought we might do a small section of what I call overrated, underrated.

So I'll give you an idea or a sentence and you can comment on it, whether you think it might be overrated or underrated and some thoughts from this. Probably it's in. In this space. So overrated or underrated? Victorian sewer systems. 

Sumit: Oh. Underrated. And they're in the big section in your book, right?

Yeah. I say underrated. Yeah. They under, they're underrated I think in the sense that I don't think people appreciate the. The scale of the project or we don't think about it. It's one of those things you say we don't really think about very much anymore. One thing is who wants to think about sewers for a start?

But but the problem was, in the middle of the 19th century, the Thames was completely polluted. Like it was it was un central was becoming an uninhabitable because of the stench and the massive disease.

And so Basel Jet set out, once they decided this was a problem, to clean it up with this massive sewer system and he built it successfully. It was a Victorian mega project. It took vast amounts of, of material and ingenuity and money and all the rest of it. And now the terms is clean enough to mostly to swim in and for wildlife to to enjoy and so on.

So it's, and that's something that happens. It's there below our feet if you live in London. And we give little thought to it needs replacing now, granted but very much underrated. Yeah. 

Ben: Very good. De-growth ideas, underrated or overrated? 

Sumit: I think a bit of both. Sorry. That's weaseling isn't it?

Yeah, that's fine. You could do that. I think I think overrated in the sense that that it's very easy to clamor that what's wrong with the world is the fixation with growth. And I think, I. Certainly there's some truth in that. There are decisions, there are certainly some decisions that get made in the name of growth that are probab, that are short term.

We all know that there are some decisions that get made that are short termist and ultimately counterproductive and so on. And we all know that growth in the ways that it's usually measured, which is essentially to say GDP doesn't really capture the things that make life worth living. It makes capture some of them, clearly.

But there are lots of things that it doesn't capture. On the other side of it though the the reason so it's easy to say that Degrowth is the answer and we should just move away from growth altogether. The other part of it though, is I don't think anyone's come up with a very credible response to that really.

We've had attempts at defining happiness and a broadening out the scorecard and so on, so that we include more factors I think about is just introducing carbon emissions as, probably the only constraint maybe that's being taken seriously on growth.

That's the only thing. And the amount of political turmoil and social turmoil that has resulted from saying we need to consider carbon emissions, on a similar footing to the potential for growth. So just there aren't that many easy solutions here. So I think degrowth. Clearly there isn't some sort of alternative to the growth at all costs approach.

I feel like the wheels are coming off that at this point. We know that there are significant ways in which it's failing our societies. I don't think just saying just step away from it is really the answer. Either there's a middle ground somewhere that people who know more about this stuff than me.

Should be trying to work out and I'm not sure they are trying to work out, I think they're trying to shout at each other instead. 

Ben: Yeah. Although there is this issue of time horizon like you said, there's some things you can do which look maybe good on a three to five year basis. In fact you could say, if you only had two years to live, these are the things you might do.

As opposed to you were thinking on a hundred year view or a 50 of your, let alone a thousand year of you. And there are these problems in terms of for instance, when you've looked at happiness or other things that people find important. So education, health. And the the correlation of with GDP is like 0.8 or something is really high.

We haven't managed to look at these some other things. And the happiness thing is again is very mixed. We can't quite get round to it, but I agree. I think we should be looking more of it. So under and overrated. Great. Okay. The role of the arts, so arts and humanities, underrated.

Or overrated? 

Sumit: Oh, massively underrated, I think. And yeah, again, with, again, with the caveat, underrated in a sense that I, so one of the things that I, I believe but cannot prove as it were is that I think that we have, when I say we, I mean I'm really talking about the UK here, or it probably applies to some other societies as well.

I think we've let the organs of the organs of imagination, that's a terrible phrase, but I think our societal organs of imagination have been allowed to atrophy. Imagination and creativity in a broad sense, rather than the narrow ones of product design, if you like. Whatever. What I mean by that is that that places like Univers, so universities have been turned into job factories to make it overly state this overly crudely. But but the, the the guiding staff in universities has become, how many productive, employees are you gonna turn out.

We have systematically through succession of events, some deliberate, some otherwise stifled the creative potential of many people who might once upon a time have been. And I know this seems quite a long way removed from what we've been talking about, but people who might once sort have picked up a paintbrush or picked up a guitar or whatever else now cannot really do that in a viable way.

We don't have the educational facilities for it. We don't have the recreational facilities for it. We don't have society that rewards it. And I think all of those things regardless of the actual products, of those activities which I think are themselves valuable, but I think what it does is it gives people permission to think about the world, in ways that's not, that are not the ones that they're necessarily given, by rote, and the more we do that, the more difficult it becomes for people to see other ways that the world might turn out or to have conviction that the way that they see the world, has merit. And yeah, and it's art and humanities that do that. There's some culpability here in that some of the arts and humanities have become so preoccupied with themselves that they've forgotten about, the wider world or seem to have lost interest in engaging with the wider world.

But nonetheless, yeah, I think we've become so fixated on hard skills on stem and this is coming from someone who is, stemmed to the core. We've become so fixated on that. I think we've forgotten about the piece that the arts and humanities. Contribute. 

Ben: I've always said the cutting edge of physics wherever you get, is much closer to philosophy, arts, creativity than it is to just mathematical equations.

And I think the role of fiction, creative arts, imagination does give you both of these things. This ability to imagine these other worlds and also then to imagine other people, other societies who aren't necessarily you. Okay. Last one on maybe last couple on overrated, underrated moonshot ideas.

Overrated or underrated? 

Sumit: Overrated. Yeah, over, overrated. Not in the sense that I don't think they should exist. I think they should exist. I think it's great for people to have ambitions people, societies. To have big ambitions and see what happens if you pursue them. This all sort of presupposes that you have the luxury of doing that.

But nonetheless, I think it's a good thing generally to have moonshots, things that seem unachievable. 'cause sometimes they turn out not to be. That's the, the self-fulfilling processes of optimism, what I think is, underrated by comparison, and this is not to say it's not happening, it is what I call in the book multiverse shots.

And this is not a particularly rigorous concept, but it's the idea that you should be trying to nurture ideas which have the potential to flower into many domains. One of the areas, and there's a couple of areas in which I think I could, there's sort of a. You can make the contrast. One is air travel, and or yeah, mean air travel, let's call it air travel.

And I get very frustrated by there's a certain demographic, shall we say who like to complain that Concord doesn't exist anymore. And that it was a great failure of it was an engineering triumphant, and doesn't exist. And where are we going as a society? And so now we have attempts to rebuild supersonic planes and and get that up and running again and.

I can't think that's a, that's not a particularly helpful moonshot. It solves a very limited problem for a very limited group of people and one that doesn't arguably need solving. And the same could be said for all the flying car startups, that exist out there. And these are essentially trying to solve problems that don't really exist.

They're ambitious, difficult, technical engineering problems. They're not real problems. Whereas I think, the other modes of aviation what you could do with air shut technology. There are people exploring all these things, but what you could do with aviation, air shut technology, what you could do with biofuels, what you could do with other forms of propulsion.

These are all fields that are comparatively unglamorous compared to the big Bang, if you like. Yeah, I think moonshots are great. I think it'd be better to try and identify fertile areas of research a bit more than in a bit more of a constructive way than we do at the moment.

Ben: I thought that was a really interesting section in your book. It. Tell for a couple of things that I think that, for instance, I don't need an AI robot for my coffee maker, but there was so much other stuff you wanted to put robots to use that maybe you could think about. So I did think there was one on that.

Sumit: Yeah. But it was also 

Ben: interesting on the aviation point that maybe it's, we want systems moonshots, which would be multiverse in, in the sense that I think the phrase comes from, oh, we wanted flying cars, but we only got. Two hundred and forty four, a hundred forty four or whatever. But actually we didn't solve it.

But had you solved a proper Twitter, social media for the world, that actually would've been, and will, would still be much more valuable than if oh, it's just, we didn't happen to solve that to solve that 

Sumit: one. I think it's interesting in that context actually. 'cause I think of a GI similarly.

I think a GI is a not well, actually, I do think to put my cards to the table. I think it is a pointless moonshot, really. I think I think it's expending an awful lot of of power resource human endeavor and all the rest of it in the pursuit of making a human ish machine. Whereas actually I think, the, I think AI has probably has a myriad of really useful applications in many areas of life that we are not really focusing on because we're.

Currently hung up on this idea of we can make an all powerful, all rounder, which I don't think is gonna happen. And I don't think it's gonna be particularly useful if we do. 

Ben: I think that is just starting to happen. It's interesting. It's maybe a little bit like what we saw in, in, in the internet is in just getting our heads around how to use this.

And that's, I think this is why you're saying younger people use. These AI agents, but yeah, we don't necessarily need them to be 10 x or a hundred x better or like human-like intelligence 'cause we can't even use our own human-like intelligence now as effectively as we could. So maybe we've got some 

Sumit: of these things.

I think the great potential of AI is to think in ways that we don't think, yeah, I'm not sure the point, I'm not, I don't really grasp the point of creating machine that will think like we do, but not as well. I think. I think creating a machine that will think in ways that we don't think is much more useful.

Ben: Yeah. Okay. And then the last one on this I guess we touched on, but overrated, underrated, this would be existential risk. I guess we can talk about AI or climate within that, but do you think overall this some of this focus on existential risk is overrated or underrated? 

Sumit: I think it's hugely overrated.

I think I don't and a bit cautious here because we do seem to be inventing things that could do. Great damage to, a large number of people. Ever large number of people, numbers of people. We are in a point in history where we could exterminate ourselves probably more than we, but nonetheless having said that I feel a bit like, I think we've started to think about the future, the way that we think about, we used to think about God, we think the future is gonna judge us, and that, there's an apocalyptic moment coming or a moment of salvation coming. And now we put it in, we couch it in terms of what our technology's gonna end up doing as though we were not in charge of it.

Or that we were not in control of it or that we don't have any ability to decide how we use it. And I find it hard to believe that our situation today is, somehow worse than, and the comparison I like making with this is a medieval peasant in, 1350, the Black Death is coming.

People are dying in their droves. You dunno why You dunno who it, you dunno who it's gonna affect. You. Dunno why it's affecting them. You dunno how to prevent it. You can't do anything about it. Your society is completely imploding. It turns out quite well for you if you're a peasant, actually.

Because feudal, the feudal system collapses and all the rest of it. But I find it hard to believe that, that was not a moment that felt more dreadful from the point of view of existential risk than the moment we have now. When we are, concerned about, we are worried about technologies that don't exist yet.

And it's not wrong to worry about technologies that don't exist yet, but the very fact that we are worrying about them in advance. It's surely an improvement over, am I gonna be dead when I wake up tomorrow? 

Ben: Yeah, agreed. Existential risk then overrated. Okay. And then last few sets of questions.

I had one I guess moving to personal creativity on your writing process or your own imagination process. 'cause you, oh yeah. You've got a whole book out and also I guess you run a creative studio. I've asked this for a number of people and I think there are as many different creative.

Processes as any other things you can write in the morning, you can write in the evening, you can write any of the 25 7. You can write lots, you can write little but I am interested in what people do. So do you have a particular writing process? Do you like notebooks or your laptop person?

Morning person, evening person. Do you write with music? No music or however, is there anything about your writing process you'd like to share? 

Sumit: I can take the music bit. 'cause always with music, that's the easy, that's the easy part of my answer. You know what I don't have a very good answer on this really.

I don't think so I wish I had a cut and dried writing process because then I could just do that over and over again and be much more productive than I am, or maybe not, I don't know.

But like most, like many people who write a large part of it is a mystery to myself really. I spend a lot of time reading. I think the one thing that, I have figured out about myself is that I am the kind of person who integrates a lot of information rather than the kind of person who has one idea and pursues it doggedly.

Unfortunately the process by which I do that is a bit opaque even to myself. I tend to read a lot of stuff in the area I'm interested in, and then at some point, words tend to present themselves to me, largely fully formed. Often when I wake up in the morning I have, I go to bed, with a massive stuff in my head, and I wake up in the morning with, with the lines I want to write down.

I. That's a very unsatisfactory answer to anybody who wants to actually do this is the truth. 

Ben: Yeah. Speech. Make sure you sleep. Yeah. Make sure you sleep. That's a good one. Okay last couple of questions then I have one, which I guess is the sort of meta question, which is there a question about optimism that you never get asked, but you would like someone to ask you?

Was there any question that, oh, you always wanna be asked, but no one ever asks it to you? 

Sumit: I don't always wanna be asked. Oh gosh, yes. Give me a second. 

I guess the question which I am asked and which I've written like 89,000 words of justification, but which I still don't really know what my actual answer to it is is it right to be. Optimistic. And when I say right to be optimistic, I mean in a cosmic sense. So in the book I explain the first part, the, why I think there's an evolutionary rationale for being optimistic.

And in the second part I talk about the people's attempts to, and this is, it's the second part really that we're talking about here. I talk in the second part about the philosophical arguments for optimism, at least actually slightly antiquated, philosophical arguments. But nonetheless, and they're cosmological arguments.

They're arguments about the way that the world is arranged. Is the world arranged in such a way that it's justifiable to be an optimist? And if you are if you are if you have religious faith, if you're a believer. That's an easy answer, a question to answer in many. It's not easy in the sense that you still have lots of other questions to address then, but it's quite easy to say yes because God is benevolent.

So you should be an optimist. You should believe that things work out. If you are not a believer on the other hand then you are left with this question of, what is the universe like? Is the universe patterned? Does the universe have a direction? Does the universe, want something from us?

And. That would be an empty question. Were it not for the kind of. Problems of cosmology today. So modern cosmologists have all these questions, some of which I think are a bit overrated, go back to that. But nonetheless they are questions. There are questions about why the universe is so neatly arranged.

Why the physical constant, the universe suit us and. I, I'll specifically set up in a way that leads to the emergence of human life in the ways that we don't think would've happened otherwise. I don't actually think that's a problem in the sense that, I think there are explanations for that, but it is an interesting question about, so what do we think about our relationship with the universe in that case?

Does that mean that is there at some kind of level, an ordering to the universe? That means that actually the way we perceive the universe, the way we move through it, the way we behave in it. Justifies us being optimistic. Is there something like that? I don't know what the answer to that is.

I suspect that there probably isn't an answer to it. Because from that little ramble you've probably understood it's not an easy question to articulate. But there is a question there about is the structure of the universe such that there is a direction or a purpose or a rationale?

Ben: Yeah. I was chatting to another physicist who's. Talked about philosophy and this notion of free will, is it deterministic or not? And he came to a conclusion that essentially we have free will in practice because of complexity and these other things. And it alludes to what you said earlier is because we don't know how the scenarios are gonna play out.

We have to run the program. We have to run, we are the program in the sense that we have to run these scenarios. Although, I dunno whether it gives justification, I do think that actually you might as well be optimistic because if that is going to make your program or your scenarios tilt to the ones that you might do because we don't know and may never know to, to your point.

And because the only way of knowing is to run the program. Then you might as well run the program in this way because it's gonna be neutral. So you can choose one or the other. 

Sumit: Yeah. Pragmatically, here I am in the world. I have to make my choices. I can't not make my choices.

Yeah. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter what the fundamental nature of the universe is, I still have to get on with my life and I started to do it in a way that I think is gonna turn out well. 'cause I'm not gonna. Actively decide I'm not gonna become the dice man and roll a dice to decide.

And I'm not going to leave it to the universe to decide. But the physicist in me would still like to know, yeah. Ultimately out there, 

Ben: is there a universal law or framework which is guiding this. Yeah. Great. Okay. And then last question, are there any current projects you wanna highlight?

Current project. Current or future projects. And is there any life advice or advice career, advice life, or anything that you'd to leave with listeners? 

Sumit: What happens next is an interesting question for me. Part of what I'm doing next is is around this question of what does, what does it mean to be a human in the universe?

I have a kind of campaign going to which I'm gonna get started shortly. And how to make the universe scary again. I think we've I think we've become a bit too comfortable with the idea that we know everything, we can do everything. And I think there's a bit of restitution of that that needs to happen.

I started thinking about my next book, which I mixed feelings about, but 'cause it's a big project, but, it started to itch, so I think that's gonna happen sooner rather than later. And in terms of life advice? Oh gosh. I don't know if I'm, I think I've exhausted my supply of life advice in the book.

Really. I think, yeah, no, there is one actually, which is I think the I think forgetting everything else, all of that kind of intellectual scaffolding and like what I tried to do in the book was provide lots of lenses to look at the world through, and hopefully one of them is one that you'll look through and think, yeah, I think the world does look brighter through that one.

But the the one thing I think is most helpful is I. Or most immediately useful is to try and pay attention to what your life is actually like in the day to day. Because when we get gloomy about the state of the world it's this kind of thing of our own lives are okay. But we think the rest of the world is terrible.

I think it's worth remembering that, the people you meet in an everyday, as you go about your life, most of us, fortunately most of us live in, peaceful societies. At least, we go about the world and we meet people and everyone does what they're supposed to do and and people are friendly and generally get on and, traffic works. So thousands of people, millions of people go about their business without erupting into conflict or violence or decay or whatever else. So every day when we go out in the world, what you actually see is people getting on with it. And people managing their lives and trying to reach the best outcomes for themselves.

And when it comes to that optimism gap, I think what helps is to remember that's what people are like all over the world. What you're seeing around you, you're not in a privileged to some extent you are but it's not that you are in a bubble separated from the rest of humanity.

That's what the world is like. That's what people are like. I think that helps to get over the optimism gap. 

Ben: That sounds excellent advice. And so with that, I'd remind everyone the book is called the Bright Side. And with that, thank you very much. 

Sumit: Thank you, Ben. Thanks.

Devoted and Disgruntled 2025 sessions

I popped into this theatre openspace UnConference event. It’s Devoted and Disgruntled and has been going on 25 years.  Here are some of the discussion that took place.

Link to the DnD site.

What's your exit strategy?

1. AI actually stands for "Artificial Impersonation" – What is AI really and why should we be creatively worried and excited about it?

2. Is it ever too late to be interviewed by Smash Hits?

3. Why do we do what we do?

4. If I’m not doing anything more "important", I’d better sit + write my play

5. Creative role sharing – Who is doing it well? Is 2 really company?

6. How can we start to help UK society see the value of the arts again?

7. How are artist and audience development linked?

8. Opera & classical music – How do we drag the industry forward with us?

9. An alternative national theatre??

10. Confident authenticity in an industry that feels judgmental + observed

11. Bombard me about the bunch of bonkers characters (that I’m still discovering) in a play about anti-Asian racism

12. Creation beyond the border – Funding, etc.

13. Can we clean up the Spider Network? (Performing Arts Infrastructure)

14. Self-producing artists: How are you doing? (And how are you doing it?)

15. The Gathering (Improbable’s quest for a home) – Updates – Possibilities – Requests

16. How can we find balance in work + our own creative fulfilment – Filling our wells

17. Access/inclusion from the start – Not a bolt on!

18. Psychotherapy + improvisation – The joins

19. Tea with the gays / coffee with the queers

20. I’m an artist in recovery: How to survive a toxic creative process

21. Harness the absurd

22. What are we doing about / with directors these days?

23. When theatre is building the plane whilst already flying it, how do we teach board & funders not to be afraid of heights?

24. Who does the UK theatre sector think it’s talking to?

25. Training pathways in tech for performing arts for those 25+ and career shifters?

26. A manifesto for the arts

27. What can theatre do to address the mental health crisis affecting young people?

28. The repository for half-finished ideas

29. 20 years of D and D – How was it for you? (Oral histories)

30. If we could invent an arms-length funding body (Arts Council) fit for the next bit of the 21st C, what would it be like?

31. What do artists want an arts space to be?

32. How might we continue to collaborate beyond this weekend?

33. R&D – Hopes, dreams & nightmares

34. AI and/or Art: How do we work with or against AI?

35. The future of musicals – Have your say! Bleak or bright?

36. Theatre – What’s the connection?

37. I feel so disconnected from my ability to make theatre. Should I reconnect and if so, how?

38. Menopause (peri + post) as creative transition

39. British venues love international work. How do we get them to love migrant artists?

40. Lunch + imagination games

41. Climate justice – Coney last performance workshop

42. Art/performance to counter authoritarianism

43. Politics?

44. Manifesting workshop

45. Tea + empathy – Weekly peer meetup at Edinburgh Fringe 2025

46. Finding time to make & not just write funding bids

47. Is the arts sector filling gaps in NHS mental health provision? If so, how do we proceed ethically?

48. How can theatre be used for rural development?

49. Invisible fringe – How can we get the attention from press + audiences that fringe theatre deserves?

50. Eldership and the future of creative participation in music + performance

51. How do we support each other to take risks?

52. Help me to put dreams and a heart into my dolls

Mary-Ann Ochota: Adventure, Resilience, Unveiling hidden histories, archeology and the ancient world | Podcast

Mary-Ann Ochota is a broadcaster, anthropologist, and writer known for her work on Time Team and books on archaeology and the British landscape. 

“Archaeology is ultimately about people – the stories of people in the past and how they lived their lives.”

Mary-Ann discusses her visits to Chernobyl, British henges and the Australian Simpson Desert; exploring themes of resilience and environmental recovery. 

“One of the big misconceptions is that archaeology is just about digging things up.”

She shares insights on ancient British sites and the broader implications of sustainable development and access to nature. We discuss her role as president of the Countryside Charity and her thoughts on the future of rural development are highlighted, along with her creative writing process and advice for connecting with nature.

“We’re all living on top of layers of history, whether we realise it or not.”

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

Contents

• 00:31 Exploring Chernobyl's Impact

• 04:59 The Resilience of Nature

• 05:55 Adventures in the Simpson Desert

• 13:56 Ancient Sites in the UK

• 17:10 Access to Nature and Social Barriers

• 31:56 The Ridgeway National Trail

• 38:33 Exploring the Purpose of Henges

• 39:29 Ancient Feasts and Food Waste

• 40:15 Reevaluating Ancient Civilizations

• 44:32 Imagination and Environmental Crisis

• 47:53 Balancing Hope and Realism

• 50:06 Writing Process and Creative Challenges

• 01:04:24 Sustainable Development and Land Use

• 01:11:32  Life Advice 

Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Okay, great. Hey everyone. I'm super excited to be speaking to the brilliant Mary-Ann Ochota. Mary-Ann is a broadcaster, anthropologist, writer, and adventurer. You might know her from Time Team or her books on archeology and the British landscape. She's a passionate advocate for the countryside and explorer of the world's hidden histories.

Mary-Ann, welcome.

Mary-Ann: Thank you very much for having me. It is genuinely a great privilege.

Ben: Thinking about your adventures, you've been to Chernobyl and I think also to the city of Piya.  What struck you most about your visit to Chernobyl and how perhaps it might influence our views of resilience and environmental recovery, and anything about the abandoned city, which really struck you?

Mary-Ann: It was such a strange place, Ben, I think I went with, so we were making a documentary for National Geographic. Oh no. Was it Discovery? I should really know, shouldn't I? And it was about Chernobyl 30 years on and how the impact of the nuclear disaster at the nuclear power station that had impacted not just the people and the environment, but also the wildlife.

And so I think I had gone with a certain set of preconceptions about what a kind of nuclear holocaust landscape might look like. But actually you get there and the immediate presentation of this landscape is that it's beautiful, rural, there's loads of wildlife. And it feels. Lovely. And we had training before we went because we were going to be going to areas of the exclusion zone that tourists don't normally get to go to.

And so you have to take additional precautions. And the person who was training us is ex-army. He was part of the army teams who would go into civil disaster zones or war zones to make safe, the chemical, the nuclear and any kind of pot potential biological warfare threats.

So the other, members of civilian and military teams could then go in safely to help restore power or rebuild the road or reach victims of the violence or whatever. It was set at field hospitals. So his was the advanced team who had to deal with the stuff. And he said basically in this kind of scenario, it's not a live war zone.

There's not, dismembered corpses strewn across the road. You're not gonna find some kind of quivering wreck of a survivor in the bombed out shell of a house. It's the silent threat that is really easy to forget. Because it's the dust. It is just the dust that you will inhale that will be on your skin that has a half life of thousands of years of radioactive contaminant.

And you won't feel any different. You're not gonna start coughing up blood, you eyes aren't gonna burst. It's just the silent killer that will in 20 years time, you get cancer and maybe you wouldn't have if you hadn't taken the precautions that you do. And that was the thing that really struck me, that the notion of how we perceive risk is often so aesthetic.

The aesthetic of what things look like, what a scary or dangerous thing looks like versus what actually is truly a risk was the thing that, that struck me. And that you have to be conscious in your vigilance. Because otherwise you just become really quickly complacent. There was one point where filming days are really long and we'd been filming in the forest because we were filming with a team of scientists who were investigating the impact on the kind of the woodland rodents.

So things like little voles and little mice that live naturally in that kind of birch woodland that has grown up around all the villages because for 30 years people haven't been cutting down trees. They haven't been cultivating fields, their gardens where all these houses used to be. And nature is regenerated and it's impacted by the nuclear contamination, but it grows anyway.

And the thing about investigating the impacts on things like door mice and vols and little mice is that because they reproduce so quickly, you've got 30 generations of impact. Whereas obviously if you're looking at humans, you've got the children of the people who were evacuated. So when you're looking at the impact on genetic inheritance, the impact on how mutations have affected populations, things like that, you're not looking at a zombie mouse with, five ears, but you're looking at really subtle little changes.
 

Ben: That's fascinating. I, looking at the pictures, it also just struck me. How resilient nature is or, little animals and things and how they come back. 

Mary-Ann: Nature runs. And I think, that's one of the amazing things about talking about Rewilding.

Even in a kind of pop a kind of a landscape like the uk, which is very densely populated, 70% of the land masses farmed, but you actually go give it a little chance and it bursts back into life. And actually that's one of the kind of things that you have to remember that what we are doing is maintaining suppression of certain types of habitat and what the kind of the, what happens if you look at places like Chernobyl, which are far from ideal conditions for real restoration of nature, but in other ways really great because you've entirely taken away the human pressure on those landscapes.

And you go what happens now?

Ben: On the other end of the spectrum, I think you've been to the Simpson Desert in Australia, and that's somewhere which is super remote and harsh. And yet maybe that recalls something about the resilience of humans over time. What did you learn about the Simpson Desert? And I guess that was more ancient cultures, but the ability of humans to adapt to where we are?

Mary-Ann: Yeah, I think there's many opportunities that I've had around the world and in back at home in the UK where the thing that really strikes you is the ability for people and communities to, like you say find new ways of coping with threats, coping with challenge and harm. So the Simpson Desert is.

An extraordinary place. It's the largest, it's quite a niche kind of claim to fame. It's the largest parallel dune desert in the world. So imagine kind of Lawrence of Arabia. You've got those big sweeping dunes that are like waves of sand. The Simpson Desert doesn't really look like that. It was ex, again, expecting something different to what I then saw.

The Simpson Desert is lower, it's a bit grayer in lots of parts. And these sand dunes are quite big. Not massive, maybe 10 meters high. And they run in parallel lines for literally hundreds of kilometers before petering out and then starting again. And a lot of the desert is very kind of scrubby.

There is vegetation there and it's sorry, Simpson Desert. It's ugly little scrabbly bushes. When rain comes, which is rare, but does happen, it bursts into life and all of a sudden for a few weeks you've got this, these carpets of wild flowers. And then what happens is that the water will be held in basically kind of clay pans where naturally the sediment has formed at a kind of a base a slightly less permeable base.

So everywhere else, the water dissipates very quickly. It evaporates off because you're in a desert, it's hot, and it's very dry. But on these clay pans, it holds water for a little while. And then all these different animals and birds and plants burst into life and you've got this real extraordinary cyclic.

Rhythm of life in these desert ecosystems that is completely alien to someone who lives in temperate, rainy Britain, where the cycle for us is seasonal. It's every year and today, for example, I walk the kids to school and you could smell spring in the air. And I really love that experience of kind of feeling my animal, self responding to that.

But in the Simpson Desert, some of these cycles don't happen. And there is a cycle that happens annually where you've got the hot summer season where it gets up to 50 degrees centigrade and no one goes into the desert. And then the winter season, where, for example, expedition groups like ours can go if you carry all your water with you.

But some of the cycles run on generational human generation length. So 20, 30 years you'll get these seasonal cycles and you've got, what you end up with is species that kind of, their range shrinks back to these refuge little refuges where they can just clinging on through the really harsh seasons year after year.

And then there's another rainfall event, and then they spread out again, and then you they circle back to these refuges, which are really biodiverse and really precious. Because if you lose a refuge, then you lose. Thousands of literally thousands of species from plants to invertebrates to the slightly bigger animals.

And then of course you've got the desert specialists who can cope, big eared little mice and funny little lizards with big fat tails that store moisture. But it's an amazing, it's an amazing habitat to walk across. So we were walking and we had camels carrying our water and kits, so there's no permanent sources of water in the desert because these clay pans are very temporary seasonal.

And the people who used to live there the PE people, native indigenous to that area were the won kru. And they would go into the desert, they'd live on the desert fringes, and then they would go into the desert when conditions were suitable. And they were doing a number of things fishing, for example, in these clay pans.

Where did the fish come from? Nobody. The biologists know, but it feels like they spring from nowhere. And the one kru had these wells effectively where you, they create a kind of a natural clay pan, very low down, and then it gets filled with sand, but it holds enough water. So then when you get to a well, you can dig it, dig out the native well, and you will get literally a, kind of a cup's worth of water at a time.

But because you are. That kind of generationally inherited knowledge of how to survive in these landscapes. That's enough. That will keep you going. And then you can walk another 20 miles to the next native. If you miss the you're screwed. That's it. You're done. But so you don't miss, and you walk at night often.

You walk in, the kind of muscular times, dusk and dawn. Or sometimes through the night just to cover the distance to get to the next

Ben: and I assume that the wells are about one day's walk away from one another.

Mary-Ann: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And the thing that was always.

Confusing to the the white colonists who were turning up with horses and with a canoe or a boat strapped to a horse that would then promptly drop down dead after a few days because the conditions were just horrific and horses can't survive walking on that kind of sand.

They started to import camels. So camels aren't native to Australia. There's thousands of them now, and they're a kind of a problem. But. Camels could cope. But the thing that they didn't understand was how the people could have coped. And they just thought they, they must have been living like animals and actually go no.

It's incredibly sophisticated knowledge that just cannot be underestimated. And actually what you see as well as these chains of native wells that are, like you say about a day's walk between one to the other are stands of this particular plant called Pitchie (or Pituri). Which has the same kind of volatile chemicals as tobacco.

So you can chew it and it gives you a bit of a high. And Pitchie was traded up and down north, south pretty much across most of the continent of Australia. And other things like shells, feathers this Pitchie, various kind of types of pigment, all sorts of, precious and specific commodities were traded up and down these long networks between different groups of people who had different languages different cultural ways, but had some kind of commonalities.

And so what you'll find is in what feels like. Genuinely, the middle of nowhere is a picture stand a stand of these bushes. But you can see that it's been cut and copies by human hands. It's growing in a different way. Now, I wouldn't have been able to see that, but in our expedition team, we were traveling with botanists who were like, I see it and point out, can you see where these cuts have been made?

That isn't na, that isn't natural. This isn't naturally how the bush would grow. And so basically what you're doing is pruning them so that when you come back the following season, there's more picture to harvest that you can then carry out and trade, strike even get high.

Ben: Yeah. Did you try any?

Mary-Ann: I didn't. No.

You have to dry it and then ferment it. 

Ben: Bad reactions, maybe not thing to try for the first time in that. 

Mary-Ann: Never tried a cigarette. I managed to skip that phase of being a teenager. So I feel like maybe Pitchie (or Pituri) would've been the thing to get you through break.

Break the seal. Yeah, exactly.

Ben: It strikes me that there was such sophisticated ancient knowledge and also these cultures, which obviously the colonialists went and destroyed, but coming back closer to home how many ancient. UK sites have you visited? How many of these hinges have you been to?

Because you've I'm pretty sure you've visited Stonehenge and you've written about Avery. You've written about Kane as well. I'm not sure I've got pronounced that correctly. But what do you think is going on with the UK hinges? Are you fond of the kind of astronomy type ideas about why the Henges were about and what do you think about some of these ancient sites in Britain?

Mary-Ann: Britain is just the best for like really weird old stuff. I think that's the thing, Ben that's. Links lots of my work. So for example the trip in Chernobyl, not only were we looking at this, the wildlife, but also meeting people who wanted to come back. For example the one Canaro people still exist despite all the horrific and brutal treatment and the kind of cultural genocide.

People still go to the desert now. They live outta the desert, but they do still go bush and people in the uk I think we sometimes massively. Take for granted the fact that we live in this landscape that has been permanently inhabited since last ice age. So like 11, 12, almost 12,000 years ago.

And every single generation has made its mark in the landscape because, feels so remote. So you look at Stonehenge and the first circle the wider circle, not the kind of massive stones in the middle, but the kind of wider earth work. That was established about 3000 BC about 5,000 years ago.

Avery a little bit later, four and a half thousand years ago, probably callanish, like you say, up in the Hebrides, amazing. If you want to go and visit weird, cool archeology that's a bit off the beaten track, I'd say go to the Outer Hebrides or to Orny both sets of Scottish Islands.

One on the west coast, one off the east coast. But we've got thousands of them, and some of them have souvenir programs and tickets and gates and whatnot, like Stonehenge. And then some of them are, all you need to do is to bother to go and find one basically. And if you have the ability to go into the field, literally a field and find them, then honestly I think you'll be repaid tenfold a thousand fold with the kind of the joy of exploring being a landscape detective.

But even if you don't have access or the ability to get into the middle of a muddy field. The resources that we have now, the tools that we have online to look at aerial photographs, to look at LIDAR scans of kind of the land the land forms to get all these records that have been digitized.

You can do some fantastic armchair landscape spotting as well. Yeah, what it's, they're brilliant. I love them because one of, there's so many why's that are still unanswered.

Ben: Yeah. I just really mysterious and, you can go to places like the Simpson Desert to get that, but you could get it much closer to home.

I've noted a lot of your work on access to nature and access to places like this. I'm quite an urban boy and when I speak to some of my urban friends, there is this sense here in London or maybe in the UK that the countryside perhaps is for an elite.

You need to be rich. Aristocrats have a lot of land. Maybe city people or even explorers aren't so welcome. We have this issue maybe with access and pathways and knowledge and the like. And I had earlier on the podcast I. Her nickname's Al who also has a lot of work on terms of access to nature and things like that.

And it seems to me that there's a perception that there's a bit of a challenge and there's a little bit of argument around this. I'd be interested to know what you advocate for and where you think the kind of challenges and opportunities are in terms of getting access to nature and things.

'cause like you say, some of these things, you just need to know where they are and it's essentially free and, or should be and they should perhaps not be. Some, as much of debate around this as there is

Mary-Ann: yeah. Realities of barriers to access to our countryside more broadly, but as well as the landscape heritage cannot be underestimated.

It is really easy for me to say they're free. You should just go. But actually think about what that represents and all the stacked. Privileges and assumptions that is based on, which is that I have access to a car. I have money for fuel, I have a spare pair of shoes so that if my feet and get muddy or wet, I have something else to put on.

I've got the I've got access to laundry facilities in my home. I don't need to take all my kit to a laundre. I've got a waterproof coat that works and waterproof trousers. I've got layering. I've got a ruck sack. I've got enough free time to be able to go. I've got enough money to stop at a cafe perhaps and buy a sandwich and a cup of coffee.

I've got don't have a physical disability to consider so that if I'm parking up in some random car park and there's one toilet block, I don't need to go, oh, hang on a minute. There's no disabled blue. I. Mixed race. My mum is Indian and my dad is Polish. I think in some circumstances I'm perceived as a person of color and in other circumstances I'm white enough, I'm white passing.

I think it makes a big difference when you are able-bodied and you are wearing Gore-Tex, that people nod at you and go, oh yeah, she's the right kind of person to be here. She looks like she probably knows what she's doing. But I've spoken to people who, have, oh I know loads of people who've faced really explicit, horrific racism.

The gang of friends who went walking. And there was one place to go to the toilet, which was a pub. And in, as they went through this village and one of the guys is practicing Muslim and he didn't want to go into the pub. So he sat outside while his mates went in to, to go to the loo.

And someone who's standing outside, one of the locals, I guess having a cigarette said, oh, you leaving the terrorist outside then are you? And it's just horrific. There's a guy called Sam Ascar who runs a guiding company called Summit Special. He works a lot with people from the global majority, guiding them on kind of walks, increasing community capacity and confidence to get in the outdoors because if you are walking with a group who you have a, an affinity with, you don't feel so exposed, you don't feel unsafe.

And they get death threats. They get death threats for taking over the countryside, inverted commas. And it is genuinely appalling to see how hard it is for some people to simply be in the countryside. And often we think of, um, racism and poverty and access to public transport and stuff like that as urban issues.

We are a majority urban. Society. Most of us live in towns and cities, but we cannot forget that the rural communities are, need to be economically viable. They need to be culturally diverse. They need to be able to have access to affordable homes and, sustainable transport. And I think one of the things that when we forget that or overlook it or assume that it's probably fine because actually it's all aristocrats and people, leaning over five bar fences gates, chewing straw.

That actually you create the perfect conditions for a rise in populism as much as anything. And we do a kind of massive injustice to all those communities if we don't take seriously. There needs to be. Economically viable, diverse, exciting, entrepreneurial communities in exactly the same way that we look at Leeds or Manchester or London and go, of course you need to create opportunities for business development and investment and green power and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Name all the things that are important. If you don't go and how does that work in the rural hinterlands, then we've absolutely missed a trick and we are doing a huge disservice to literally millions of people in our nation. Yeah.

Ben: Because I think, although we're majority urban might be 70 30 or maybe even 60 40, so that's Yes.

A minority, but 30% is still a really large absolute number.

Mary-Ann:  I think it's come to the fore quite a little bit more than usual that because, we've seen tractors surrounding the House of Commons as farmers protest things like changes to inheritance tax. But the kind of the, the dissociation the kind of divorce that we have, most of us from how our food is produced and who is doing that, who is actually managing this land and in what ways and how much of a say do we have about that?

Um, it's a real problem. Our complacency or kind of feeling like, oh, that's nothing to do with us is part of the problem because we. Just offer an un unequal and unhealthy share of power to just a certain handful of people who may well be happy to say, don't worry. We're custodians and stewards of this land.

Don't you worry your little urban heads about it. And you go, hang on a minute, hang on a minute. Who is that benefiting? And the answer is not the nation and not social justice. So I'm a big fan of access reform, partly to challenge that hegemony of power because it is unequal and we've forgotten what we've lost.

Because of enclosures of common land, because of effectively people being pushed to urban areas because of a depopulation of rural places we think that's how it's always been. We forgotten that, not that many generations ago the, countryside areas were much more populated and you'd have, 12, 15 people working on a farm.

Whereas now it's incredibly lonely and isolating. 'cause you've got one farmer struggling away with a bunch of machinery, but also untethered from the fabric of society. And that's not good for either, either side of that equation.

Ben: So you are recently president of the Countryside charity, is that it?

The role president? Yes. So I can see this is gonna be one of your priorities. Is there anything else you'd like to highlight as what you are thinking? And then maybe you can roll it into, so if you did have. One or two or three policy asks what would they be? Some might be a little bit more simpler around access reform, which don't seem perhaps as tricky.

We might get onto what sustainable development might be, which might be a little bit more tricky. Yeah. But access and yeah. What other things you're thinking and policy recommendations in the uk or even broadly, you can take on the world if you'd like.

Mary-Ann: You would be surprised at how tricky access reform is a kind of first thought you're like it's not that hard.

And it turns out there is a lot of vested interest pushing back. So there's the situation as it stands at the moment in Scotland, so literally head over the border and you have a default of access as a member of the public, you can go pretty much anywhere on both land and water.

As long as you do it responsibly. So you can go hiking across any field or mountain or hill. You can go swimming in a lock, you can launch a canoe, you can wild camp. You can light fires again, as long as you're doing it responsibly. A little campfire. You can ride a bike, ride a horse. You can't go into kind of private land, so someone's garden or like a kind of work yard or a farm yard.

You can't trample crops. You can't disturb livestock, but you can, for example, walk along a field margin, find your way across the landscape. And the essence of this Scottish outdoor access code is that there's a default of access, a right of access. Except where there's obvious exemptions where it would not be responsible for you to, for example, walk across this wildflower meadow, walk through this herd of cows where it would really disturb them.

You have to, it's on you to behave responsibly and to educate yourself on what responsible access looks like. In England and Wales, we don't have that. We have a default of exclusion with certain access permissions. So we have about 140,000 kilometers of footpaths and bridleways, which Scotland tends, doesn't really have, it doesn't have the footpath network that we in England and Wales have.

And it's not to be underestimated. That footpath network is pretty awesome and really quite extraordinary in compared to other places in the world. And we have open access on, particular types of land. Now it's weird because it's an ecological designation. So it's for example, unimproved grazing and you're like what the heck is that?

I don't know what that is. Or unimproved, grassland. But most of it is moland mountains and heath, which inevitably isn't really where most of the people are. It's up and away. It's things parts of the Pete district, it's parts of the late district. It is parts of places like the South Downs National Park, but I.

Any other bits of it, you have to stick to a footpath or a bridal path, or a byway or you are not allowed to be there and you would if you were walking across a different kind of field. Then it's the, it's an act of civil trespass. It's a civil offense. And I'm a huge supporter. And on that open access land, you can only walk.

That's the only thing you can do. Or you could stop and bird watch or you can rock climb, but you cannot, for example, ride a bike, ride a horse. You can't camp and you can't swim, for example. The rights of access to water in England and Wales are like pretty terrible. I think something like 3% of waterways have rights of access.

Then landowners can, through their large s give you permissive access. They can say, we'll allow you to walk along this path to reach the river, but they can withdraw that permissive access at any point. There's no controls over what kind of thing that access looks like. So they could put styles in, they could make it really narrow.

They could put barbed wire. They could say, you can only come on every second Thursday of February and that's it. Or just say, we've decided not to now, so you can't come anymore. And I would really support a change in access in England and Wales that defaults in very similar ways to Scotland to say, actually, let's have a right of access to the land with sensible exceptions rather than the other way.

And the reason is twofold. The first is that it would create more access for more people close to where they live, which we all know. The evidence is stacked up that is good for our health and that is good for our mental health, our wellbeing, our social cohesion and resilience. But also really good therefore for productivity, for keeping people in work, keeping people economically active, reducing costs to the health service and social care services.

All this stuff is the return on investment is fast as soon as you've got viable green. Access. People just are better. They're more, okay. So that's one thing that you actually just increase access for people and you still need things like car parking and litter bins and styles, or not styles, gates, sorry, don't have styles 'cause they're really terrible for access, but accessible gates.

People will want paths as well. Not everyone wants to try and, plunge their way across a river or kind of try and tread down the kind of the scratchy brambly edge of a field side. Some people want to do that, but some people will want to path. But the other thing, the reason that I think access reform is really important and why it would create a kind of a real step change that is important in so many ways beyond just being able to go for a walk or a bike ride.

It changes our relationship with the landscape and it changes that sense of ownership and belonging and responsibility to one, which is, this is also my place. This isn't private property where I am here either under duress or with permission that can be withdrawn at any moment. This becomes a right, and with that right becomes a profound responsibility that this is my land too.

It's my responsibility, it's my duty to understand it better, to care for it and perform. There's a campaign group, the right to, and they call it wild service, which is also the name of a type of tree, the service tree. But fundamentally it becomes about a reciprocal relationship with the land and with nature.

Not one where you go as a consumer to use it recreationally and then you withdraw yourself back to where you came from where you rightfully belong, which is in a town somewhere, but actually this is land that is ours and that it feeds that much deeper essential relationship, which at heart acknowledges that we are part of nature and that we need nature and to care for nature is an act of service, but also an act that fulfills us profoundly.

Ben: So it leans away from it being a transactional money thing to stewardship and thinking about the long term and our relationship with the land and everything. I think that absolutely. Yeah. That's really fascinating and I. I hadn't also picked up until I was reading about your work that I think you are patron of the Witch Way National Trail and I discovered I didn't know anything about this trail and it's really ancient.

What drew you to that and what should people know about this trail?

Mary-Ann: The Ridgeway National Trail. It's one of 16 different national trails around the uk, which are designated in the same way under law. They're designated in the same way as national parks and national landscapes. Things like the High wheel or the Rocha Hills or the Lake districts, or the Peak District or south Downs National Park.

So these national trails are supposed to be jewels in the crown that really celebrate the the most iconic or culturally specific or unique in terms of the, the ecology of our landscapes. So things like the Pennine Way the walk along the Hadrian's wall the walk along offers Dyke on the England Wales border.

They're all national trails and the Richway National Trail has this kind of nickname as Britain's Old Road. And the National Trail section of it runs from Ivanhoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire just north of London, to Overton Hill, which is basically Avery in Wilshire. And it's about 87. It is 87 miles long, so if you wanted to walk it you could walk it in I guess a week or so.

A lot of people, some people but you can walk like little sections of it. And parts of it are the kind of Western half, the Wiltshire Northwest Downs end of it is accessible for horse riders and people on bikes as well. It's mostly bridleways, whereas the bit that goes through the Chiltons, the Chilton Hills is mostly footpaths, so you can't take a bike or a horse there.

And it's. It's remarkable. It follows the chalk escarpment that kind of runs, um, from northeast, basically the wash in Norfolk in East Anglia, down to kind of line Regis in Dset across that kind of bottom corner of the kind of UK mainland. And it follows the high ground. So you get really distinctive set of species of wildlife because the specialize with this chalk grassland.

But you also go past so many extraordinary archeological monuments that just are mind blowing. It's a really beautiful walk. And because it's chalk where the path is, it's exposed. And so you are literally following this really clear, distinctive white line through the landscape. And, it's inspired.

Lots of artists people like Eric Rubius who painted these landscapes where you've got this line of white that cuts through arching up and over these kind of rolling hills. And sometimes even though you are in really the most populated corner of Britain when you're up on the redway, you can, it can just be you, skylarks and some hares.

And it's really beautiful given that it's so close to so many towns and cities. It's it's quite a remarkable place.

Ben: That sounds amazing. So I have two teenage You should go. Teenage. Should we go? Yeah. I have two teenage urban boys, so this is definitely would be one on our list.

But is there a anywhere you'd recommend, I guess I'm London centric to that, but if we're to go anywhere in the uk. Where would you say we should go and have a visit or have a little adventure?

Mary-Ann: Why not start? Let's start on the Ridgeway. There's a really cool bit of a walk where you can walk from no, hang on.

Let's scrap that. So I'm a big fan of Avery Stone Circle. I Okay. Think it's better than Stonehenge. Sorry. It's better than Stonehenge. Sorry. Stonehenge. Partly because you can get up close and personal to the stone Stonehenge. You have to stay on the path and just like squint to see the thing and you're like, oh, is that it?

It's a bit small. It is impressive. Fine. But it's not cool. It's not viscerally amazing. Yeah. So going to Avery and you can hug these absolutely enormous, like tons and tons of stone and kind of wonder, genuinely marvel at the construction of the biggest Henge in Europe. It's a super henge.

It's so big. It's got a village in the middle of it. And then you've got these various stone alignments. You've got circles within circles. You've got these huge earthwork banks. You've got a Stone Avenue that leads out of the village. And if you walk up the Stone Avenue, a carry on for a. A kilometer and a half carry on for about a kilometer and a half.

So not too bad. Even for people who don't love walking, walk slightly up a hill and you get to a place called West Kennett Long Barrow, which is from about five and a half thousand years old. It's an old to from the late stone age, and you can go inside the spooky tomb and you can literally sit inside a prehistoric tomb that is older than the great pyramid of Giza.

Wow. And it's literally just you and a footpath and you can wander in and and it's it's on you to explore, which I think

Ben: I'm definitely gonna, I think we're gonna try and get there this year. And I suppose there's a whole ancient community complex around this, or was it more just a religious pilgrimage site?

Mary-Ann: Such a good question. Ben Avery is obviously. Really important. We don't know quite how it was used, but it certainly, it has ceremonial proportions. One of the really interesting things actually about lots of different Henge monuments. So Stonehenge is officially a hege because of a tiny earthwork way further out than the kind of big stones that you see.

And a hege is it's got a coming from the outside, it's got a bank of earth and then a ditch. So the ditch is on the inside of the circle. That's officially what makes something a henge as opposed to, if you think about like defensive earthworks around a castle, you would have the ditch on the outside and then a much bigger bank on the inside.

'cause you're trying to stop people from getting in. So they have to get down the ditch and then they have an even higher climb to get over the bank of earth with a wall on top or what have you. Whereas a hinge from the prehistoric period. So in the late stone age and the Bronze Age, what you end up, what you have as a kind of theme is that you've got the earthwork on the outside, you've got a bank and then a ditch on the inside.

So it's more like it's containing something on the inside rather than preventing something from coming in from the out or. Maybe the bank is for sitting on or standing on. So you can see what's happening inside the circle. So it focuses attention into the circle. And so one of the thinking, one of the kind of theories of how these henges might have been used is that they are communal gathering places where dispersed communities can come together to.

Either bear witness to some kind of important ceremony, or maybe it's a place where you go for particular processions or occasions, perhaps seasonal. Again, seasonal times that kind of mark the end of harvest or mid-winter or the kind of effectively like a brilliant knees up in the middle of summer where, you know, people hook up, you make trade deals, marriage arrangements, everyone gets wasted.

You have a big pig, barbecue, whatever it is, which we find at Dorrington Walls, which is a site near Stonehenge. They were just massively keen on pork barbecue. So much so that they throw carcasses away that have lots of meat on them still. And we can tell that because all the bones are still articulated.

So you know that the kind of the flesh and some of the tendons and stuff. So we think of the stone age as everyone kind of scrambling for a final, tiny hazelnut to stave off starvation. But actually they were doing well enough that they were feeding their pigs apples and honey, we can tell 'cause the pigs have rotten teeth.

They've been fed such sweet diets to sweeten the meat probably.

Ben: And they had lots of food waste as well then, or at least at times. And had food waste. Yeah.

Mary-Ann: Yeah, exactly. So this kind of conspicuous consumption.

Ben: And maybe had these, ritual performances and things, it really strikes me that these ancient civilizations, or even not so ancient, were just so much more sophisticated than my kind of lay interpretation was.

And actually a lot of the techniques and skills, some of which we couldn't even replicate today and have no idea what was going on, but also that civiliz what we might consider civilization or these techniques happened a lot earlier than it would seem, I dunno, I'm gonna pronounce this correctly from the Turkish site, but Ger Beckley Pepe, I think that's how you talk about that.

Yeah. Yeah. It seems that is ancient and they were doing things so far before we thought that humans started doing these type of things, and that might then apply to everywhere else in, in the world we're thinking. I dunno what you think about that or what kind of this, thinking about how it should change our view around what.

Ancient humanity has been doing and what we've been doing all of this time,

Mary-Ann: I I think you're right recently and in with increasing frequency, we have dating techniques that are more accurate. You used to be able to say, oh, it was somewhere between 12,000 BC and 8,000 bc, but we're not actually quite sure.

Whereas now we've got techniques that can really hone down dates or you can get a kind of sample from a particular type of artifact or biological residue. That means that we can get just a lot more information without destroying the thing in the process. But yeah, basically. Most frequently the thing that we thought first happened in 4,000 bc then you suddenly get dates.

For example, Quebec tepi this really extraordinary kind of ceremonial complex where there's evidence of early agriculture there's evidence of narrative storytelling in these kind of carved panels. And you just think. Oh, we need to recon, reconfigure that. There's even like way deeper in the past, we've got evidence of Neanderthals, for example creating a rock art making shapes of hand prints creating ceremonial structures.

This amazing super weird site in France where they found Stites arranged in a circle deep into a cave system far beyond the kind of natural light. And the only people who were around at the time were homo Neanderthal lenses, not homo sapiens, not us. And so you go, oh, we need to reconsider them.

That they weren't knuckle dragging idiots. They were. Sophisticated, creative capable of that kind of abstract thought. So quite regularly the kind of list of criteria that we use as human exceptionalism. Oh we are the only animals who do language. We're the only animals who create art.

And you go oh. No. It turns out Neal did that too. Oh. It turns out that, whales use vocalizations that distinctly identify different individuals, which you might otherwise call a name, for example. Yeah. You are right. They're not sitting around the whale equivalent of a campier telling stories about, the gods and monsters as far as we know.

But we constantly underestimate both other. Species and we constantly underestimate the humans who came before us. I think that's the one that's the, I think that should be on the list of human criteria. We're just rude and exceptionalist

Ben: regularly. And maybe I dunno whether it's this, I guess you could almost say it's a slack of imagination, but I was reading a lot about, and observed, for instance octopus.

So this is almost like ancient. And for as far as we can tell they might have their own culture, their own humor, their own sort of society. But it's so other, so alien. We can't imagine it. And we don't have their language, but it, they might go we can't understand your language.

Imagine if you could trade with octopus or speak with ants. Ants we could do so much for ants and ants could do for us if we could treat them on a level, but obviously it's not there. It's a little bit science fiction.

Mary-Ann: Yeah. But you are right. I think we. You think who, who loses when we have that failure of imagination or failure of curiosity?

And I think sometimes it's not because we can't work it out, it's because the impact of acknowledging the sentience or the importance or the integrity of that particular organism would profoundly force implications and changes in the way that we act, that we take for granted that put our needs first.

But fundamentally, we are, facing climatic Armageddon and a massive crisis in biodiversity collapse. And so business as usual is. Clearly not working. And because we're short term, it's that failure of imagination. And because we've got so much kind of vested interest in, for some of us, often the people who are pulling the levers of power and money where money goes they have enough vested interest in maintaining some version of status quo.

But it doesn't serve us, not as a species, not for the majority of us, in fact of the kind of 8 billion humans on the planet, and certainly not for the broader spectrum of non-human kin or other than more than human. If you want other than human.

Ben: Yeah. Maybe it's this failure of imagination, like you say, and vested interest from a minority.

Ben: Willful blindness.

Mary-Ann: It's interesting to contemplate what, don't, the thing that history teaches us is that we don't learn from history, but the same mindset of kind of dominion and fundamentally an exploit, an exploitative relationship, I think is ones that, you can see writ through with our relationship with the natural world, but also written through with cultures around the world through colonial and imperialist.

We've basically got that same imperialist mindset and we've we can point at the harm and say, oh, there's a thing that happened that wasn't great for some people except, maybe others. Yeah. They go, the railways were fantastic for India, well done us. And they should say thank you. The kind of the flip side of that is that if we perpetuate and continue and keep feeding those uncritical, unpro, ways of shaping how we understand the world, then we continue to cause the same harms.

Ben: Yeah. So I will put a glimmer of silver lining in that we seem to very slowly, much too slowly and much too painfully do achieve small bits of progress. So we went from slavery to women's rights, minority rights, disability rights, but.

Still more to go on all of those really to, to some extent and really slow. But they did come in. But I, I have a a thing within disability. It's why is that being so slow for it and continues to be so slow? But, when you look at it over human generations, at least you can see there is some, although I don't understand why we can't do it quicker for some of these things because they are only human made constructs, which we are disassembling and reassembling.

But there, there is a sliver of that. I do think we, we have made progress, but it does seem to be so slow on that.

Mary-Ann: Yeah, I think, yeah, I think you are right.

Ben:  I only mention  it because I, because when I speak about with this, my son I don't want him to give up hope as well because sometimes if you feel you can't do anything, then you end up not doing anything.

On the one hand, you don't want to you don't want to negate the scale of the problem or the challenge and the bad stuff that we do. On the other hand, you don't want to think that, oh if this is the case, then we're always powerless and we might as well give up.

So you've gotta got this weird balance of where you are in advocacy of we've gotta hope for the best, but we're also planning for the worst type of thing.

Mary-Ann: Yeah. And I think that idea of hope not being optimist, it doesn't need to be about optimism, it needs to be about a commitment to continuing the change.

Even though it's hard, even though there's no guarantee that you will succeed, the endeavor itself is of value and should not be ducked. I think the other thing is you are absolutely right. It's really easy for us to be pessimistic and go, oh, isn't things, aren't things terrible?

And they do feel admittedly quite terrible at the moment. And all those gains that I thought to some extent we had down there was consensus that this was a good thing. Now feel like they're at renewed risk of going backwards, particularly with the Trump presidency in to a kind of a lesser extent with, for example disability cuts announced by the kind of labor government in the uk.

You go, hang on a minute. What the things that we took perhaps were a bit complacent and took for granted. We thought we'd won that war and we could move on or won that battle and could move on. I think we need to potentially keep reasserting, the value and the why which is exhausting to say no.

It's important that, disabled people have every opportunity to live fulfilled lives. Whether they're the working, getting people into work or whether you are unable to work, you still deserve to live a fulfilled and, coherent life that has that is, beyond mere survival.

I, you think didn't the Victorians decide that was probably appropriate? Didn't we wasn't that, didn't we beat women's suffrage as a kind of concept?

Ben: Yeah. Settled that a while ago.  I'm interested in your creative and writing process, 'cause you do all of this traveling and broadcasting and storytelling. You are a brilliant presenter, but you've also written all of these amazing books. I asked Cisco a number of people, and there's no right answers, but I'm always really fascinating.

Do you write in Burst? You keep notes, do you keep a little drawing pad where you are as well? Do you do it in weeks at a time or every day? How do you like to write and how's your process?

Mary-Ann: Oh, it's such a pertinent question at the minute, Ben. I have a very long overdue writing project, apologies to Mike at Pan Macmillan and it is coming who's my editor?

So I have two small children, one's six and one's three. And that has massively impacted my ability to, I think, go with what feels like the natural rhythm of my writing and creativity because it has to be shoehorned in between all of life and the kind of caring responsibilities.

Naturally left to my own kind of will. I would write from the afternoon into the evening in long days. I'm like more plotty, shyer horse than I am sprinting thoroughbred for sure. It takes me a long time to percolate and settle and faff about, and then I start to slowly get into the writing.

So I find that actually to get. Proper big bits of writing done. I basically have to leave my family and go and stay. I go and stay in a youth hostel where there's very little else to do, apart from going for a walk or sitting and writing. Those are my two permitted activities or go for a run or something like that.

Because otherwise I just end up, I don't know, I'm just making spaghetti bolognese and then putting the washing on. And then by the time the kids are in bed, you're just like, oh, I'm tired now. So working in short bursts does not work for me. It does for like adminy stuff, but like the big brain work, I need hours and hours on end.

And probably days upon days where you build up that momentum I'm definitely,

Ben: Do you edit as you go or do you put it all out and then edit? Afterwards, which you need your buildup of days.

Mary-Ann: Yeah, I try not to. My husband, Joe Craig is a, an author. He writes children's books fiction and I write nonfiction.

So the kind of, the activities are slightly different, but there are elements which are the same, which is and many years ago, I actually overheard him giving advice to a youngster who was saying, oh, I want to write stories. What, what do I do? And he said, basically, imagine that the writer and the editor are two separate people.

You can't do both jobs at once. So write first, edit second, because otherwise you get stuck trying to perfect before you've created, get it down in some kind of messy draft. The first draft is always shit. Make peace with that. That is part of the process. You don't need to show that to anyone, but you also want to turn off the critic in your brain so it doesn't get in the way of, you don't want someone standing over your shoulder going, that's a terrible, clunky sentence, right?

Or that's not the right word. Or, cool, you are not as bright as you thought you were, are you? You don't want any of that. Hush, hush, go away, make a cup of tea, annoying critic, editor person, and you just get it down with no judgment. And then you do the next stage, and then the next stage, and then another stage.

And that's where you can be a bit more critical and move stuff around. I've just started using Scrivener. Yeah. As a software. I was attempting to write this book that I'm working on at the moment, which is a history of our species, but short and very readable. It covers Quebec, Lee Tapi, in fact and Neandertals.

I was really struggling with a Word document of such a long manuscript that kind of has so many aspects that relate to one another. So I gave Scrivener a go, which I found very helpful because it also has the functionality where you can just make everything else go black, literally go black, and you've just got words and you don't get distracted 'cause it it looks and feels like words.

So you're not faffing with a really complex bit of software.

Ben: A decent amount of, screenwriters actually in some playwrights use a kind of Scrivener type thing. I use although I haven't done a long piece for a while, and I'm not sure I quite have the space around 'cause of children's things.

The post-it note strategy, which was the kind of analog version of a kind of scrivener. So when you have a scene or a little chapter, but also, or even something which would only be two or three paragraphs worse, and you have the heading, but you're not quite sure where you place it and you don't want to lose it.

You have it, but you also wanna go, oh, you know what, it's no good being in the middle, in the first third. It actually has to go all the way into the middle third somewhere. And you rearrange those or you realize you know what? That's no good. So you just pair up the post-it note and put it somewhere else.

Mary-Ann: Yeah. Yeah. That, that feeling of having no, nothing is sacred when you're editing. And you might have spent hours, days trying to get a thing. Clear or sorted, and then you go to review it and you're like, Ugh, I don't need it. Yeah. It shouldn't be here. Doesn't fit. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't fit. But I'm a very paper-based person.

I like still use a paper diary, for example. I do try and get some of it online and I've, what I tend to do, I dunno why I do this, but I tend to create like email drafts to myself. So I use my drafts folder on Outlook to get down a kind of, like you say, a line or a link or a something.

Just again, because I'm, I I'm. I don't madly, I don't enjoy spending time interfacing with technology. I'd much rather be digging a hole outdoors or doing something in the naturey outdoor space. So the thing that even though it's clunky and doesn't quite do the job, it does the job well enough with less kind of mental friction.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. My, my wife Anish actually does that quite a lot and she's she's writing in a kind of nonfiction narrative sense as, as well, but I'm always really worried. It's oh no, it's gonna, you're gonna lose it in drafts or yeah, but it's somewhere where you don't lose it and things.

But yeah, no, that, that does happen. That's what happen. Write and things. Yeah. I don't, if it does work to me joke. Yeah.

Mary-Ann: I yeah. I should, the kind should is always a terrible, it's, it is never that useful in any bit of life, but as a writer as well. I should be more organized.
 

Ben: Creative messiness though I'm really in favor of it, that actually it sometimes means you get linkages and ideas that you wouldn't otherwise if you are too rigid and rigid in form. Maybe that's just an excuse, but I do think it's, I, yeah, I do think it's true. Think

Mary-Ann: that's, yeah, I think that's very true and I think I'm, I dunno if it's a kind of stage of life or it's an age thing.

But I'm definitely less bought in to the idea of efficiency and kind of high output productivity now. Yes. Because a, it's not very sustainable. You burn out, but also because the, it is really easy, isn't it? In our kind of, in, in the world in which we live to feel like that's where your value as a person lies.

And it's really. Helpful, I think to sometimes just go, but why are you doing that? Yeah. What value does it value in perceived in a much broader sense, rather than, are you gonna earn money? Are you gonna earn lots of money or no money? You actually go, look, what does this add to your obituary for argument's sake?

Or by, creating some sense of positive legacy, not in an egotistical way, but in a kind of, have you left the world a better place? Yeah. And if you weren't that, ah,

Ben: riffing back to our idea of stewardship earlier. Yeah. And I do think it's almost in all things like big or small or personal or organizational, that the offset to efficiency.

There's trade offs in everything. Tell us, the economists say the offset of efficiency is less resiliency. And you see that to the extent that you make things just in time or one supply line really cheaply because this is really efficient.

Mary-Ann: Yeah.

Ben: You are much less resilient as a person, as a system, as an organization, as when something goes wrong and something always goes wrong.

If you have a single supply line really efficient, your supply line is disrupted, you have no more business. And so actually this is a lesson I think I take sometimes from nature. Nature has a lot of redundancy, which actually is resiliency in some ways. It's efficient in some ways it seems mysteriously inefficient, but it's not inefficient in this operational sense.

It's because it's building these other things other things around it.

Mary-Ann: Exactly. Yeah. And it determine, it depends on the timescale that you're perceiving as well. Yes. Like how big is the perceived, what are the parameters of your project? Inverted comm, and you're right, yeah. The idea of kind of redundancy or inefficiency being bad and you go, actually, if you reconsider, maybe that's the most important thing.

I was struck, I was chatting to a a youngster I know the other day who's 12 years old and was talking about doing duke of Edinburgh Award and how it wasn't really of value anymore unless you do your gold, duke of Edinburgh, the bronze and the silver, everyone's got them, so they're not really worth anything.

And it really struck me that for that youngster in their kind of social circle and their education circle. It was perceived as, what is the product, what is the output rather than process or what you might get from it By doing community service, by learning skills to go hiking and read a map by learning about a different project in a kind of follow your own nose, Montessori indulge your own learning and curiosity.

And I thought, oh no, what we're failing our youngsters.

Ben: This is exactly your point about the transactional nature of some of these items within nature. And to roll, lean back that obviously the majority of the value is not in your little gold, bronze, or silver certificate. Yeah, the majority of the value has to be in the experience and everything, but if you're only doing it for the certificate, then obviously you lose everything.

Anyway. Last couple of questions for you. Would be current and future projects, and then we might also tip into kind of any advice, thoughts you have, but maybe yeah. Current or future projects that you would like to highlight.

Mary-Ann: So the big current project is this book about humans, which I, I started writing a number of years ago and then put down basically because having very small children fries your brain, it turns out whilst also trying to keep all the other plates spinning.

So it's back up and running now and hopefully we'll get finished. I'll finish writing in that in the next few months. Basically, it's a short, super readable history of our existence as a species as really complex, socially, elaborate people, creatures, animals from the species that first started walking on two legs, so about three and a half million years ago.

To now to how our, that inheritance might shape how we respond to future challenges. But all readable and all quite sure. So not as thick as some books written on this subject. The idea is if you're a quick reader, you should be able to read it in a day. Excellent. That's my plan. Turns out writing short is harder than you think.

You think, oh, just dash it off. Nah, it turns out it's taking me longer to write a short book than it did.

Ben: Yeah, it there isn't that aphorism. I'm not sure who, is it maybe a tribute to. Is it Oscar Wilde or maybe Mark Twain? Something like, I'm sorry, this letter is so long I didn't have long enough to make it shorter or something like this.

Mary-Ann: exactly. I endorse that sentiment. It's exactly right. Yeah. Because you have to boil it down. Condense, yeah. 

Ben: It Takes  longer, but you not lose most of the meaning and everything that you want to say. Exactly.

Mary-Ann: Exactly. So that's taking up a big chunk of time. The other thing is as you mentioned before my role as president of CPRE, the countryside charity, there's so much stuff that's coming our way in terms of land use frameworks, in terms of energy infrastructure and build out of kind of grid new homes.

The government have committed to one and a half million new homes in, within five years, probably unachievable. But how you go about doing that, even in the kind of steps towards that, there's a way of doing it well, and there's a way of doing it that will cause really great harm and actually just make loads of money for the mass house builders, but not deliver affordable housing, social justice or protection of the natural environment.

So there's lots of stuff coming to CPRE that we feel passionately about, want to advocate strongly for drive policy influence. But also I think my perspective as president, like the public facing, person who shunters on in public about this stuff is to make sure, or to invite more people into the conversation and for people to go, actually this isn't a niche thing about boring planning. This is actually about how our country looks, how it operate. Our lives. Our lives. Yeah. And in the kind of same way that people say, oh I'm not, I don't really do politics.

And you go, of course you do politics 'cause you eat and you drive on roads and you live in a home and you think about what the future might look like for you or for your family or for your loved ones or for your job, of course you do politics. And so I think that I feel the same about everybody should, does countryside issues.

Whether you live in a high rise in the middle of the London Docklands or you live in a kind of rural cottage in the middle of Rutland. It doesn't matter. It matters to us. It. These things impact all of us, and we should all have a say. Yeah we need to grow our ecological literacy and confidence to, to speak out on these issues.

Ben: Yeah. I should have asked you about sustainable development in. Rural Britain or even Britain o overall. So maybe I'll sneak one in because there's this debate very live, particularly within England, around sustainable development, solar panels, local communities and maybe around this green belt.

So I've been to bits of the green belt and some bits of the green belt are really horrid, but some bits of the green belt are really lovely and it's this really difficult, this is this balance that we have that, we have got needs and we also want to protect. We also need to develop, but not lose but not lose.

What's really valuable about the past, and I see this in reading some of your books around some of the sites that we have or like this old wooden church and the like, the by. Able to incorporate some of the, now with the past, you actually keep the past alive and that's what people did in the past.

And then sometimes if you ossify something like when the green belt was set up, it might've been fit for purpose, then it might not be fit for purpose now, but how do we save the bits that we want whilst not letting it over? So that's a massive, huge question on the sustainable development, maybe seen through the green belt, but I don't know if you had wanted to share a couple of thoughts on that.

Mary-Ann: Sure. So the thing about the green belt is it's a planning designation. It was set up to prevent urban sprawl. So when it first got set up it was in response to development that was really ad hoc. Basically, you'd have a kind of a trunk road coming out of a town and developers would buy up the land and then they were building houses along the full length of these roads and then building out either side.

So then towns would get merged. And if you. Allow that to continue and you let the kind of the economic driver just push where development happens without a kind of strategic plan, you end up with Los Angeles where you can literally like just sit in a traffic jam for a day and not get anywhere.

Or drive and drive and drive and drive and drive, and you're still driving through suburbia and it's all car dependent and it's none of it is sustainable. And you go where is your food coming from? Where is your fresh produce coming in? How in particularly pertinent to us now in 2025 looking forwards, how are we going to mitigate for flood events?

If everything is built up how are we going to protect from heating within urban environments? If you don't have any green canopy cover, if you don't have areas nearby that provide biodiversity what happens to all these systems that are absolutely on their knees? Because we have undermined their what we were talking about before, we've undermined their redundancy.

You go, oh, we don't need this scrubby hedge row. We'll put more houses, or we'll put a car park here, or we'll build a factory or a data center. Or we'll expand the dual carriageway to a four lane motorway. That means that people can get to wherever they're going, or in a car individually, one single person in each of those gas guzzling cars or electricity guzzling cars.

Doesn't really matter what it's being fueled on. That's where we're going to invest time and money. But it's also where investing land and land is finite. Once you've used it up, you can't earth more up out of the sea. And the Royal Society did some modeling and said, and this was for the previous government, this government have even more commitments to what land they're using and for what.

But the previous government, the previous Tory government all their commitments for land, if you met each of those commitments for farming, for building, for energy infrastructure you would need, we would need a piece of land twice the size of whales to meet all the commitments unless you stack up benefits so that as it's called multifunctional land use.

So actually one of the ways to do it is to, for example, instead of having a solar farm here and a food production farm here, and a carpark there, why not put the solar panels as a canopy over the carpark and then actually you retain land for. Maybe it's wildlife restoration, maybe it's more food production, maybe the land that is being allocated for food production or protected for food production that's already being farmed.

How can we farm that in a way that is nature friendly and regenerative? Bearing in mind that I think, we throw around these terms like sustainable farming or regenerative farming, and you go what's the opposite? It's unsustainable and degenerative. Who's voting for that? And the only people voting for that are the people who either can't see what the alternative looks and feels and how it pays, or people who are profiting from the system as it stands.

In the short term because in the long term we all lose when, all of Carlisle is underwater. When there's massive supply chain shocks, when you go to Tesco's and you go, where are all the apples? And you go, the apples aren't here because there are no pollinators anymore. And you go, shit, can we get them from Senegal then?

And you go, no, 'cause they're screwed as well. Yeah so land is finite. I think fundamentally land is finite, so we have to use it really carefully. And up until now, the vast majority of us haven't really thought about it and haven't really had a say in how it's used. So I think the one thing I'd say is that we need to be really smart about how we use this finite resource.

And the other thing is that we need to ensure that democracy and democratic input is really strong and protected in that system of deciding and decision making fundamentally. The kind of that bottom line, which is democracy isn't about putting a tick in a box every five years. It's about having a meaningful say about things that shape our lives on an ongoing basis, in a way that you are both knowledgeable enough and empowered enough to have a meaningful input into the process, and then that input is taken into the consideration and the output.

You can see how your input impacted on the final outcome. As opposed to people going to public consultations, feeling like they're really impassioned in terms of what they're arguing for or what they're saying. Have you thought about this or we're worried about this, and they it feels like a kind of a paper exercise where someone's nodding why bother having them 

Mary-Ann: If entirely disregarded because that's again, where you feed the rise of populism. People who feel like they're not invested in the systems of power and they go screw you. I'm gonna vote for those other crazies who are saying, we'll give you what you want. Yeah.

Ben: Strong democratic processes and much better thinking about.

Land use. Okay. That sounds pretty good. There you go. Yeah.

Mary-Ann: If we could last, if we sort that out that Yeah. Yeah. Then

Ben: that you can think, oh, I had a great time as president. Okay. Last question then is, do you have any advice for people, maybe these are people who want to do more with nature or maybe it's your amazing career of being both anthropologist and into broadcasting and in, into creative arts or any overall life advice that you would like to give listeners?

Mary-Ann: Oh. Oh, such a loaded question. Okay. Two. I'll go two things thing number one, career advice, particularly for youngsters, but actually I think probably relevant to everybody. And I have to remind myself, I give myself this advice too, which is that it doesn't all need to be part of a big plan. Say yes to stuff, follow your curiosity.

See where it leads be open to the journey rather than the transactional output. And in terms of connecting to nature, don't feel like it needs to be big or once in a lifetime. Or exotic or remote or expensive. It can literally be, we started Gorilla gardening, the patch of land at the end of our street.

And I live in suburbia just outside London. And it had some really scrubby bushes that maybe the council would've come and laid at the start of the season. But actually me and a couple of neighbors went, hang on let's try and do something with that little patch of land. We haven't got permission, but I contacted the local garden center and said, we're doing some community gardening.

Can you help us? So they gave us some vouchers to spend on plants, wildlife friendly plants. We've got some seeds that we're all pulling propagating on our window sills that we'll plant out when the little fellas are a little bit bigger and, and honestly the combination of social connection, investing in your place, people walking past going, oh, hello, what are you doing?

And just starting little conversations. It's lifted the whole feeling of what matters and that you find common ground with people that you might otherwise not have an opportunity to chat to or not feel like you are allowed to stop and talk to them. And actually the outcome is that we have a nicer environment for the people and a nicer environment for wildlife.

And we've made friends with each other. Yeah. So yeah, start small. Doesn't need to be expensive, doesn't need to be time consuming. Go for a walk and stop and use all five senses. What can you smell? What can you hear? Feel something, find a funny little bit of moss or a bubbly brick look. Notice the lichens growing on, or the mosses growing on the side of a tree or the side of a brick wall, or whatever it is.

Notice where the birds fly and where they don't fly. And don't forget to breathe.

Ben: Yeah. Oh, that sounds excellent. So follow your curiosity. And for nature, it can be small things. Yeah. So I remember we go mud larking down the river Thames or even just walking on the river, Thames Beach right in the middle of London it seems.

Yeah. But then you're transported far away and yeah. Through these small things

Mary-Ann: Or beyond yourself. Yeah.

Ben: Great. On that, Mary-Ann, thank you very much.

Mary-Ann: Thank you for having me.

Rebecca Lowe: Exploring Freedom, Moral Philosophy, Technology and the best society | Podcast

Political philosopher Rebecca Lowe discusses her views on freedom, equality, and the ethical implications of emerging technologies. Currently writing a book titled 'Freedom in Utopia,' Rebecca delves into philosophical debates concerning obligations to extinct animals, the ethics of eating meat, and the future potential of lab-grown meat. 

On questioning norms and making choices:
“Think hard about what the norms are that you follow unthinkingly. There are many ways to live a good life, and it’s for you to work that out for yourself, because you’re the only person who can have any epistemic access to that.”

On fiction and its philosophical role:
“I feel quite strongly that people who don’t spend time reading fiction are really missing out on one of the great things about being human—the capacity to separate out from your daily life, think about other worlds, imagine.”

She also touches on the moral considerations surrounding artificial wombs, the possible role of ChatGPT as a tool for philosophical inquiry, and her disillusioning experience running for political office. Rebecca emphasizes the importance of decentralization, freedom, and respect in society while also sharing her creative process and insights into leading a fulfilling life.

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below. Listen onApple,Spotify or whereveryou listen to pods. Video above or on Youtube.

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Contents

• 00:22 Reviving Extinct Animals

• 02:29 Moral Implications of Eating Meat

• 07:47 Future Moral Consensus

• 11:25 Consequentialism in Healthcare

• 19:21 ChatGPT as a Philosopher

• 25:28 Artificial Wombs and Ethical Questions

• 30:33 Rebecca's Political Journey

• 34:43 Creative Process and Philosophy

• 37:50 The Importance of Reading Fiction

• 41:03 Imagining the Best Possible Society

• 42:19 The Role of Prisons in Utopia

• 46:01 Education in an Ideal Society

• 49:05 Cultural Goods and Utopia

• 52:18 Healthcare and Resource Allocation

• 55:11 Under rated / Over rated

• 58:55 Final Thoughts and Advice

Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

[00:00:00] Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Rebecca Lowe. Rebecca is a political philosopher. She has a particular interest in rights, freedom, and equality, and she's currently writing a book called Freedom in Utopia, in which she thinks about freedom in the best possible society. Rebecca, welcome.

[00:00:19] Rebecca: Hi Ben, thanks for having me, great to be here. 

[00:00:22] Ben: Would the best possible society look to revive the woolly mammoth? 

[00:00:28] Rebecca: Do you know, actually, I've been for ages wanting to write something about our obligations to extinct animals. I think there are some really interesting arguments to be made about this when that technology becomes possible.

I don't know enough about the science. I need to, I've got some scientist friends I should ask. Maybe it already is possible. I'm aware, I think some philosophers are writing about this. I haven't actually read that stuff, and I should. But I have this general interest in things like how the demands of morality change when new things become possible.

What are our new requirements? What's permissible? And it does strike me that in that it seems like we have obligations to prevent current animals going extinct. When it's possible to bring back previously current animals, what do our obligations lie? I also just think a load of those animals that are dead are really cool.

I'm probably the stupid person who would want Jurassic Park to happen. So yeah, would it have woolly mammoths? I hope so. 

[00:01:22] Ben: So there are a couple of current projects actually coming out of long now and brand stinking. So there is a project to revive the woolly mammoth and they think they can do it.

But as a stepping stone to that, they actually have revived extinct species of a particular tree. So it's a first step for plants, which they think also might be. Might be positive but there's a kind of techno optimist critique in here somewhere because there's some thinking that the woolly mammoth Might be able to help I think the tundra for instance the tundra in siberia where historically they may have helped with things like that potentially going too far but there is some thought on that I might be a little 

[00:01:59] Rebecca: anxious if the reasoning was, to instrumentalize it.

I'm not sure if the tundra You know, the Tundra argument would count as that, or if, I'm sure people would come up with parallel arguments anyway, but I think I might be a little anxious if a large part of the thrust for bringing back a creature was to use the creature for some some particular end, but that's probably just me overthinking.

[00:02:21] Ben: Yeah, no, I think that is one of the critiques that some do, but then I think not everyone involved in the project puts that much weight on it. Obviously other people have different things. I think one of my moral failings is the fact that I still eat animals. I eat less now than I have ever done, but I still do.

I'm hopeful that lab grown animals like lab grown diamonds will be a future replacement. And I do wonder in a hundred or 200 years, we might view eating meat a little bit like slavery is why on earth did we do that in terms of social or moral progress? However, today, when I am presented with animal, I find it's actually respectful to eat any part of the animal given to me, bone marrow, eyeballs, liver, I will actually eat everything.

And I was reading some of your work, which actually had this idea of whether there was respect or not within lab grown meat. Or things. But in any event, do you think eating animals is actually disrespectful like that? And what are your hopes for lab grown meat? Is there some moral qualm about it, which I perhaps might not have considered as a substitute for the meat eating I do today?

[00:03:30] Rebecca: Yeah, I'm a big meat eater. I eat the I eat the marrow and the liver. Haven't eaten the eyeballs. I've probably, have I tried the eyeballs? Maybe. I love eating meat. I tried to give up eating meat. I managed for a few months last year. I have to say I managed by just eating all of the seafood.

Which slightly fails. I just like meat too much. I came to the conclusion there are too many more steaks I want to eat. But that's a failing as far as I see it. I think it's bad to eat meat. And the main reason I think it's bad to eat meat is this respect point that you're bringing up.

So in other words, I think even if all of the animals you ate had the best possible life and the best possible death, found some way to kill them without suffering, found some way to, eat them at the end point of their natural lifespan. However you want to cash it out, I still think it would be wrong to eat them.

The reason is that I think it's disrespectful to eat the dead body of a once living creature. I think most people hold that view pretty naturally around human bodies. That's why you feel You know, uncomfortable walking over a grave or, someone playing with the bones of a skeleton. I think we should afford a similar respect to the dead bodies of animals and, we're not just talking about playing with it, we're talking about consuming it.

And what's more, we do it, at least nowadays, for our pleasure. There are plenty of alternatives. Back in the day when there weren't, or if you're living in a place where there aren't sufficient non meat alternatives, I think that's different. I think if you eat the dead body of an animal, because you need to then I think you've got a load more arguments at your disposal.

But for my [00:05:00] pleasure, because I think it's delicious, when I could be eating something else that's delicious, so I can't even depend on some aesthetic argument. I think it's bad and wrong, but I'm, I'm human. I fail. Do 

[00:05:12] Ben: you put any weight on the environmental arguments? 

[00:05:15] Rebecca: Yeah, I think there's a whole subset 

[00:05:16] Ben: of the different, yeah, 100%.

[00:05:17] Rebecca: It's another sufficient argument, probably. For me, the sufficient argument that holds the most weight is the respect argument. I think for me, a lot of my views around how we should treat each other as humans, but also treat the other living things in our world come down to this point about, basic equal moral respect, something like that.

That's at the heart of my kind of, libertarianism or liberalism, whatever you want to call it. 

[00:05:40] Ben: And that respect doesn't need to transfer to lab grown meat. 

[00:05:44] Rebecca: Yeah, so I've written a thing actually, which I think I pretty much still hold, which is for a long time, I thought that the answer to my problem, which is I really love eating meat, I love cooking meat, my favorite thing to cook is meat, I'm one of these people who go to the butcher shop and, get the cool cut and I'll read loads of stuff about how to cook it, and I'll enjoy cooking it, and, all of those things but I think it's wrong, so that's a Problem, how do I reconcile that?

I thought for a long time, hey, sooner or later, lab grown needs are going to come along and I can, when it's good enough, I won't just You know, gain the kind of the taste sensation and the the texture sensation. I also gain the aesthetic and intellectual value of cooking it and all of those other things, giving it to my friends, the kind of the creative aspect too, I love all that stuff.

I think the problem for me is though that I feel like it would still be disrespectful to the kind of animal it replicates. We're not talking about creating a steak that doesn't look like a steak or doesn't taste like a steak. The whole point is that it's a as near to perfect simulation. And I make an analogy in my little piece I wrote, which I wrote for Eon, which if you're into philosophy, you should read some of these articles.

That's for your listeners. I make a kind of an analogy with video games where you're, um, imagine you had a video game and the aim of the video game was to beat up and otherwise abuse women. There's loads of arguments why you might think that's got sort of moral problems. One is it's bad for you to do bad stuff.

Another argument, however, is that it's disrespectful to womankind. And it doesn't have to be that, the particular instance of the woman is a real woman because the whole point is, it's not, it's a simulation. And I think you can apply the same argument to eating, the simulated beef steak.

It's disrespectful to beef kind to cows. That's, I think that's probably my position, but as as I've just admitted, I eat the actual meat, so it's going to be a little bit less bad, good times, 

[00:07:47] Ben: right? Are there any things today, which in a hundred or two hundred years time, you think we might have consensus on it being a moral wrongness?

So I, I wonder whether meat eating, except for some more narrow cultural things, might be there. And it's interesting we progressed, I think there's moral consensus. Slavery was bad and wrong, and then we had women's rights, arguably we had minority and disability, other rights, which we've had a growing consensus that, okay, that it was morally wrong not to have those rights but in the moment, it's quite hard to judge, you go back to, say, 1500 or certainly 2000 years ago, I think it would have been very, it was quite hard for a lot of them to feel like, okay, slavery was there, aside from maybe some religious thinkers, which is interesting, but is there anything you spot today where you go oh, I really think this is on the chopping block?

[00:08:35] Rebecca: There's kind of two parts to this, aren't there? One is, which is the thing I feel a little more confident maybe saying some things about something like, what are the things in our world that are bad and wrong? The second is a kind of prediction type question and it's, about epistemic capacity.

Are the people in 100 years time gonna have the capacity to know that thing was wrong? As you say, there's all kinds of considerations, maybe people are going to be far more stupid in the future. Maybe people, they'll have been in nuclear war and people will live in silos so they won't gain the advantage of talking to each other.

And I can't make predictions about that. But a couple of things My, my assumption is, so one of them is definitely the eating meat thing. How we treat insects? I don't know if this is just me, but all my life I've been, I don't think even, I'm not even sure what the word for it is.

I remember when I was a kid seeing people, clasping and killing mosquitoes. I remember my uncle, so I'm just going to be nasty about my uncle now had one of those little electric fly zapper things and I just don't get the, I just don't get it when people, I understand if you're in a hotel room with a mosquito in a country where you might catch one of the, Zika virus or something, I'm not really going to have a problem with you killing the mosquito.

I still think you're doing something problematic. If I can get the mosquito out the window, believe me, I've spent time in my life trying to get the mosquito out the window. Killing the mosquito is something I will do, but yeah. I'm, the idea that you just kill the spider, and not just kill the spider, but have fun, enjoy killing the spider, I just find it [00:10:00] morally, I find it morally repulsive, but I also just, I feel like I'm just on some other wavelength or something.

I just don't understand the mentality there. So the cavalier way in which people treat insects. I find astonishing and it doesn't mean I think you've got to go along, with a little brush and glasses looking at all of the, the speech ahead of you. I'm talking about voluntary intentional destruction, enjoyment in the destruction of a living thing.

I find this incomprehensible and I hope, I can only hope the people in the future look back and discuss. 

[00:10:34] Ben: That's really interesting. That's the kind of respect for living things idea. I find that interesting because you argue against consequentialist ideas in your sub stack. So this is the typical utilitarian thinking about the ends justify the means and the like.

And it's interesting because actually a lot of. Say effective altruist utilitarians have ended up being taking this position on meat and actually they do a lot of work on insects And particularly prawns and things like that, which other people find a little bit odd It's oh, why are they paying attention to this?

and they would make arguments that Prawns or insects have a little bit of value and therefore they make this value based argument and they come to it from that side of the argument. So I find it's really interesting that you've also come to it from a respect and principles way of doing that.

But I'm also interested in generally your take about why you feel so awkward around these consequential ideas. And I'd be interested In particularly placing it in typical cost benefit policy decision making and what you make of that in typical political decision a political economy decision and one thing that I think about and I throw to philosophers was within Healthcare economics or as I've noted that one of your parents is also medical ethics So I thought maybe you'd have a really interesting view on this but for instance in the UK, but really under any healthcare constrained budget, they make these decisions, and this is a live one, where they try and compare the cost of saving, say, a preterm baby with, say, a diabetic, and although it's quite flawed, you can get a rough consensus on what they call these quality adjusted life qualities, how much 

[00:12:11] Rebecca: qualities.

[00:12:11] Ben: Yeah, how much is or a disabled adjusted life here, but essentially they're putting a value on life and they're putting it under this constraint of budget, although it's a statistical thing to help them make those decisions. And I actually think it comes from road pricing initially, interestingly, economically speaking, but so they'll go something like.

It costs maybe half a million to save a preterm baby, and it costs about twenty to thirty thousand pounds to save a diabetic in terms of a year life. And if you just do a pure utilitarian calculation you tend not to make that decision. If you survey people, they actually will say, no, I think that I think we should spend some money on babies.

And it's interesting, different types of people are differently on that spectrum. Interestingly doctors themselves tend to be a little bit more utilitarian than just the average sample of the. Woman in the street, but I'm interested faced with that sort of decision. How do you think?

Philosophy helps think about it or in particularly you're thinking of philosophy. Is that something where you think you might have some insights? 

[00:13:14] Rebecca: That's a big question. Where to start I think one thing I'd say is, I'm with I'm not a Kantian I don't even know very much about Kant But one thing I think he's right on is that autumn fires can you don't have obligations that you It doesn't make sense to say you've got an obligation to do something if you can't.

When you're talking about things like healthcare, you have resource constraints. And while we continue to have resource constraints, we have to make difficult decisions at the margin. We have to You know, way up where the next pound is spent. So it's hard to give a clear answer if you're not going to depend upon some kind of equation in which you're, assigning costs and values to different kinds of lives or to different like if somebody is, if it's more expensive to save somebody's life than someone else's life, how do you deal with that?

I think you're right that. There's got to be some space for costing stuff out and whether that comes from road pricing or, insurance and people and actuaries have to be able to find some way to translate what it means in financial terms when someone dies or someone doesn't die or someone suffers an injury.

I understand that. And to some extent that's going to have just, market considerations at its heart. I think for me, a starting point I would use. would be something like urgent need I don't think it can only be what is the, the value in that sense that's assigned to the life, I think it's also what is the situation in which the person finds themselves whether that means that then you preference something like queuing for an allocation thing, so you and I have the same injury, but I get to the hospital first you and I get to the hospital at the same time, but I'm more likely to die.

Those generally are a kind of first place consideration, and my limited understanding about. Allocation of [00:15:00] resources in health care decision making it's rarely that you started it from the point of, hey, you tick these boxes, I tick these boxes, therefore I get priority.

That's the kind of fourth order matter is my understanding in terms of triaging that maybe I'm wrong on that. I'm not sure I have much of a better answer, except that my general position for two reasons is that consequentialism, consequentialist reasoning I think is bad and wrong. The main reason is I think it.

It not only allows or permits, it also sometimes demands certain behaviors which are morally repugnant. I also think you can't do a little bit of consequentialist reasoning. That's a relatively controversial view. I'm with someone like Stuart Hampshire on this. I don't think you can do pick and mix.

You can't be like, hey, for this policy problem, I'm going to do some consequentialist reasoning. That's not to say you can't say something like, hey, that argument Ben just made is a consequentialist argument. I'm just saying that you, qua Ben, can't be a little bit of a consequentialist. You're either a consequentialist or you're not.

It's a totalizing moral theory. You can't jam it together with some other theory. They're not coherent. So I'm saying one thing about, what you're disposition, your belief system is, and one, one thing about what counts as a moral theory or what counts as the kind of grounds on which you justify an argument so generally speaking, this comes back to something we were just talking about before around, overdetermination, so having different arguments for, to come to the same conclusion I think it's often the case that you and I can come to the same conclusion using different arguments.

For me, it's never going to be the case that one of those arguments is a good argument if it's a consequentialist argument. Doesn't mean we can't come to the same place. So I can come to the point in which I think you shouldn't, clap and laugh at killing the mosquito on my, right space pluralist liberal approach, and my friend the consequentialist can come to that purely, on the outcome, teleological and justifying the means position.

I'm just going to say, hey, that's a bad argument. You got to the right place. They don't get a monopoly on the endpoints. Sorry, I'm I don't have a good answer to the QALYs question except I'm deeply skeptical of assigning value in a bigger sense for lives. Yeah. I practically understand the requirement around costing stuff out.

Of course, that's the case in a world of limited resources, and healthcare resources are incredibly important. What I don't agree with are claims like, because this beta sounds down syndrome, therefore it's less. It has less moral value, that life, than the fetus without Down syndrome. Similarly, the person who's 86 has less value in this deeper sense than the person who's 17.

I'm just 100 percent not going to agree with that. And it's not just I'm going to disagree with it. I'm going to think it's revolting. Yeah. 

[00:17:46] Ben: That's interesting. There's a few things I find really interesting in those comments. If you add ask the average person, they do have this sense of what's fair and what's not.

So if you're born with, say, a rare genetic disease, but it's really expensive to treat, there is a sense that money shouldn't have been the stumbling block for treating some of those, even that it will take from, some others that you will end up having to just do a little bit of everything, knowing that you can't do.

do everything. And then the other bit which chimes, because it's one of my big problems with what a lot of Peter Singer writes, which actually comes down to disability rights. And I'm close to disability communities, but it, his strong form view means he ends up having to argue for these things, which feel morally really wrong to, Lots of people, in fact, probably a majority of people, but specifically to say within the dis disabled, disability community.

His 

[00:18:38] Rebecca: position's on infanticide, which he recently clarified in an interview, I think, with the New Yorker. We know that he held this position in the past. But he came out and clarified it again. He still holds it. Yeah. The parent who doesn't want the kid under the age of one can kill the kid. I'm slightly, but not very much you 

[00:18:56] Ben: know, caricaturing his position, right?

That is the end outcome of the, yeah, of the arguments. But and it's really tortured to get there because it's to do with, as far as I understand it, and I haven't Deeply read all of the underlying papers but almost to do with the personhood of animals So you've come he comes this is the consequentialist thing about you sometimes get to these decisions by seemingly very, tortured things 

[00:19:16] Rebecca: Yeah, 

[00:19:17] Ben: But in any event, maybe this is a good other good segue as to do you think?

Chat gpt, let's just call them gpt is a good philosopher 

[00:19:26] Rebecca: Yeah, I do. Again I'm a philosopher, so I'm gonna want to define the terms good and philosopher. Yeah, okay. I have this general view about the term philosopher, which is that most people either have far too narrow or too expansive a view, to a small set of people, like a relatively big set of people. You're only a philosopher if you're one of the four people working on epistemology or metaphysics at one of three American universities. And then on the expansive view, everyone's a philosopher because we all do, we live, philosophical lives and make philosophical comments.

On some level, Both of those views are correct, but they don't really tell us very much, do they? [00:20:00] If you think of a more, a mid ground position, which is Being a philosopher, doing philosophy, and those things are slightly different is applying a certain kind of approach to thinking about things maybe within also a certain set of questions, within a certain set of topics.

That's the more the kind of approach I'd take to being a philosopher is doing philosophy. Yeah, I think ChatGPT is increasingly a very good philosopher, certainly in terms of philosophical tool or resource that if you are interested in philosophy and you're willing to put in the philosophical work, I think you can, I think you can benefit massively from it.

I do I often talk with ChatGPT about philosophy. I wrote a thing on my sub stack about this recently, which I think some people got a bit of attention, one of the big philosophy blogs. Covered it, got a few funny responses from philosophers, I think probably hadn't read my piece, and also I'd say probably hadn't tried, the later, more pricey version of GPT, which I think is an easily justifiable spend if you've got, if you've got any money.

And I'd say actually, you know, I was talking to a friend about this the other day, I feel a little bit like It's like people who are offered, I don't know, you get this bargain and it's hey, and it is a bargain, hey, for half of your worldly resources, you can live forever. And you're like no, I'm saving my money up for something important.

The idea that you can talk proper philosophy with a text box on your computer is just so incredibly, it's insane. It's incredible. And the idea that you're not willing to like, Spend 200 quid on 200 quid on that, I think, or 200 dollars, I forget what it is now. I'd block it out of my mind.

I don't know, I just don't know what, how do they price stuff? Generally in life, what is their pricing strategy where that's not good spend? Okay, of course, if you're starving and you've got kids to feed, I don't have any kids to feed. I'm fortunate I can afford it.

But affording it means, assigning sufficient value. And why would you not assign a load of value to this thing? Probably, to be fair. It's slightly circular because you haven't tried it. Yeah, I think a load of people are missing a massive trick here. I find it quite funny. 

[00:22:00] Ben: It's getting cheaper and it's getting better and it's particularly good if, say, actually, so I don't know, if I ever want to think about what a consequentialist would think, or particularly say, Peter Singer, you ask TPT, it's really good at parsing some, particularly someone who's had quite a lot of public work, like Singer, and really teasing out this is probably what they would say.

And then you have this kind of quite angry conversation with them, which you couldn't say to Pizza Singer's face, but that's very dispassionate about this is because you haven't considered this, it's quite good. And it's interesting someone we both know, Tyler Cowen, the economist also advocates that.

But interestingly, Tyler has said, I don't know if you picked this up, but he claims he's two thirds utilitarian. So you should challenge him on this, whether you can be two thirds anything on this next time next time you speak to him. Actually, maybe that's a good segue. I noticed that you'd read his book The Age of Infavor, or you'd skimmed it.

And I was quite interested because it actually talks a lot about essentially an autistic cognitive profile as well as things like AI and other things like that. And I do wonder whether in the future, things like autism profiles or how we consider disability, or just talking about different mental states or different ways of being will be quite radically different.

And we can already see some signs now, but in where things are going, I had a chat with someone who was. Born deaf now can hear as an actor and it's interesting that they view the kind of cyber technology which enables them to hear Almost as a kind of companion partner. Not quite. It's quite a complex thing, but Interestingly in the same way that you would say you should have respect to insects They think that you should essentially have respect to these call them cyber AI in the sense that it's a part of her life, or we might get to the extent where they are.

I find it's really interesting that I'm often saying please and thank you and actually being quite nice to my GPT, weirdly because I actually think I get better responses, but there is this thing about do you abuse your GPT or are you nice to it. Yeah, so I was wondering, what do you, what did you make of that and what did you make of the Age of 

[00:24:05] Rebecca: Yeah, I read some of it over Christmas.

I thought it was excellent. What else? I think so actually on the point around saying please and thank you to the GPT, I think it's, it's good to practice being a good person. This is one of the reasons, so actually I wrote in my substack piece about talking with GPT about philosophy, but I bullied GPT, if that really means anything, to bully something that doesn't have moral status.

It probably doesn't, it's a shorthand, isn't it? But I felt morally dirty afterwards. I was trying to find out if it was a consequentialist, and I was really Again, I'm not sure it counts as being awful if it's a thing you can't can you be awful to a wall? No, you probably can't, but it's good to practice good behavior, and I think I didn't do that there.

So yeah, I think it's, I don't find it weird to say thank you, I do as well, you're right, it probably also has some benefits probably baked into it, and it's probably good if it's baked into it that it responds better if you're polite. 

[00:24:55] Ben: But there is something to, like you say, to good behavior even if it's in private 

[00:24:59] Rebecca: right, or 

[00:24:59] Ben: [00:25:00] you can, you might have a toy model and you bash it up.

But, and obviously, maybe there's no real consequence to the toy model or whatever, but you are modeling, even to yourself, 

[00:25:10] Rebecca: a 

[00:25:11] Ben: good behavior or not. 

[00:25:13] Rebecca: That's right. And I think we do have obligations to ourselves as well. And one of those is to try to. Make ourselves into good people as we can, because it's good for us to be good people.

It's bad to do that stuff. And one of the obligations we have to ourselves is to hold ourselves in check and to try to improve. Yeah cool. 

[00:25:28] Ben: A couple more philosophical things, and then we might pivot into some creative things. I noticed you wrote something around artificial wombs, and I've spoken to some young I guess liberal thinkers who are actually quite pro artificial it gets around a lot of the medical complications of biological birth.

I guess this is the sort of far future, although it's starting to happen now, so it's maybe not as far as before. But I was wondering what you thought about artificial wombs and whether some of the thinking about artificial wombs, they also transferred into, Essentially artificial or even AI soldiers and this type of thing about where AI goes But I'm wondering if you still have the same view on artificial wombs as you had has it changed and Whether you'd like to articulate that.

[00:26:12] Rebecca: Yeah, I think my position is something it actually reminds me a little about I guess the third I think I gave you two thing I would wonder if people in the future might look back with some moral I have some deep moral concerns about surrogacy for various reasons. One is, I think, the mere sufficient concern is about the woman who who gives birth to the child.

I worry about the exploitation of women to that end. We know, at least in some places, that women are exploited and used. As vassals or vessels and I have deep concerns about that. I also have concerns about the fetus that becomes the baby being separated from the person who gave birth to it.

Again, there's all kinds of, questions and things, and I'd want to clarify that, that, my position further. But one answer, to the artificial womb question is, it takes that problem away from, in terms of at least the treatment of the woman who gives birth. If you can do that without having that third party.

or whatever number party it'd be. That's one problem seemingly solved. I don't think it takes away the baby problem entirely, because there are questions about what it is to be born of a machine, effectively. In the piece I wrote about this, I took into account, the concerns of both the fetus and also the woman.

And I think there are great benefits on both ends of this kind of technology. Oftentimes the stuff I read or the people I talk to come at it from one point or the other. You get feminist argument, which is, it's better for women not to have to give birth for various reasons, not just, physically because it is brutal and risky, but also points around the opportunities in the labor force, costs, more general costs there are to, to giving birth, to being a mother, taking time out of work and all of those concerns.

But there's also the baby point, which is there are great advantages. In terms of access to health care interventions monitoring of being outside of, being hidden within a woman's womb. Also there are points, my friend Emily made this point when I was writing my piece around the kind of injustices and inequalities that obtain.

when we take into account the behaviours of different pregnant women. You've got pregnant woman A, who's a heavy smoker and drinker goes on rollercoasters. I don't know the effect of going on a rollercoaster on the thesis, but I'm assuming at least later on it's probably bad. And then you've got, woman B, who follows all of the best guidance, some of the guidance I'm sure is rubbish.

It seems like there's going to be some pretty serious costs to the fetus in Woman A. We can get rid of that if we have, if in the world in which we have the artificial womb, which provides all of the things that the fetus needs to develop. There are big questions around how you how you compare those things in terms of particular psychological effects.

What does it really mean to say what does it do to a fetus psychologically to, for them to gestate within the machine? It's very hard to know how to answer a question like that. But I think, generally speaking, it seems to me like there would be vast benefits of this technology coming into play.

I think it's highly likely it will. And I think it's really important we think about the ethical questions now, because once technology is in place new obligations arise. It's getting very hard to say, the fetus of eight weeks, 10 weeks, and now we have the technology to save it, but we shouldn't save it.

People will start saving it. And then you're going to have questions around women wanting to opt into this. And you're going to have to come up with pretty good arguments to say that women shouldn't be able to opt into that. Some of those might well be those resource questions. If this is something that's expected on the National Health Service does it mean that just because it's possible, therefore the taxpayer should spend?

Those are important questions. My point is, think about it now before it becomes possible. Otherwise, a load of these just status quo [00:30:00] problems come into play. It's very hard to wind stuff back once it starts happening. People start to backwards justify just because it happens, you get sunk cost thinking.

Think about it now. Try and work out some, some baseline stuff and we'll be in a much better place. It's also just interesting and fun. 

[00:30:19] Ben: Yeah, I think so. I think that we do seem to be a little bit behind where technology is going or is both in AI and in health. Technology and some other things perhaps a pivot into your life.

You ran for being an MP here in the UK. And that I wondered what you learned from that experience. I get the vibe that it's like, Oh my God, never again. And I'd be interested to know like, how, and obviously a lot of people are quite skeptical of like political system and average person on politicians.

Overall so i'd be interested in your experience, was there anything positive to take away? What are the maybe critiques you would take away and how is that? How is that whole experience for you? 

[00:31:06] Rebecca: Yeah, I mean look i'm not naturally a joiner. I didn't join a political party until actually so when I was doing masters back in 2008 in london.

I worked for a bit of time as a researcher for an mp It was a tory mp. So I had to join the conservative party to apply for the job I hadn't joined a political party before then I I hadn't got involved in student politics, there's nothing I was less keen to do, I hate all of that stuff. So I'm not naturally, I'm also just generally not naturally a joiner, I don't like organized fun.

I love playing board games and stuff, but the idea of, I don't know A work away day where you're forced to, I just, that's just naturally not me. I think the things I learned from it, yeah, number one, I don't want to be an MP. I have friends who are MPs and I really admire them. I think we need good people to do this.

But the invasion of privacy the stuff around party constraint, so towing the line, not being able to say what you believe. I don't think when I was running I ever said anything I didn't believe. I'm, yeah, I don't know, I'm not very good at doing that apart from anything else. But living with those constraints wasn't something I wanted to do.

Also the party that I ran for the Conservatives has changed a lot since then. Back then in 2015 it was relatively socially and economically liberal. I'm very socially liberal, there are a few parties that match that. I think it's also just like a relatively rare combination to hold probably these days.

[00:32:26] Ben: What's happened to classical liberals? Why, 

[00:32:29] Rebecca: Why the I don't know guys where are they? Come join us. Come 

[00:32:33] Ben: join us. Was it like from, I guess there's a huge tradition of it, but I guess if you root it in something like John Stuart Mill's time and beyond, you would have thought, oh, and now like diminishing.

I just think, I 

[00:32:47] Rebecca: find it for me, I'm just naturally skeptical about anybody trying to tell me what to do, including myself. I think it's not surprising that I adhere to it. As much as I adhere to anything, I'm definitely a, classical liberal. We can, talk about what that means, but.

In terms of the substance that's generally, been the substance of the views of the classical liberal thinkers around free speech, free trade 

[00:33:06] Ben: Freedom in general. Concern, 

[00:33:07] Rebecca: sorry, say again? Freedom in general, yeah, absolutely. Concern around, the overbearing state trying to tell you how to live your life, rule of law, these, constraints on other people trying to tell you what to do that's just naturally where I lie.

I'm also interested in the kind of, the moral theory aspect of it, how you justify these things, because again, this is consequentialist classical liberals and there's rights based classical liberals. There's interesting stuff about property. I wrote my PhD on moral property rights, largely because I'm naturally a capitalist.

I believe the stuff that it, the system under which we're the most free, it brings about the most good ends. But when you're thinking about, competing claims over stuff that is external to you. Which I see as being a necessary building block of supporting capitalism. It's hard to come up with a non consequentialist argument.

Or at least it's not hard, it's just I was interested in working out what the best justification for that was, because I'm the kind of philosopher who won't just, settle at this stage. I find myself having to go back down to where it begins. But sorry, just to go back to your question about the politics thing.

It left me quite disillusioned. It made me realize that a lot of people in politics, I think are in it for the power. It also, I think, pushed me towards recognizing that what I'm most interested in is just interested in, sorry, is just sitting in a little room reading philosophy books and talking to interesting people like you about philosophy.

The policy stuff and the politics stuff, I think is admirable and necessary, and I think all of us who are interested particularly in political philosophy should do some of that stuff. But for me personally, I like sitting reading Quine. That's just, that's just who I am. 

[00:34:42] Ben: Too compromising.

And maybe on that, what is your creative? process. Do you like to read half the day, write half the day? Are you a morning person, evening person? I've asked this out of a lot of creatives, and basically there is no right answer. People who are really good could do it. Early first thing, late first thing, read a lot, [00:35:00] write a lot, anything else.

But I'm just interested in what people do. Do you have a particular process. Do you sit down and write it or 

[00:35:08] Rebecca: I don't really, I again, I'm a little anxious around even imposing stuff on myself. Although I, then you get into this kind of circular thing where, I'm not happy unless I write, unless I work.

But if I'm telling myself, I've got to do it at this time, I'm going to, rebel against that. I have, I guess I come to some kind of. Compromise on which there are certain things I'm going to expect that I'm going to do every day, and many of those are things that are going to motivate me or put me in a good, I don't think I need motivation to write, it's basically all I want to do or read.

But I'm aware that you know if I do some exercise, and I listen to the music and I read some fiction. I talk to other people and I go for a walk. I'm gonna be in the right kind of frame of mind, not just to do some writing, but hopefully to do some good writing. I try to make sure I read philosophy every day that isn't related to the stuff I'm working on myself.

I was doing this thing where I read half an hour of classic 20th century, random classic 20th century every day philosophy every day. That was easier when I was living in my own house with all of my books. I then went to America for a few months and I didn't have all my books. If you're living in a house, thousands of philosophy books, you can just take them off the shelf and Oh, today I'm going to read Stawson.

But that was a good practice. I did enjoy that. I wrote like 50, 000 words of notes on stuff that I still go back to. But yeah, so there are certain things I do. I like writing. In the evening and at night, I do read and write at other times as well I read all the time just when I feel like doing it.

I write when I feel like doing it. I guess one principle I have, and as much as I have any about this, is if you feel like writing, go and do some writing. I'm lucky that I mostly, most of the time feel like that, but if I ever feel like very particularly And then, I think, listen to yourself.

Sorry, that's not very Like I say, I constantly have this whole problem about not trying not to, Not too many constraints on yourself. That's fair enough, 

[00:36:50] Ben: which is a definite way of doing it. What role does fiction You play in your own creative processes and what role do you think it should play maybe in overall humanities thinking and maybe in particular I noted you read what I have loved and it's interesting that one of the themes, it's multi-layered book but one of the themes is around grief.

So I'm particularly interested in maybe do you think. On something like grief, philosophers have anything to say, and is that a better domain for fiction, or even memoir, or something like that? Multi layered question as to what fiction plays a role in your own thinking. The fact that you blogged about it means that it must play some role.

Does that have any role for philosophy in general, or is it just for you? And how, when fiction seems to derive some real things to dwell on in terms of grief, that Perhaps there's a more powerful way than is that outside the domain of this middle road philosophy? 

[00:37:47] Rebecca: Oh man, that's a great question.

Beautiful question. I would say, first of all, I just am obsessed by reading novels. I always have been. I grew up without a TV. My parents, we didn't have a TV until I was about 12 when my brother and I came up with this. We basically persuaded our parents that if we could do the Times Crossword, we would get a TV.

There must be 

[00:38:05] Ben: some metaphysics argument for having a TV, right? I think 

[00:38:09] Rebecca: We'd already tried all of those. They had to read. Yeah I think this, I don't, I think I'm probably just dispositioning. It's probably just the case I would have already loved reading, but I think it was a very kind, good thing my parents did, because I just became obsessed with reading.

I was, what I always wanted to do, and I love reading fiction. I think it's really important to keep reading fiction. I know a load of people who, when they become adults, read other, don't read fiction anymore. Partly because you feel as if you have interests and obligations to know what's going on in the world, so you prioritise non fiction.

I understand that. I'm anxious around instrumentalizing fiction, although I do think there's a load of instrumental value in it. I find on some level certainly, I also find the same thing with going to the theatre. That when I'm, engrossed in fiction sometimes it helps me do philosophy because I'm forcing myself to not think directly about the philosophy and then sometimes I guess you get that, just that turning over in your mind and maybe you come to some conclusion you wouldn't have done otherwise.

I think it's definitely the case that for some emotional matters, fiction can play a really important part in our life, whether it's as a matter of comfort. So I think, similarly Bertrand Russell has this great point in The Conquest of Happiness, one of his books where he talks about playing games as a way to cope with grief.

I completely think that's right. Again, it's a point I think about being completely engrossed. Probably the same about sport, if you're playing a really vigorous game of tennis, you can't really be overthinking about the awful things in the world. So it's an escapism point, it's a sorry, my computer's just telling me to enter my password, I don't know why, so I'm just going to do that, there we go.

Um, multi levels of value, I feel quite strongly that people who don't spend time reading fiction are really missing out on one of the great things about being human. Which is the capacity to separate out from your daily life, think about other worlds imagine [00:40:00] and also just engage with, certainly the kinds of fiction, I like, which often are.

I guess, quite philosophical, I think, the what I loved is a very philosophical novel. I tend to be less keen on explicitly philosophical novels to when people are trying really hard. And actually there were a few points in that book where I felt maybe she was trying a bit too hard.

But when it's implicit, I really love that. So people like, I don't cut there, I think he's a great philosopher. Except for in the Lives of Animals, which I think is one of his best things. He doesn't really say, Hey, I'm now going to do some philosophy, right? So I really enjoyed the Knausgard. I read the first book recently, and I actually didn't so much the little essays, the more kind of, Hey, I'm now going to give you a philosophical little it's division on, the theory of time or whatever.

What I really liked was the implicit philosophy in the rest of it. So again, like someone like Iris Murdoch, I like her novels, but the bits where she's like explicitly doing philosophy in them. Less keen. So yeah, philosophical topics and ways of thinking about things. I suppose is something I particularly value in fiction, but I just like good novels.

[00:41:02] Ben: Yeah, that's great. Maybe let's do a little bit on thinking about what would be. in a best possible society and then we can wrap up with some quick fire and maybe some current projects and advice. Oh, I love quick fire. 

[00:41:13] Rebecca: Sounds good. 

[00:41:15] Ben: So on the freedom in the best possible society, I'm interested in art, education, prison.

Maybe disability as well. But in this best possible society, we had a brief conversation on this a few months ago are there still prisons? And I guess, when I look at prisons today, I was looking at some stats, and there was, it's something extraordinary, like 30 to 40 percent of people in the prison population have severe mental challenges.

Call it as an outcome that You know, they've been told they have huge learning difficulties or autism or other things or you're talking about half where If you really think about it that there's something which has really gone badly wrong and there is Then maybe there's a little other half which is a little bit different but you might need some restraints, I guess still in a best possible society if you've got some of these things how does your utopia handle constraint seen through the view of prisons, but I guess any constraint 

[00:42:19] Rebecca: Yeah, so I think my view is pretty much that it's not justifiable to put someone in captivity as a form of punishment.

I have a more radical general view, which is around whether punishment is ever justifiable. But if we're talking about putting someone in captivity as punishment, I think my position is that's not. Justifiable. However, that doesn't mean I don't think that it's ever the case that it's justifiable to put someone in captivity, right?

And if you, exactly, and if you think about the reasons why we do people to put people in captivity, so for instance, one of them might be a public health reason. If you come down with this new highly contagious disease but you're refusing to confine yourself to your house. It might be the case that someone wants to lock you up for a bit.

I'm not really passing a judgment on whether that's justifiable, I'm just saying that's, they're not doing it to you to punish you. They might also be wanting to punish you, saying, Hey, Ben, why are you not staying in your house? But that's a separate argument, right? So I think my position is something like, I don't see, even in the best possible world, because I think you'll still have some psychopaths, you'll still have some people who want to do bad stuff, and I don't think the best possible society would be somewhere where you weren't free to choose to do bad stuff, and sadly do bad stuff, therefore we have to think of ways to respond to that wrongdoing.

I can't see it wouldn't be the case that sometimes you need to put people in captivity in order to protect other people. So this is, I think, a self defense argument or a Now, of course, the way that's going to cash out is something like you're going to have these institutions that look like prisons, it's just Rebecca saying that they're not punitive.

However, I do think actually that if prisons weren't intended to punish, then they would look quite different. It'd be much harder, for instance, to I think to defend, certainly I'm not going to use the word justify there, defend some of the really quite vile practices that go on in our prisons at the moment.

I saw there was a report out yesterday from the prison inspectorate, I haven't read it yet, but one of the points that was being made was something around women's access to being able to wash their underwear. You're talking about the most basic human rights necessities of, being able to have access to sanitation and clean living spaces and clean stuff on your body.

The idea of, but of course, the problem is that if you're using a punitive argument for imprisoning people, you're going to say, oh, but if we don't treat them bad, it's not going to be, it's not going to be a prison or people aren't going to want to come to the people that aren't going to want to stay out of the prison.

You've got to find some kind of, whereas if you take the punitive element There's no reason why prisons can't be Places where it's not just that your basic needs are being met, believe me, I think everywhere, that any institution that's going to be a place where someone is spending their time needs to make sure that's the case, it's also going to be like, you [00:45:00] can't have these silly arguments anymore about, oh, those Scandinavian prisons, people get TVs.

Is a separate point. I grew up without a TV. I have views about whether TV is a necessary, preferential. Like I don't have a TV. I'm glad you know what I'm saying. 

[00:45:13] Ben: Society with a lot of technology. Yeah. You could be in the equivalent of like almost. Let's say a theme park or a holiday villa.

I think there'd certainly be 

[00:45:22] Rebecca: animals, there'd be green spaces, there'd be work opportunities, there'd be education. You'd have, we wouldn't just be talking about meeting basic needs, we'd be talking about it being a valuable place for people to spend time. And once you take the punishment element, that goes away.

But I'm not denying that you'd still have institutions. Again, it might, you might actually be able to take a non institutional approach in which what is effectively house arrest becomes, but again, there's going to be all kinds of resource allocation questions around this. So yes, my assumption is that Utopia, or is my working conclusion at the moment is that yes, people are put in captivity.

[00:45:57] Ben: For doing bad stuff, or, 

[00:45:59] Rebecca: but it's a different justification, yeah. 

[00:46:01] Ben: In this best possible society, do you still have schools? Would a government ever set a curriculum? Is there a basic amount of knowledge that you think a best possible society should have as a base? Or, if you take more, in fact you have it today.

I'm very sympathetic to the unschool movement of letting people do that. I still think knowledge is really important, but what knowledge someone Should want to seek is much more debatable as to whether anyone I guess you could say parents included But I guess another thing but at least best possible society.

Do we still have schools? How is education handled? 

[00:46:38] Rebecca: I think like we all have and not just parents have a serious obligation to ensure that kids get educated and One one one thing that I think I saw in a friend about this the other day and they're like, oh that's very illiberal of you because I said something like Children shouldn't get to choose most of the stuff.

That doesn't mean children shouldn't get to choose any stuff, right? But children shouldn't get to choose what the things are that they learn. That doesn't mean at the edges that they, their interests can't be satisfied, that those things can't govern some of the stuff they study. But as adults, one of the things we're obligated to think about is, what is it, what are the kinds of knowledge and skills, ways of, becoming better reasoning creatures?

How is it that we can inculcate those capacities in children. I'm not convinced that, I'm certainly not convinced that our current school system does a very good job of that. I didn't like school. I have a lot of sympathy for the school is prison argument. My I'm not really fully convinced that the answer though is, everyone's homeschooled partly because everyone is good at homeschooling their kids.

I have anxieties around Kids effectively being indoctrinated by people with very strong views about things. I certainly don't want the state going around telling people not to tell their kids stuff. But I think one important role at the moment that is incentivized by schools is giving kids access to other ways of thinking.

So if you've got a kid who's brought up in a religious household when they go to school they learn about other ways of seeing the world. Kids are, because they're not fully reasoning creatures, are very open, they're very persuadable. It can be indoctrinated very easily. I'm not, that's not a comment about religion generally or any particular religion, it's just a point that I think, again, because we all have obligations to kids we need to make sure that kids have access to different viewpoints and also to certain kinds of knowledge.

So if a kid gets 18 and doesn't, I don't know that there's gravity, or know that there are other countries in the world, there's a whole load of substance. That every kid has the right to know about, because it's important stuff. Sometimes there's some truth arguments about this, but some of it is just because it's established knowledge.

If it's the case that the established knowledge is that there's gravity, the kid has the, the right to know about that. I'm happy to make those kinds of arguments about this, those kinds of arguments. How you actually do it, whether, the state should be determining a curriculum, I want to have that stuff done as locally as possible.

But there is definitely a role for, um. Hard fact here. 

[00:49:03] Ben: Yeah, and rights and obligations. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. And then last one on this one is, do you think your best possible society has more art and more fiction, more theater or? Less or is it actually it's up to that society to decide so it's very hard to tell 

[00:49:20] Rebecca: yeah this is a great question I wrote a paper about this which will become a chapter in my book, which is basically around this problem of If you just let the people determine what the culture should be the culture might be really bad And if you don't know the culture like if you don't know about Mozart, you're hardly gonna push for Mozart this is a difficult problem in terms of how much spend there should be, what the obligation on the taxpayer is.

How much preference should play a role in this? Are there, objectively good cultural things that everyone should know about? I have an argument which is something like, again, it's like a right to the opportunity to know certain things. And I think you can use an argument like that which kind of bypasses the objective subjective value [00:50:00] point.

Which is something like it's the case that some particular opera is established knowledge is that this is good in these particular ways and people know about it has cultural significance, then I think it's wrong to deny someone the opportunity to know about that. The Truman Show world in which you're kept in the bubble and you don't have awareness of things that are going on in the world is bad for various reasons.

One, because you can't play a cultural part in it. One, because if you don't have awareness of it, you can't know that you might like it. I think those kinds of arguments can bypass some of those much more difficult should be people just get what they want kind of argument. I don't know whether there'd be more.

I generally think that more is the way to count these things. Would there be a diverse and interesting cultural mix in Utopia? Yes. I'm not sure it would be Utopia if not. How you get to that though, what the process is. what the institutional arrangements are. I don't have a good answer for you yet, but hopefully I'll get one.

My guess is probably something a little bit like, I think Rawls says something like, in the realistic utopia I don't know something like it takes some time for for people to start being just to one another because they're suddenly now experiencing more just institutions or something like that.

I'm paraphrasing badly. My guess is that over time, when you have all these other advantages, so my conception of utopia is one where people have much more of a purchase on decision making, so decision making is much more decentralized. I think when you are being treated like a reasoning creature with the right to make decisions about your own life, I think that has other advantages.

And my guess is that one of those advantages is also maybe valuing a diversity of cultural goods. That's probably a bit of a stretch, but I think I could make that argument. Also maybe if I don't know, maybe you have access to more resources, you have more disposable income. Because I think the nearby possible world is one where there's much less scarcity of goods.

I think a world in which the state is less intrusive. You have more freedom to determine what the good life is for yourself. I have a naturally positive view about humankind, that we're naturally Good, most of us, but also that we're inquisitive. So again, I think probably you'd see a morality of cultural goods 

[00:52:18] Ben: Is health care a universal right in this utopia?

Are we wealthy enough that there is no resource constraint or I guess it depends if you're really wealthy then you probably get there. But I guess in the realistic utopia, there may be still other resource constraints. There's always going 

[00:52:35] Rebecca: to be, yeah, there's always going to be constraint, like number of doctors and nurses time to do operations.

But 

[00:52:41] Ben: do you think universal healthcare is better than let's say the US model of private insurance? I very simplified something, which is quite complicated, but 

[00:52:48] Rebecca: I generally think like mixed models are pretty good. I, it frustrates me when, if you criticize the NHS, people assume you want the American model.

I think America has pretty high spend also. I think there are two questions. One is how the goods are allocated. One is how you pay for it. I'm a hardcore believer in like a pretty generous social minimum. And by that, if people genuinely can't provide for themselves to meet their basic needs references to, we can, draw the line where that, you know, where that cuts in different ways.

Then I think we should, um, we should help those people. Again, there are all kinds of questions about how you do that, what the mechanisms are, what that counts as, what their role in contributing is generally I think like mixed payment. Models on a social minimum is the answer a world with fewer resource constraints Although like I say, you're still going to have the people constraint.

I think could look much better I dislike the way we do it in the uk partly because I think it has dreadful outcomes Just look actually to return to the women's healthcare thing our Maternity statistics are atrocious, on any count. They're still better than 

[00:53:52] Ben: the US, though. No bar, 

[00:53:55] Rebecca: no bar, man! Right?

[00:53:56] Ben: That's true, but I think we are worse, if I look correctly, than Slovenia and Slovakia. 

[00:54:02] Rebecca: I think they're probably the only European countries, though. Like France, Italy, Scandinavia. Plus it's not just a relative thing. There's going to be some absolute requirement here. And I don't think any country in the world is meeting that absolute requirement, partly because I think people don't take sufficiently women's pain into account.

There is still this kind of naturalistic fallacy argument on which it's good for women to feel pain during childbirth or something which I really dislike. I saw a good piece the other day about how women in France have much better access to epidurals and stuff. And again, it's partly cultural.

Cultural thing, but there's a 

[00:54:35] Ben: lot of there's a lot of cultural thing. There's actually a lot doctors themselves or Technocratic value of pain. Yeah does not match the Call it the patient or the consumer value of pain So this is one of the things because pain in itself like will you go through a painful episode?

But if you're cured at the end, so this is Partly the utilitarian problem that while you're killed, it didn't matter that you went through a lot of pain because you're cured at the end of it. [00:55:00] 

[00:55:00] Rebecca: It's like the argument is hey, the person is dead. It doesn't matter that they suffered. Yeah, 

[00:55:05] Ben: or even the person is alive.

It doesn't matter that they suffered because they're alive. Yeah 

[00:55:10] Rebecca: right, 

[00:55:10] Ben: great. So maybe let's do some quick fire. Cool, go for it. Underrated, overrated, and then we'll finish off with a couple of questions. Okay. I'll try and do some of these. You can pass underrated, overrated, or maybe neutral rated, or you could say more or less.

So we'll do a segue one. Underrated or overrated, universal basic income? 

[00:55:31] Rebecca: Probably overrated, just because a lot of people are obsessed by it. But I think it's a depending on how you, what you, what do you take it to mean? It's if you just take it as a social minimum type thing, but probably overrated just in terms of too 

[00:55:46] Ben: many people on about it social media, overrated, underrated, 

[00:55:51] Rebecca: underrated, at least the good types.

Twitter, for instance massively underrated. People love to hate on Twitter. I've met like loads of interesting people, work opportunities, make friends through it. Great. 

[00:56:01] Ben: Great. Great. Phil, 

[00:56:03] Rebecca: If you filter well. It's incredibly valuable. 

[00:56:07] Ben: Equality, underrated, overrated? 

[00:56:11] Rebecca: Depends on what you count as equality, right?

In terms of like basic equality of respect massively underrated. Probably the most important concept in morality. If you're talking about, equal distribution of goods, then definitely overrated. 

[00:56:27] Ben: Fair enough. Although that's interesting because then I was going to put freedom, but I guess you probably don't you don't rank things like between equality and freedom because you put those very important, but I'm guessing on freedom underrated or overrated, you'd probably still say it's underrated today.

[00:56:41] Rebecca: Yeah, freedom is so important. I think freedom is, we have all of these like denuded understandings of freedom that go around. Whether it's people thinking, freedom is how many, machine guns you can have, or whether people think freedom is trading away political rights for economic goods I think, I also want to make a distinction between the ontological sense of what it is to do something freely and what the moral value of having that capacity is.

I think though generally philosophical theories and particularly theories of value massively underrate freedom. That's the point about my Utopia book to be honest. Like where does freedom sit within the theory of the good? And I think people I hate people who are underrated. 

[00:57:20] Ben: Great. So we're speaking, I'm in London at the moment, and you're in Spain, so I think this might be obvious, but underrated, overrated, travel.

[00:57:28] Rebecca: Oh, I love travel. Particularly train travel. Trains are massively underrated because they couldn't not be, because they're so great. 

[00:57:35] Ben: Yeah, that's fair. 

[00:57:36] Rebecca: I also find as a, again, like a kind of aid to being productive. I love working on trains. I love, working in new places. It's inspiring and fun and.

Yeah, 

[00:57:48] Ben: that was great. Great how about so we talked a lot about respects i'm going to assume that's still underrated But what about the concept of honor? I guess we've got all of these Aristotelian or other values, but maybe honor do you think it's underrated overrated? 

[00:58:03] Rebecca: I mean i'm gonna ask you what you mean by honor if you want to I mean if you're talking about Sorry, isn't very important answer.

If you're talking about honoring somebody for doing something good, then it's probably a good thing. If you're talking about honoring somebody for doing something bad, then no, but maybe that doesn't count as honor. I get a little anxious around, all these kinds of traditional values, like being patriotic, being honorable, being deferential.

Um, I think they rub up against my sense in which I don't want people interfering in me. I also think pride is something I have a bit of a, anxious relation with. So yeah, I'm just gonna say it totally depends on what you mean. Sorry. 

[00:58:46] Ben: That's good. Good philosopher answer.

Okay, that's great. So last couple of questions. So if you could then. Choose one thing to change about the UK. I guess you could either do policy if you want to be practical or some philosophical or other concept that you think that is really underrated and we should really embed within UK thinking.

I guess we didn't talk about the centralized, decentralized thing, but I think people have picked up, you're not a fan of centralization and would want more localism, but yeah, if there's one thing you could either change in the world or maybe the UK, either policy or thought that you would embed what would it be?

[00:59:21] Rebecca: I put some brakes on the assisted dying stuff. It's being pushed through very quickly. I have I don't, I'm opposed to it substantively, but I think the process at the moment is very concerning. And I don't actually think it helps people on the side of, making arguments for it. I think it's counterproductive.

The process shows, it may just be the case that the process itself is bad, and we need to change the process. It may be that the process is being misused. Beyond that, yeah, I just think. some fiscal decentralization, the decoupling of revenue raising and spending at the local level. The UK is a massive, particularly England is a massive outlier here.

And that's not an argument itself, because maybe it's the case that [01:00:00] other places do too much of it. But I think it's disrespectful to people in the sense that I think it's not just that Fiscal decentralization brings about better ends, matching, local needs and preferences with decision making, whatever, competition innovation, specialization.

It's also you've got the right to make decisions about stuff around about you, and that's been taken away from local people. Easy change, just, yeah, start with some housing stuff or whatever, property taxes, and get the ball rolling. 

[01:00:29] Ben: Easy. That makes sense. I'm generally in favour of that. The one big exception is I don't know what you do about big infrastructure.

Because no one wants If you want a wind farm, no one wants wind farms next to them. 

[01:00:42] Rebecca: I love wind farms so much. I'm such a fan of the wind Oh man, I saw some really beautiful ones on the train line. If you ask most people, they don't want wind 

[01:00:49] Ben: farms. But maybe that's where they've got to make a stronger argument for it, but things like wind farms, The 

[01:00:53] Rebecca: aesthetic argument for wind turbines, both onshore and offshore, I think, is It's not, it's been underdone.

I would do that. I'd be the wind farm czar. 

[01:01:02] Ben: Or many nuclear power or something. I was thinking about the assisted dying debate. It does strike me that I wonder whether the private members bill route, this is a really peculiar UK thing. So listeners, but I do wonder whether that's actually something we need to just.

Yes, and do other processes. It's not that, for instance, the U. S. has got some really weird esoteric processes, which they should definitely nix if they could. They can't because it's entrenched in their system, but it strikes me that this was under debated under or from all sides and that and partly because they tried to push it through this.

[01:01:36] Rebecca: 100%. And I think you're right. I think it does bring up questions about the PNB thing, which already is a little bit of a joke, a bit like the EDM thing. Some, some of these routes are a little bit of a joke, to be honest. And I mean that in the sense of that's what the consensus view within Westminster, again, that might be a bad view, but that is not a consensus view within the rest of the country.

So you already, you've got a Yeah. Transparency. There's these technocratic 

[01:01:59] Ben: things. Whenever you have these things about people have to sit up and speak for a set amount of time to do these things. You have it in the US as well. It's if you can stand there for six hours or something, you can run down the session by weird, sheer dint of willpower.

I'm not sure the ability to stand for six hours should be the measure that we debate these things on. Something's 

[01:02:19] Rebecca: going wrong there, isn't it? It's like your point about Peter Singer. If your argument comes to the conclusion that you have to. Be in favor of killing the baby. Something's gone wrong, guys.

[01:02:29] Ben: Anyway, okay, so I'll end up with would you like to highlight any current projects or thoughts that you're working on? Obviously there's this book around freedom, but anything else you'd like to mention? 

[01:02:39] Rebecca: Yeah, so the book, read the book, although I've got to write the book, but I'm doing an inter intellect series on it.

So if anybody's interested in coming along once a month online, that should be fun. I'm enjoying writing my sub stack. I'm writing a piece at the moment about the meaning of life. Cause I think it's funny that almost everybody makes this joke about, Oh, what do philosophers think about the meaning of life yet?

Of all the many philosophers I've met, I don't think I've ever met a philosopher working on the meaning of life. I thought it was funny. I'm waiting on a visa to go to But they do work on the good life 

[01:03:06] Ben: sometimes. 

[01:03:06] Rebecca: Yes, they do, but I think So yes, that's right. Of course, the philosopher's answer is Oh, but maybe not explicitly answering that question.

I'm waiting on a visa to go to America for a couple of years. I've got an exciting new job I'm very happy about. Yes, good things ahead, I hope. 

[01:03:21] Ben: And let's end with any life advice, career advice, philosophical advice that you might have for people. I've already picked up, if you don't want to compromise very much, definitely don't want to go and be a politician so that's one one thing but yeah, any other thoughts that you might have, maybe for people who want to follow?

A life within philosophy or political economy thinking or just generally some things that you thought about How you got to where you got to today 

[01:03:49] Rebecca: think hard about what the norms are that you follow like unthinkingly I think and maybe this is a just an interest in freedom thing I think all of us do things just because that's the way people around us do those things at the worst that leads us to doing really bad things At the best, it probably just means you're not getting as much fulfillment out of life as you might.

There are many ways to live a good life, and it's for you to work that out for yourself, because you're the only person who can have any systemic access to that. I think in a good life, you spend your whole life working that out. You probably do a plurality of valuable things but the life in which you just follow the crowd, not because.

And I'm not, I don't want to, make a kind of moral criticism of that. I just think it's very easy to do stuff just because. It's what you do, or what other people around you do. Keep questioning that. Again, all I can do is answer for me, but I find myself happier when I stop and think, am I really happy doing this thing?

I often ask myself this question, particularly if I feel frustrated or annoyed. I'm having a bad day, or I think, why do I have to do this thing? Whatever it's to [01:05:00] do with some obligation. I stop and think, what's the counterfactual, what is it I would rather be doing?

And sometimes it's just hey, I just don't want to have to go to this meeting, in which case maybe I just should go to the meeting in some instances. But sometimes it's no, maybe I should be living in another country or maybe I should be writing about different stuff. So think about the counterfactual, is my answer.

[01:05:21] Ben: Yeah, that's really good advice. Just think about the norms that you just follow, maybe because you've always followed, and check whether they are still what you want to do. I do, want to have one follow up on that. So apart from stopping and thinking, or maybe even asking chat TPT, is there a good way of doing that?

Because sometimes you don't really know that you do things like you've always done. And you might not be challenged about it. I may have always eaten meat for a huge amount of time and it's quite hard to, you never get the external trigger. I guess this is your point about indoctrinated thinking about children when they don't meet those different ways of thought.

Is there a good way of snapping yourself out of it? 

[01:06:00] Rebecca: That's an excellent question. I don't know. So two things, one in terms of how you work out what the things are, you just do an audit of what the things are you do in your day. I'm a big believer that you could always find a little bit of time to do something you want to do.

So I do 10 minutes of exercises a day and go for a 10 minute run because I can't really say I don't have 10 minutes. I find that's really valuable to me in so many ways. So yeah, just one way to work out whether you're doing stuff just because you do it is to think about what the things are that you do.

[01:06:32] Rebecca: Then how you assess the value of them is difficult, isn't it, right? You want to be thinking about it in terms of whether it's good for you, whether it's good for the people around you. Whether you enjoy it, but that can't be sufficient, because sometimes you enjoy bad stuff and you shouldn't.

Being aware of, how it interacts with basic values, so I'm a big value pluralist. Is this furthering freedom? Is it furthering justice? That sounds like a very fellow affair arrogant philosopher's answer or something. But thinking about how your life interacts with basic values, thinking about what those values are.

Thinking maybe something like, the domains in which you want to succeed or you want to offer something. What are the things that if you, when you die, you'll be sad you didn't do, hadn't done. And there are always these like flippant answers to that, Oh you'll never, you'll never wish you'd gone to another meeting.

You'd wish you'd spent more time with your kids. No! Maybe there are some meetings that you would wish you had done. Maybe you don't want to have kids. I don't want to have kids. I don't want to have kids just because I don't have the instinct to, and I don't think you should if you don't want to. But also I think a lot of people have kids just because they think they should.

That's not to say having kids isn't a good thing. I think it's for many people the most valuable thing they do in many ways. But yeah, think about just what a good life is, and what the things are you think are sufficient for a good life. The things that are necessary, so if you haven't done X and Y, you haven't led a good life.

Or if you have done X and Y, you haven't. If you've murdered somebody, it's gonna be hard to argue you've led a good life. You might do some good stuff. And then what's sufficient? What is going to be the thing? Like I say, for many people, having brought another human being into the world and loved it and made it, set it on the route to being fulfilled itself is a sufficiently good thing to say that you've had a good life.

What are the other options on that? So, there are some easy answers like, Hey, I cured polio, or I wrote the world's greatest novel, although some people might think that isn't a sufficient one. That's, I think, for me, a really big and important question that we should all think about explicitly.

I think we do think about it implicitly. But one of the great things about being a human is being able to reflect on these things and reason about them. And I think if we don't do that, we're really missing out on something that is it's not just part of us, but it's also something that we have the capacity to build on I think that's my answer.

Ben: That sounds  great yeah, think about your norms and think about what it is to have a good life. So with that Rebecca Thank you very much. 

[01:08:56] Rebecca: Thanks so much Ben. I really enjoyed it

Daisy Christodoulou: A deep dive into VAR, Football, Education, and the Art of Learning | Podcast

Daisy Christodoulou is an acclaimed author in the field of education. Daisy has also written a book on video assisted refereeing (VAR) in football. Her substack is here. 

We discuss being a football fan, VAR's impact on the sport, and the controversial decision-making processes involved. We speak about how VAR might have improved other sports but has mixed results in football. We suggest what technology should spring to football and sport.  We debate on how this potentially reflects the limits of rationality in human endeavours. 

"We need to get away from the search for perfection. Whether in education or VAR, it’s about striking the right balance between accuracy, simplicity, and consistency to avoid ending up with the worst of both worlds."

"When you apply a very precise, letter-of-the-law system, it sometimes tramples over the qualities that make the game what it is. VAR has unintentionally highlighted the limits of rationalism."

Transitioning to education, Daisy shares insights from her research and books on the importance of knowledge-rich curriculums, cognitive science, and the challenges of modern educational systems. The conversation delves into the history of self-education, the role of physical school environments, and strategies to enhance learning outcomes. We touch upon the relevance of English literature, fiction reading, and Daisy's innovative projects at No More Marking, utilizing AI for better educational assessments.

“A written sentence is an incredibly efficient way of communicating information. It can do things that video, audio, or computer code cannot. That utility alone makes reading irreplaceable."

Summary contents, transcript and podcast links below.  Video above or on Youtube. Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you listen to pods.

Contents

• 00:23 The Joys and Struggles of Supporting West Ham

• 01:29 Controversial VAR Decisions

• 02:55 Problems with VAR in Football

• 04:23 Objective vs Subjective Decisions in VAR

• 06:24 Comparing VAR Across Different Sports

• 07:13 Proposed Solutions for VAR Issues

• 10:03 Historical Context and Evolution of Football Rules

• 12:50 Impact of VAR on the Spirit of the Game

• 15:26 In-Game Experience and Fan Reactions to VAR

• 18:55 Broader Implications of VAR and Rationalism

• 27:00 Potential Reforms in Education

• 31:50 Path Dependency in Education Systems

• 37:05 Emphasis on Knowledge in Education

• 38:44 The Myth of 'Just Look It Up'

• 40:57 Cognitive Science and Learning Techniques

• 45:06 The Importance of School Buildings

• 49:55 Historical Perspectives on Self-Education

• 56:55 Balancing Educational Trade-offs

• 01:02:05 The Decline of English Literature Studies

• 01:12:30 Final Thoughts and Life Advice

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Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)

Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Daisy Christodoulou. Daisy has written three books on education, including The Seven Myths of Education. She keeps the Substack newsletter at no more marking. Her most recent book is about VAR, or video assisted refereeing in football. Daisy, welcome. 

Daisy: Hi Ben, thanks for having me.

Ben: What are the best and worst things about being a West Ham football supporter? Ha ha ha 

Daisy: ha ha. The best things are The best things are, for me personally, it's, you know, my family support them, my dad supports them. So going with my dad to the matches is really good fun. We're a really historic and famous club.

We play in the Premier League, which is the biggest global sports league in the world. So you get to go and see every week some of the best footballers in the world. Playing, which is, is really amazing. We won a trophy about 18 months ago, first trophy in a long time, which was really good fun. We have some really great players in the team at the moment.

It's great to go along and watch. What are the worst things? I suppose there's lots of ups and downs. We won a trophy 18 months ago. Since then, maybe things haven't been, haven't been too great. We did have a good win in the week. There's a little bit of discontent about our current playing style and Our last home match, we were not our best, shall we say.

So yeah, ups and downs, I guess a lot of football fans would say the same. 

Ben: So did you see, I didn't see, but I read the October West Ham versus Manchester United game. And I was reading there was a last minute penalty decision given to West Ham for a foul in the box, which was given by VAR for video assisted refereeing.

So what did you make of the decision? 

Daisy: Yeah, I was at that match, and it was quite a controversial decision, I think, at the time and afterwards. I think afterwards, the referee's chief, he came out and said, actually, they were wrong to give that penalty. You know, the original on field decision was correct. It shouldn't have been overturned.

I have to say, watching it in real time, even though it worked for West Ham, and it meant we got a penalty and we won the game, I did think seeing it in real time and then seeing the replays, it felt different. Quite harsh on Manchester United. I think if that had happened to my side team, I would have been a little bit annoyed.

And I think the general approach this year, which I probably would support is referees, they're trying to use VAR less. And I think that's definitely one way to cut down on the controversy. So they're trying to say, look, you only go and review it if there's a really big error, don't just go and look at it on marginal decisions.

And so the issue with this particular decision is it didn't feel like a really big error. So in that case. you know, shouldn't have been overturned, should have stayed with the, the on field decision. Of course, one of the things I, I sort of write about is what is the line between a really big error and not a really big error, just a kind of medium sized error.

And that's not always that easy to, to, to tell. 

Ben: So what do you see as the problems of VAR? You know, you've outlined some of them in the book, but do you see two or three as being particularly problematic at the moment? 

Daisy: Yeah. So I think one big issue, which covers kind of handball and offside is Once you apply technological scrutiny to things like handball and offside, it kind of changes the way the law is applied.

So what with handball, what's been really interesting is once you start scrutinizing, We're using slow motion replay, using people to go back and look at things. You suddenly start spotting loads more handballs before. And so you suddenly start giving a lot more fouls, a lot more penalties. And people are saying, hang on, really, that's a penalty.

You know, the ball brushed his hand when it was hit against him from two yards and we're giving a penalty for that. So you're suddenly giving penalties and fouls for things that you would never have done beforehand. And the same time with offside, I think offside before VAR, it was just had to be done by human judgment.

There was a presumption of benefit of doubt in favor of the attacker. In reality, you couldn't precisely measure that benefit of the doubt because it was all being done by the human eye. And now you've just applied a really strict kind of application of it and you've got the, the, the, the reviews.

You're getting much stricter applications offside, which again, I think people aren't happy with. So I think what it's shown is you apply a lot of scrutiny to something. You don't always end up with more clarity. You don't always end up with better outcomes. So scrutiny isn't always the solution. 

Ben: Yeah, there's an over, over precision.

Daisy: Yeah, absolutely. And then I think the second issue. So I think the handball and offside sort of sit in one category of being, if you like, quite objective decisions that have still caused a lot of problems. And then you've got another problem with. Things like fouls, where you're getting like, like that Manchester United West Ham example where the fouls aren't objective.

They're relatively subjective. So you can have different referees who, you know, have different, will apply the law in a different way and have a different opinion about what is and is not a foul. And I think you've seen that with you've seen that a lot with, with, with the judgment of fouls and with this, the rule in the first few years was clear and obvious.

with the idea that you could, you should only overturn something if it's clear and clear and obvious error. But unfortunately, a clear and obvious error, that's another subjective judgment. VAR, when it comes to overturning files, it hasn't reduced subjectivity, it's kind of just added another layer of subjectivity in.

So you've now, instead of having one, subjective opinion from one human being, you've basically got two subjective opinions from two human beings, and who is to say actually the second one is any more right than the first? And as we saw in that Manchester United match, you then have a third opinion coming out a couple of days later from the referee chief saying actually no, you know, that, that second one was wrong and the first one was right.

So again, has that actually added to our clarity or has that actually increased the confusion? 

Ben: And I was reflecting on your book, and like you say, there seem to be two groups of decisions and a kind of spectrum between them, really. You have a decision which is meant to rely on a physical reality. Did the ball cross a line?

And that would be a simple one. And then you have some decisions which really rely on some form of human judgment, and they interact. For instance, handball, under what I presume are the old rules, is yes, it touched the hand, but was it deliberate? So this idea that there's judgment and the intention has to, has to come into that.

And obviously VAR or video or all of that can't, you know, there's just another layer of judgment that, that you say, particularly on, on that one. And I was really interested in, in seeing that deliberation. And it struck me cause I was looking at some of the surveys and before VAR, There was some surveys which suggested people were quite, fans were quite interested in having it, because they thought, oh, it would settle these decisions.

And then in the last few years, it's been much more mixed as a, as a reception, particularly for people actually in the game. The one sitting at home on TV is also maybe a little bit different. And then I was also reflecting that it seems to be really different in some other sports. So in tennis, VAR is seemingly much more accepted.

I think it's a Hawkeye thing. But it seems to be that most of those decisions lean towards that physical reality. Did the ball hit the line or not? And there isn't a kind of deliberate foul element to it. Whereas actually in football, there's more judgment and there's a kind of different set of, of flow.

I was, I was interested in whether those two things are kind of how you would also see it. And you also have some solutions about what you, Might want to do deal with this. So I thought you'd talk about your view on it and whether you think proposed solutions for this challenge. 

Daisy: Yeah. So I think you're right.

There's, there's different categories of decisions. There's ones that are objective or more objective, and there's ones that are more subjective. And I think when technology was first introduced to football, it was goal line technology. It was introduced in about 2013 and it was the same Hawkeye technology that's used in tennis and in cricket.

And it was used to tell if the board would cross the line or not. And I think by and large, most football fans would say that works really well. And it does eliminate a problem, it eliminates that problem of the referee just not being able to see what's going on. Just literally cannot see if the ball has crossed the line or not.

Hawkeye is automated, so it will send a message, I think, to the referee's watch. So the referee will instantly know if the ball has crossed the line or not. And then the referee can award a goal or not, as the case may be. And that, as I say, came in 2013, I think works pretty smoothly. And I think people were hoping that VAR would just be the next level.

you could introduce it and it would be as smooth and operate as well as, as, as the goal line technology. And I think it hasn't because a lot of the other decisions in football are not as straightforward or as clear cut as has the one across the line or not. So obviously the fouls are at the other extreme, they're just more subjective.

And you can, you can just debate them. And again, actually having endless debates about it doesn't necessarily help. Like maybe we just need to have someone on the pitch, make the decision and we move on. But I think the decision where I think we're all probably a bit surprised by just how controversial it has been and how it hasn't helped is offside.

Because offside felt like another decision that was very similar to, to the goal line decisions. It, you know, it felt like the kind of binary yes or no answer, which humans find it very difficult to judge. And technology is just tailor made to solve the problem. And so I think all of us, I certainly thought that technology would be a brilliant solution for offside.

And I think the weirdest thing of VAR has been that it's actually ended up potentially being the most controversial aspect of VAR. So that's something I think a lot of us didn't anticipate. So yes, you're right to say there's a kind of a bit of a subjective objective distinction, but even, even the more objective decisions.

have actually ended up causing controversy. 

Ben: And do you think that's maybe a reflection of the fact that we might need to re look at the offside law within that? Or do you think it's a problem of technology? And I kind of think it's interesting also you reflect on a couple of elements which I'm going to put under the flow of the game and the spirit of the lore, which I kind of think intersect with all of that in terms of, you'd want technology to help both of those aspects as well as get correct decisions, and you kind of want the rules of your game also to help those, those kind of things in spirit, and they all seem to interact, so I'd be interested in your reflections on that.

Daisy: Yeah, so I think, why hasn't offside worked, take that one first I think Why it hasn't worked is it's again a general issue I think with all technology when you apply all the cases we apply technology to sport is that most of the rules of sport were laid down in a pre technological era. So not just in a pre VAR era, but in an era before you even had video replays at all, or TV.

So a lot of these rules are laid down, the bare bones of them, in the mid 19th century. The off siders rule as we have it, I think, was adapted in 1925 or 26. But, you know, the origins of it are like the 18, 1860s, 1870s. And it kind of is designed as an impressionistic law. It's designed to be yeah, the ref, you know, obviously you know a human being's making that, and you're just trying to get him to make a judgment.

And then, over time, the offside rule has been liberalized. And a lot of people will tell you that the liberalization of the offside rule has probably led to, over the last 30 years in particular, So making the offside more friendlier for the attacker has led to probably more attacking football, more goals, more creative football.

There's probably even some quite subtle second order effects where it's led to play being expanded in the middle of the field. There's a persuasive argument that it's allowed for the development of, of, you know, high quality Guardiola's Barcelona and Spain and Manchester City, because it expands the space available in the middle of the park and it stops Defenders pushing up and, and narrowing, compressing band, you know, 20 or 30 yards either side of the halfway line.

So there's all these very subtle kind of things going on offside. And as I say, it was a purely impressionistic, you know, being, being judged in this very impressionistic human way that couldn't be precise. And so then what you've had is you've had this pre, pre technology rule, and then you've come in and applied a really precise technology to measuring it.

And as I say, it's just up, it's changed the way that law has been interpreted. And it's led to, I think, more offsides being given and offsides that people would never have noticed before, like the tiny kind of toenail or dreadlock offsides. Which would never have been given before. And there actually is an analogy with other sports, where you've applied technology and it's changed the game.

So in cricket, they brought in Hawkeye to judge LBW decisions, and it's led to spinners in particular getting more LBW decisions. But what's interesting there is there haven't been as many complaints, because this is, this moves into your next point you made about the spirit of the law, which is that, Even though in both cases, the technology has had a really big unintended consequences, unintended consequence, which was not the intention of the people bringing it in.

In cricket, people are fine with that because they think it's made the game better. And in football, they're not fine with it because they think it's made the game worse. And so in terms of making the game better or worse, I think there is a sense in cricket and in football, in all sports, you want to see skill rewarded.

And what you're seeing with more leg before wicket decisions being given is you're seeing the skill of the spinner being rewarded in a way that kind of feels fair and consistent. And it's actually stopped some of the sort of ways that batsmen used to really kind of have a little work around to avoid getting out of LBW.

They used to stride down the pitch with their pad and that would mean they couldn't be given out. And that didn't feel very fair. So the technology's kind of supported skill, it's gone with, I think, what most fans want to see, whereas I think with football it's gone the other way, and you're now getting, I think, I quote Roy Hodgson in the book as saying, you're getting very skillful moments that are completely in keeping with the traditions and the spirit of the game, being ruled out for incredibly tiny infringements.

Yeah. And it's already very hard to score a goal in football. And I talk about this in the book. It's maybe one of the factors in the success of football, that it is hard to score a goal. But you don't, you know, we probably got the balance right where we were. You don't necessarily want to be making it hard.

You don't necessarily want to have very skilful moments being ruled out for offside. I think all of those things are the reason why it's been trickier in football. It just hasn't, the unintended consequence has been bad. It's not been what we wanted. 

Ben: I think that seems really fair. I, because I was thinking of another example just because of the Olympics it's the only time I watch it, is Taekwondo, where it's actually become a real part of the game, but there's a sense of fairness.

It's they can look at it. Did it hit the head? 

Yeah. 

Ben: Which is usually a skillful moment. And if it did in the, in the referee missed it, then actually we can reward it and there's limits and things like that. I wasn't aware of the cricket analogy on LBW, but I can see that rewarded for, for, you know, Yeah, for spin.

It's also rewarded in that as favor. But I guess there's that other element you talk about is actually in football. It seems to interfere with the flow of the game, particularly I think if you're watching it in person. Yeah. Whereas I guess cricket's a little bit more episodic anyway. So you've got, you know, you know, you bowl in and you, things like that.

And I guess even in Taekwondo, whether I think there are a little bit of thinking, all does it. Does it offset the rhythm of the game? They have a certain rhythm anyway, and actually the fighters don't mind having a tiny little bit of a break. So it kind of works slightly in their favor on, on the fitness part.

Whereas actually in football, all you're doing is kind of waiting around. And so if you had a movement or there was a certain rhythm to the game, it resets that, which, which probably puts it I guess against the team which has got some sort of momentum anyway, so I'm not sure about that. But it seems that fans don't like it.

Daisy: Yeah, I think it's, I think there's a couple of issues. So I think one fundamental issue, which is kind of hard to overcome, is that football is just fundamentally a very fluid and a very spontaneous game with very few natural breaks. And that makes it very different from cricket and tennis. where you've got these successful examples of being used, and as you say, probably taekwondo and other sports as well.

Certainly very different from American football, where there's lots of frequent breaks. So that's one kind of fundamental factor that I think is always going to make it hard in football, that you just don't have the natural pause. And so you're, you're inserting a pause that isn't natural into the game.

I think there's another issue which is where it has been badly managed and badly implemented, which is the in game experience for fans is not great. And this is partly a little bit of a hangover of other issues to do with football. So football's always a little bit uneasy about showing in grand replays because they're worried that it will just, if you show, show an error, then it flat fans will go crazy and you know, it'll inflame people.

So it, it, it's, that's, that's kind of one prior issue, but I would say I watch a lot of cricket live as well as football. And. When the technology was introduced with Cricket, the actual in game experience for the fam is quite good. They would show it on the big screen, you could turn around, you could see the replay, you could see what the umpire was seeing you could hear the audio, if you, if you, you know, you can have that as well, and and they flash up the little graphic for the LBWs of the three red lights, and you, so you, you really know what's going on.

And of ways it added something to the, to the game, both at home on TV and in the ground. And it added, you know, the sense of there would be that moment you, you did lose the spontaneous moment of celebrating a wicket in the moment, but you kind of gained because you got to see it on the screen and there was a moment where you could all see what happened and you could cheer or what have you.

I think with football, as I say, watching a lot of football live too, the first thing that really hit me was just, I just didn't know what was going on. And again, compared to that example with cricket, it just felt like you were, you were just really confused. So I was at the first match in the Premier League in 2019 where it was used and it was Raheem Sterling was given offside against West Ham so he set up a goal and then they went back and checked it and nobody really knew what was going on.

You know, so things aren't flashed up on the big screen, you don't see the replay, you don't see the deliberations, you don't hear anything. They've chosen now to start releasing some of the audio after the event. But, you know, that's not the same. And they've done something now this season where they release a little typed explanation of why that decision was made about 15 minutes after.

And again, you know, that is not, to give that cricket example, that is not, oh, we've got the three red lights, the third red lights go, we can all cheer. It's nothing like that. There's a lot of confusion. And you get a situation where, you know, there'll be people in the ground who are texting people at home to find out what's going on.

And you're like what is the point? Who is the game for? And this is obviously where you get into bigger issues about modern football. Is the game for fans in the ground or is it for the much, much, much bigger TV audiences watching at home in almost every country in the world? And that's a challenge football grapples with in lots of different ways, not just VAR.

Ben: It sounds like you should become a part time football advisor for this Little period because I think you suggested maybe let's have a pause. Let's have a moratorium Let's gather things and get expert opinion and fan opinion say Where has it improved both the spirit of the game, you know? And I think like you say they probably go back to at the minimum the hawkeye for out of bounds decisions and goal decisions and maybe there can be a little bit more of a debate you're right The interesting thing is is one on the off side and I've seen some of those but where it's so close And you kind of feel like well You know, who could really tell it's only going to be, it's only going to be the computer.

Was also really interested reflecting on it. And I think you, you mentioned this as well at the really high level. One of the reasons I think sports are really interesting and particularly football is it seems to reflect a lot of what goes on around humanity, what humans think, creativity, how modernism goes and things.

And on one level, the reading of your book on VAR argues for these kind of limits. Of rationalism, maybe limits of technology. And I think that's a really interesting backdrop because if you take it out to the wider world, there's a lot of debate on how far we go with utilitarian thinking, how far we go with cost benefit analysis.

And even, I guess, in your kind of other day job world, quantitative marking versus a kind of human judgment element. So I guess bringing it all together, where do you see the limits of, of Rationalism. And is it a limit of rationalism or is it a limit of technology or where human judgment is? And how do we best figure out where we should draw the line or how we should move the line with time?

Daisy: Yeah, absolutely. So there's lots of big issues there. So I think one is when you have a very rational and very, I call it in the book, I talk about the difference in the letter of the law, the spirit of the law. You have a very rational, very precise, very letter of the law kind of system that maybe can be applied by, by computer.

I think the problem with that is it sometimes misses some nuance, it misses, it can be a bit bloodless, it can be, it kind of tramples over some of the, you know, the qualities of something that make it what it is. And again, I think the handball, the handball decisions are a really good example of that.

You've applied this very cut and dried letter of the law approach where you've said, it touches the hand, effectively, it's offside. We're going to take away any human judgment about whether it was deliberate or not. And you just opened up a huge can of worms. And, and caused all kinds of problems and actually, you know, the past five years have been so much backtracking and rewriting of the law and what have you to, to kind of try and deal with what they've, what they've unleashed.

So I think in that sense, it has been a case study in some of the limits of, of rationalism and some of the problems with just trying to apply very hard and fast cut and dried rules. But obviously, You can't live a world without rationalism either. And I talk about the limits of the spirit of the law approach, so a more impressionistic approach, as I say, where you're trying to take into account common sense and have a bit of discretion.

Those systems aren't perfect either. They result in a lot of inconsistency, they can end up with bias, they're very hard to scale up and you can just end up with something that looks very, very different. There's this, you know, as I say, the lack of consistency there. So they both sort of have their tensions, and I think you can see these tensions in lots of fields, and there's lots of fields that have to try and reconcile them in one way or another.

And one of the things I talk about in the book is you're always looking at trade offs. So a big thing I talk about in the book is we have to get away from the search for perfection. So I talk a lot about trade offs in other walks of life. I talk about trade offs in an area a lot about with evolution.

So I quote from an evolutionary scientist who talks about, you know, in evolution we could have the amazing long distance vision of an eagle at the cost of not having very good color vision. You know, everything in life, you're sort of trading off on different metrics. And one of the things I say is, I think what we've gone for with VAR is we've tried to maximize, we've tried to dial, turn the dial right up on accuracy.

And before VAR was introduced, you would hear a lot of fans, managers, players, they would say, we just want more right decisions. We just want more right decisions. You know, VAR became this accuracy maximizing kind of system. And then all of a sudden you realized once VAR came along, actually, we don't just care about accuracy.

You know, just like maybe, you know, with eyesight, actually, we don't just care about long distance. Actually, we care about the color vision too. Actually, can you plug some of that back in? And what we realized with VAR is we don't just care about accuracy. And I quote Rio Ferdinand saying this from the very early days of VAR.

He said, actually, simplicity matters too. You can't get carried away spending five minutes on a decision, because one of the things that people like about football is it is simple to understand. So there's all these other things that suddenly we're realizing, oh, actually, maybe it isn't just about accuracy.

So we need to think of the trade offs and maybe two dials, maybe more than two dials, you know, series of dials. And we've got a series of factors that are going into our optimization curve. And this is where you can have rationality to work out how much rationality you want. Yeah. And I talk about this and some people won't like this either.

Some people say let's just stick with the old way. There'll be errors, there'll be mistakes. It will be inconsistent. It might be biased. Get on with it. And I talk about other ways we can maybe start to think in a more mathematical, rational way with the, but the acceptance that you can't maximize for rationality, if you like, and, and, you know, to think about like an optimization curve.

And I say, one of the problems with VAR is it promised greater accuracy. And it's ended up you haven't really got the greater accuracy and you've lost other important things too. So you've ended up with the worst of both worlds. You know, you haven't maximized on any of your, of your values. And so what you want to try and do is to, is to try and get something where you've got a, you know, some level of consistency.

You've also got some room for discretion to get the best of both worlds. We've ended up, I think, with the worst of both worlds. And the analogy I give there is, is racehorses. So another one from evolution. Races have been bred over time again and again, again for speed. And their bones, essentially, if you read them for speed, their bones, their bone density gets, gets, you know, gets, their bones get lighter and, and then they get faster.

And then obviously, but you're approaching cliff edge, right? And then you get to that cliff edge and their bones are so light, they break. So you can optimize, optimize, optimize, bang, and then you end up with nothing. Right. And I think that's kind of where things have ended up with our, we've ended up with nothing.

So what I'm saying is we need to try to strike the sweet spot between all the values we're interested in. We don't want to get to a position where the game's bones break. Yeah, that's my, that's my analogy. 

Ben: And you argue it very well in your book. So if you Given a magic wand and you could change anything about football.

In fact, you can change some of the rules or anything else if you like as well. What, you know, one, two or three things would you change about football today? 

Daisy: I would, as I say in the book, I'd like to pause VAR, I'd like to do some trials around different ways of doing it. I would love to just, you know, kind of a lower stakes league or competition.

And actually they are doing this at the minute and I'm really intrigued to see how it works out. I'd love to trial a player challenge system in football. Because one of the things I write about in the book is that player challenge, you've got it in cricket, you've got it in tennis, although tennis, I think now is moving to a fully automated system.

But in cricket, you've got a player challenge system. And again, what's weird about this is player challenge doesn't necessarily really need some more right, lead to more right decisions. So there are lots of examples of players who make challenges that are just wrong. Like players are worse than umpires at making decisions, right?

But again, this comes back to, do we actually want more right decisions? People are happy with it, with the system. Like everyone's yeah, okay, fine. It works. We move on. And so I find it really weird that a system that has probably not really optimized for accuracy has got acceptance. Whereas VAR is more optimized for accuracy, but hasn't.

And so I'd be really intrigued to see, can you make a player challenge system work in football, given the constraint of it being a very fluid game with fewer natural breaks in play? And actually, I found out recently that they are trialing this in a couple of FIFA youth tournaments women's tournaments, I think.

So I'd be really interested to see how that goes. 

Ben: Oh, yeah, that would be interesting. It's interesting looking at, A couple of other sports, I'm just thinking back to the Olympics. Taekwondo is quite interesting because it's your coach who makes the challenge, although the player can indicate to the coach.

But 

Ben: one of the nice things about that, it just shows the importance of the fact that it's a kind of team, that, you know, the coach is really important within it, and they're having a different view. And I think they are slightly more often right than not, but they're not right all the time. And actually, they use it for different tactics as well.

But then I was also thinking of I remember the the Clay Pigeon Shooter, I can't quite, Skeets I think they call it, and when she saw it, and in fact a lot of people in the audience saw it, but it didn't register but then she was just really sporting, or at least in the interview she said, you know, that sport, it happens, some decisions go with you and some not, and so that kind of felt you know, some uber spirit spirit of all of that.

Maybe that's a good pivot to thinking about rationality and challenges to your other hat you wear, which is within education. And maybe you'll ask the same question within that, although maybe it's a, it's a, it's a bigger one or not. And if you had a magic wand and you wanted to reform, you know, a few things about education, I'll, I'll keep it simple by just saying maybe education in England, although you could tackle the world if you want.

Africa, US or something else. But if you had your magic wand around education you know, what would you do what would you do for that? 

Daisy: Yeah. So this is another interesting one. This is another big trade offs one. If you were just giving me a blank sheet of paper to design the perfect kind of, you know, school curriculum and assessment system, I'd have all kinds of crazy ideas.

But we don't work in that world. No one ever works in that world. You always are working with what's gone before. With the reality of the system that you inherit and particularly in the UK at the moment and there's a curriculum assessment review going on in England at the moment. And one of the issues I think with it is is there are big issues at the minute in England with recruitment and retention of teachers, big issues around workload.

There's an SEN crisis. Students being diagnosed with SCN and not the support to, to, to, to help them with that. And so you're in a situation where, let's imagine again, you designed the perfect system on paper, but it was so complicated that even more teachers left, experienced teachers. Is that then the perfect system?

It's obviously it's not, is it? You know, again, you've traded off too much. So my thing at the minute is I think the English system, obviously it's not perfect. No system is perfect, but I would say there probably needs to be a few, some incremental, improvements as opposed to kind of massive wholesale reform, because I think you have to recognize where the system is.

I think one incremental improvement I'd really like to see, and it's part of my day job, is the way that writing is assessed at primary. at age 11. So I think the current system has a lot of issues, a bit like what I talked about with the handball and VAR in that you've got these rules, these very pernickety rules that are applied very precisely and don't really give you the outcome that you're maybe hoping for.

And that's one of the reasons I got interested in thinking about handball because of the day job, the work I do in writing assessment. So I'd love to see a bit of a change there. I think that would be really good. And the technique that I use in my day job, we use a technique for assessing writing called comparative judgment, which I also talk about in my book about VAR, because I think you could use it to measure fouls.

It's essentially a method of using aggregated, combined human judgments. So combining together lots and lots and lots of human judgments to come up with a more robust decision about something. And by having thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of human judgments, you're able to kind of cancel out the errors and the bias within them.

I'd like to see a bit more of that for writing assessment, and I'd like to see a bit more of that in football. A couple of other kind of smaller things. Again, another thing I talk about in the, the VAR book, which I think is relevant to, to assessment in England I, I am not a huge fan of grades.

So I, I do like assessment and I like kind of scaled scores and robust measures, but grades are essentially they're lines that are drawn on top of a continuous distribution. So a grade, you're just chopping up a continuous distribution of attainment into quite arbitrary chunks. And the problem with that is it's quite distorting.

And I talk about this actually with FAO's and the clear and obvious issues you've had with VAR. About what is a clear and obvious error. It's unfortunate there isn't a hard, a hard and fast dividing line between clear and obvious, not clear and obvious, there isn't a hard and fast dividing line between foul, not foul, there's probably a distribution of fouls, and then we draw an arbitrary line.

slightly messy, fuzzy line and say if you're on the one side of it, it's not a thousand, the other side it is. And that's all a grade is. A grade is a line, a fuzzy line on a, on a continuous distribution. And the problem with this in assessment terms is that you have students who have very, very similar scores and very, very similar attainment profiles, but if the line kind of splits them, they're just either side of it, they get given a different label.

And that actually causes all kinds of real world practical issues. So wherever possible, I would prefer assessment results to be reported as some kind of scout score rather than a grade. And at GCSE, there are nine grades. So the problem isn't quite as acute because nine grades is quite a lot, but at primary there's three grades and three grades is like the worst number and everyone just treats it as bottom, middle, top.

So kids get put into these three categories and they come to kind of, you know, label who they are, bottom, middle, top, and there's just so much imprecision there that causes so many problems. So I'd love to kind of move away from that. I think that would be something that would be a relatively light touch tweak that could have, you know, positive benefits.

Ben: I didn't think about it in that way. That seems really sensible observation. And maybe I've got some reflections on the pros and cons of streaming with that as well. I go back to one of your earlier reflections and try and loop it all together. I think that's really right about, you know, we've been path dependent with the system that we have.

I tell this a lot of people who, so my mom's from Singapore and there's a lot of people say, Oh, we can do it this Singapore way. And I said You can't because Singapore have got this path dependent thing and actually there's a lot of cultural aspects. So in schools, Singapore schools don't have any sort of same problems that we might have with mobile phones.

Because if you're caught using a mobile phone in an inappropriate way in a Singapore school, you will lose your phone, your parents will back it up, and everyone will think you're a real punker for doing it. You don't get that same cultural element. I'm, I just use it as a silly example. And that, and it counts in health all over.

So we think, Oh, let's do the Singapore system. Wow. If you thought like Singapore and you were a city state, maybe you could, but England England is not like that. I think that's a 

Daisy: hugely, hugely important point you make. And I think path dependency is a concept that, yeah, needs to be better known.

My favorite example, actually my favorite example of path dependency is English spelling. So English spelling is a complete nightmare. If you were designing English spelling now, you would not design it to be anything like what you have. But it's, if, if we revised it now on a more rational and sensible basis, again, limits of rationality, you would then be in a situation where it would be incredibly hard to read anything written before that year zero.

So you would lose access to all of that kind of, 1, 000, 1, 500 years, whatever, you know, how much, how much writing you would, you would lose. So I mean, maybe less than that, if you look at some modern English, but you would, you would lose touch with a solid few centuries of writing. You would make it much, much harder to access that.

And you would have huge transaction costs switching from one method to the other. It would just be, be crazy. Right? So path dependency is we have to put up with the letters, you've probably seen that funny, funny thing that you can, you can spell the word fish, G H O T I because of the different ways that all those, all those letters can be pronounced.

And so we're stuck with that. You know, unfortunately we're stuck with having to teach students a very irrational code. That you would never have done if you had designed in the first place. And you can see those path dependencies in every part of a nation's policy. And so the corollary to the sort of path dependencies, you can't cherry pick.

So you're absolutely right, I think there's lots of things to admire about the Singaporean education system. I don't think you can just pick out, kind of, certain things that you like and go, right, we'll plonk them into England. Because those things exist within a whole network of history and policy, and often quite unspoken assumptions.

And that's a good example, if you want, about the mobile phone. But there's loads of these, and I say the same as well, people talk a lot about Finland, and Finland having a great education system, we should copy what they do. And a number of issues with that, one is that actually, almost as soon as people started saying this, Finland actually started to slip down the international league tables, that was one issue.

But another issue is that, again, you look at the history of Finland's education and Finland as a country, and it's got an issue where teachers are very highly regarded. It's a very prestigious job. It's a small country. It's a small country where the role of teachers and, and the role of teachers in the winter war against Russia was, it was a really big deal.

The sort of aspects of people identifying their national culture and, you know, one of the key aspects in their modern history, all of these things are kind of bound up with their education system and the role of teachers. How can you possibly kind of import that into, into England? You can't. And there's another issue too with a lot of countries that have good education, it's often quite small.

Yeah. 

Daisy: And I think there's something as well about reform processes in smaller countries. There are probably things you can do when you can get all of your secondary heads into a pretty big auditorium. That you can't do when your country is bigger than that. And again, these seem I think to a lot of reformers, I can seem really like I'm just nitpicking here.

But these are big issues. These are really big issues. And yeah, you know, you have to look at a whole system and its whole context. Rather than just trying to pick things out and plonk them in. 

Ben: That's absolutely right. Particularly with Singapore, there's things to do with scale, there's things to do with culture, path dependency.

We need a new, some social science, some interdisciplinary social science, which looks at things like path dependency and trade offs, football and education. Some sort of historic things going on. This is, this is the way, this is the way we should do it. So I was thinking back to your book on seven myths of education.

I was interested if the weighting of anything that you wrote then has changed today, because I think it's maybe a decade a while you wrote it. I'm guessing, I'm guessing not. And I'm going to quickly go over some of them. You know, one was about this fact, you know, knowledge based knowledge, rich sort of curriculums, prevention, preventing understanding that on, on skills, teacher led instruction being passive.

The fact that 21st century will say technology changes everything the kind of, you can always look it up, just look up Wikipedia or AI. This thing about too much emphasis on transferable skills, whatever that's meant to be. And we've already alluded to the fact that a lot of these things are much more intersectional than you think.

And that projects being the best way to learn. And then I guess one, which is kind of political or that teaching knowledge is meant to be indoctrination. I particularly, I guess on the first one on this knowledge based or knowledge rich understanding. I think that still definitely seems to be holding up.

Would you put the emphasis on any of the others differently or would you call out that? Because I think, you know, I would just look at it from afar. Not everyone, but I think a lot of systems have tilted a little bit back towards a kind of knowledge rich curriculum if they had strayed towards this kind of skills idea, although, although not everywhere.

But I'd be interested in your view. Would you put anything emphasis or would you, would you put something else kind of different in that, in that list today? 

Daisy: Yeah. So just for a bit of context, yeah, I wrote the book 10 years ago. I was, I, I was writing about how knowledge was important and how knowledge had been a bit downgraded in education.

And I was making the case for the value of knowledge. And that you can't have a skills based curriculum because of the nature of the relationship between knowledge and skills. I think when I wrote that 10 years ago in England, it was a controversial book. You can see from some of the reviews I had at the time people didn't like it I think 10, 15 years ago, knowledge was a bit of a dirty word.

It was seen as something very passive, very low value, very, you know, something that you had to kind of, if you did anything with it at all, you whisper it very quickly to get onto the higher order skills. And that was the thing I took out in the book, the idea of lower order knowledge and higher order skills.

I think things have changed a bit in England in the last 10 years. So the, the, the, I think you can now have more of a conversation about knowledge. There's more things are known about cognitive psychology and cognitive science, which I write about as, as well. So I think the, the, The debate has moved on a bit.

I would say globally, though. And, and outside of the sort of niche English education policy world, I think there's still a lot of lazy tropes around. I think the one that I would, of the seven chapters in my book, each one's in with a different myth. The one that I just come back to again and again, it feels like banging my head against the wall is I think it's number four.

It's you can always just look it up. So this is something I think that goes beyond education. It's just a, an idea that people have about the world that now we've all got a smartphone in our pocket. We no longer need to know anything. And, and the latest kind of iteration of that is we've all got, we haven't just got Google, we've got chat GPT.

So we, we don't just have to Google it, we can chat GPT it. And what I try to show in the book is this is not actually necessarily a technology issue. There's an issue to do with the limitations of our cognitive architecture, which is that we have a very limited working memory that can only handle certain number of new items at any one time.

So whatever kind of fire hose of information is being thrown at you by Google or chat GPT, however easy that information is to access, you have still got this very narrow pipe that you can get that information into, into your mind. And you still need in order to make sense of it, all of the information you have stored in long term memory.

So there's quite a lot of paradoxes here. It's that in order to make sense of something you see on Google, or indeed in order to construct a decent Google query, you need to have already a lot of information in long term memory to help you do that effectively. And actually Google and Chatterjee are not going to be the most effective ways of acquiring that information in the first place.

So in order to gain knowledge, you kind of need some knowledge to begin with. You can't just set students off on independent inquiries to learn everything for they need from, from, from Google. And I think actually in the last few years, we have started to see more and more people are realizing the problem.

If you just let people go off and do their own research and, and, and where they end up in the rabbit holes, they can end up in. Yeah, I think the point I'm, I'm if I was gonna, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll do a second edition of Seven Myths About Education. I, I, I might, might try and update that chapter and, and just try and press home a bit further and update it to include some bits about AI.

I 

Ben: mean, it is remarkable as a kind of, again, a far observation about how knowledge from certain domains this is more just kind of in research don't really filter in or the people who can make these kind of comparisons, kind of like you have done with, with football and, and education, it doesn't seem to be prevalent.

So one thing I think, and I think you, you talked about this cause it's very well known in cognitive science is around, you know, spaced repetition, you know, putting things into long term memory. 

And as 

Ben: far as I know, I don't know, do, do they teach that to teachers or is it like a, a common practice within learning?

Cause it still seems to me niche when I kind of talk about it to people and, you know, there's efforts and things around it, but there definitely seem to be cognitive techniques, which are known within cognitive science, but don't seem to have passed through yet. And maybe we can say this a about education.

Pedagogy as well. And the fact that a lot of these debates kind of within education, you know, listening to your sort of history of education podcast as well, kind of go back maybe hundreds of years, maybe even a couple of thousand years back to the Greeks who had some of these debates as well. Yeah.

So I was interested in your reflection on both, both maybe space repetition and, and how much these arguments have been around for such a long time. 

Daisy: Absolutely. So I think on the, yeah, the issue of the space repetition, the cognitive science, this is something I talk about a lot in my book, that we know more now about how the human mind works than ever before.

And perhaps in the last 50 years we've, we've learned so much. And yet a lot of that knowledge isn't necessarily well known in schools or well known by students or even by teachers or in teacher training colleges. I think that is starting to change in England, but I think it's fragmented. I think back in 2014, I was on a government review of initial teacher training.

Which you know, flagged up that there were some issues around kind of, you know, that, that, that evidence being taught in teacher training colleges. I'm not sure how much better things are now. They, they, they, you know, maybe a little bit better, but I think it is patchy. I think across the profession in England, you have got greater awareness of things like retrieval, practice space, repetition, things like that.

Which I think is a good thing. I think there's greater awareness, whether that means everything's being implemented effectively all the time, you know, that's not the same thing as, as greater awareness, but the greater awareness is definitely a start. And there's all kinds of issues as well with, with students and their understanding of, of how they learn.

So I think there's a famous study. What, what do students do to revise their favorite, their favorite revision strategy is rereading and highlighting. And, and, and that's the least effective revision strategy. And I'll always remember seeing students revise and having their binder full of notes and pages that were, there were more words highlighted than weren't.

You think what, what is the value of this? Where is, how is this helping? You're going for it with a nice yellow yellow highlighter. And the most effective strategies are self quizzing, flashcards, spaced repetition. And often students don't know about those. The other thing is they can often be quite hard to set up.

And I think, again, in defense of the students as well, we don't often help them necessarily, not just in terms of what we tell them, but also the structures and the rhythm of a curriculum. So I think that's probably one of the challenges for teachers and students implementing new ideas, is it isn't often as simple as saying, our spaced repetition is amazing, you should all be doing it.

To do spaced repetition properly probably needs completely revamping your curriculum, completely revamping the kind of tests you set, completely revamping how you teach. It's not as simple as saying, I'll do some spaced repetition tonight. So these things, once you, you know, get into them, they're not, they're not always straightforward.

Ben: Yeah, not exactly. If you're doing spaced repetition, you know, really well, you need to come back to an idea maybe two months later or three months later, you know, in short doses. And that's obviously not how curriculums are designed to set up. You know, you do a module and you kind of go on this kind of back and forth and interlinking.

Daisy: And the typical sort of school test, I think typically students want to go away and they want to study for a test in four days time, and they want to cram what they need to know for that test and then, and then forget it. And actually, if you want to remember something for the long term with spaced repetition, you need to be revisiting it on that spaced repetition schedule, potentially over a very long period of time.

So reviewing it more in the early days, but continuing to review it as time goes on. Yeah, if you just cram, if you've got three hours to spend learning something and you cram them into one three hour block, that is not going to be as effective as splitting it into six, just for argument's sake, six 30 minute blocks spread over maybe six months.

Right. So you want to try and try and try and space things out more. 

Ben: That makes sense. A couple of perhaps more niche thoughts or questions I had. Cause I thought you'd been expert on this. School buildings. How important is the place where you study? Obviously you need to have you know, a minimum standard, I would imagine.

But then how much, how important it is to go further? And I guess just from far observations, you know, there are these sense of when you think about large public buildings, you know, Not only is there kind of the actual immunity So does the thing work and does it work? But these ideas of civic pride is it a nice place to work in?

Does it make you feel good those things which interestingness of a judgment thing are probably hard to put in in quantitative things And I guess in in in england, but Broadly, there is this debate about how much money we should spend on on buildings and schools and the like. So i'd be interested to see like how important a factor that the kind of building or the place you're working in or teaching in is versus all this other pedagogy and i'm sure they interact but i'd be interested in your view 

Daisy: Yeah.

So I think buildings are very important. They obviously are. But I think, as you say, you tease out a little bit there, some of the issues around why we think they're important. So if you have a fantastic school building that makes the students very happy, that makes the teachers very happy, that makes the teachers want to stay and work there and not want to leave, and it helps the students live healthy lives, but it doesn't really improve attainment.

Does that mean the buildings don't matter? So I would say no. If, if the buildings are doing all those other nice things. And the Civic Pride that you talked about and their community hubs and, you know, all kinds of features going on. If they do all those lovely things, then I would say that's a good in and of itself.

And you can see it as analogous to having a nice library in the town or having a nice, you know, a nice community center. So I think there's a section of having a nice building, it's just a good in and of itself, and it doesn't necessarily have to be justified beyond that. But I do think there are ways in which buildings can help or hinder learning, and given that we want them to be places of learning, we should probably think about the kind of things that do help learning.

And again, when we have to make the decisions and we have the trade offs, we should go in favour of the things that help learning. To what extent can they sort of help or hinder learning? We can consider examples of students who have learnt difficult things in the most unpropitious and difficult circumstances.

So again, you know, you want to be careful. I don't want you to get the message, if you haven't got a nice school building, you can't possibly learn anything. That's not true. There's one really famous modern British mathematician, statistician, I think Dennis Lindley, who learned a lot of his maths in an air raid shelter in the Blitz.

Right, so people can learn in difficult situations, and I think part of actually what you want to teach students, just as a general character forming thing for life, is you can overcome some hurdles, which is not fair that these hurdles are there, and it's probably not fair that you don't have an amazing building, but, you know, that is something you can, can still overcome.

And I would say even if you have the best design, so I do think buildings can have an impact on learning and can improve learning and make it more likely to happen, but even if you have the best design, best optimized building for learning, kind of what, how much difference will it make? That's an interesting one.

I don't know. And I think it will make some difference, but again, is it, is it, is, is, you know, Is it, is it even necessary or sufficient? I don't know. But then what, you know, what is the ideal building then? What is that? And I would say early in my career, I think I worked in some buildings that weren't ideal.

So I do think it's important to say there is a difference. And I worked in some buildings that I think made learning harder. So some buildings, you know, classrooms without walls. I've been in schools like that. I don't, I don't think they help. I think the noise, I think you need to form long term memories.

I think you need to be able to concentrate. I think silence can help with concentration. I think noise all the time makes it harder to form memories. So I do think there needs to be quiet rooms. There need to be some, some divisions between students who are doing things that are noisy and students who are doing things that are not.

And I think if you don't have walls, it's really hard to have the hat. So a basic, a basic, a basic requirement would be walls. And of course, there are lots of other kind of nice to haves. But again, it is striking, I would say, in modern Britain and kind of throughout history, how a lot of the most innovative and brilliant examples of, of, of learning environments are not necessarily the ones that have always the most brilliant buildings.

So we've got to bear that in mind, in mind too. 

Ben: Yeah. There's a very famous building which no longer exists, which was on the MIT campus, and it was a temporary. building, which then lasted for a really long time. Part of it was that they, I mean, this is more askance, but they were able to set it up how they wanted to set it up.

So that's a different thing, but it was the fact that it was actually very cheap and but had the minimum standards that they needed and for them, they could. they could also do that. So it's kind of an interesting interaction. One other perhaps niche one because I was reviewing some of your podcasts on the history of education and I hadn't realized back in history, I guess before you really had much government sponsored education or when it started around these working class thinkers and people who essentially came through a self education route, which had its pros and cons as well in this kind of history of self education.

And then the idea of why governments came in and tried to formalize education as well, which there were different debates. Some was maybe around status quo and kind of controlling your population. And then some was well, not others. But I was interested in your reflection, I guess, particularly with this intersection of, of working class or those who weren't going to be able to enter the system, which I guess is different today and, and how they came up.

out with sort of self education ideas. I guess it doesn't really argue against knowledge base because actually they came with a, with a knowledge, a lot of knowledge in that. And there's these other intersectionalities with working class and the like, but I was be interested in your reflections on that.

Daisy: Yeah. So I think that Yeah, this, this podcast episode you're mentioning, I talk about a kind of, I suppose the formal name for it is working class autodidacticism. So working class men and women who taught themselves in the absence of a really well established formal sort of state provision of education.

And it's been this, this is a little bit of history that's been forgotten about and it's a fascinating history because I've talked about people who, you know, they're doing great things without having many resources and not necessarily having any kind of building to help them. There's a, this fantastic history of working class people doing just this and founding their own institutes, founding their own libraries, finding the time and incredibly busy and physically demanding day jobs, finding the time to, to go and study beyond that time.

And really inspirational stories and people doing it sometimes to better themselves financially, but a lot of the time, just because they wanted to. They wanted to know stuff. You know, it was a personal development. And the book I talk about is a fantastic book by a historian called Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes.

And he goes up to 1945, I think, about 1850, 1945, something like that. And it's, as I say, a very inspirational, very inspirational story. It's a bit earlier than 1865. He goes most of the, I think, a lot of the 19th century. You don't get state education in England until 1870. Even then, it's relatively patchy.

It's only up to 11. But it's, but before 1870, there is a lot of education going on still. And, and so it is really important to, to remember that, I think. Obviously, there's real patchiness with this, both in terms of not everybody has access to it, and that's one of the reasons you have the campaign for state education, and also in terms of what is it people are learning if autodidacts, as I said before, can go down rabbit holes.

And I think perhaps when I first read Jonathan Rose's book, it is easy to really romanticize some of this. I think, as I say, perhaps we've, we've seen in the last few years in, in lots of different ways, there can be a darker edge to autodidacticism there are real strengths and weaknesses to learning things slightly outside of formal institutions.

So one real strength of autodidacticism would be, you look at someone like Michael Faraday, I talk about him in the, in the podcast. So Michael Faraday is a real. You know, but kind of, do you, did he invent or discover electricity? I mean, you know, it's a philosophical question that he does a lot of laying the groundwork for the, the, the basic kind of the basic scientific implications of electricity, which found so much of our modern world, you know, he's a real pioneer and he's a very practical scientist.

He's a lot of practical experiments. He often hurts himself doing them. He's a great scientific communicator. He's. really, his early years are kind of almost entirely self taught. So he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a poor working class guy from London and he attends lectures at the City, I think the City Philosophical Institute.

He kind of just, you know, almost entirely teaches himself, makes that, makes contact, makes contact with people at the Royal Institution, a phenomenal story. What's really interesting is he is not influenced by anybody at Cambridge where they're doing. lots of pioneering scientific stuff at that time. And so he doesn't come across a lot of their scientific models.

And in some ways that's maybe quite good for him and quite freeing. So there's that kind of upside that he can think in a slightly different way. One downside is he's mathematics. He never really develops his mathematics and it takes James Clark Maxwell kind of later on to come along and kind of almost apply the maths to a lot of his work and to sort of formalize it in that way.

So that's the kind of ups and downs of it from someone like Faraday. And then I think you can probably see ups and downs in other ways, as I say, in a sort of slightly different way. Dark Age, if you want to it, but to what extent do you, when you're teaching yourself, do you go looking for things that reinforce what you want to hear?

And you know, is that an issue? There's a lot of research now. I think, again, if you'd asked me 10, 15 years ago, I'd have been quite naively optimistic that better education will kind of always lead to enlightenment and better agreement and consensus and choosing the right thing to do. There's a lot of evidence People who know more about a particular issue are actually, can often be more kind of ideologically motivated.

Ben: They get more entrenched in their view. 

Daisy: Yeah, and actually, when you're, if you know a lot about a topic and you're presented with evidence that disagrees with your prior information on that, again, you'll have more information to argue back against it. So I think they've done this with climate change. But they've done lots of studies where people you know, people are sort of shown information that and actually the people who are better informed about climate change are often kind of least likely to sort of change their minds.

So these things are really complicated. 

Ben: Yeah. There's another, I don't think there's another dimensions there. Which isn't often picked up, which I think it basically is an open mindedness dimension, which actually it overlays on that. And if you don't have that as your dimension, then it doesn't, it doesn't really figure.

And I think that's right. I always think of it as kind of relatively fat tails that actually you, you are perhaps more likely to make these more unusual discoveries and maybe step chain discoveries, but you're also more likely to go off the deep end and go down some craziness, which just ends up not to be true at all.

And so there is a trade off in that. 

Daisy: Exactly. And I suspect again, to come back to trade offs, which is one of our themes is we don't quite like to admit that we want to think again, that we can pick up one end of the stick without the other. 

Ben: But there's 

Daisy: probably an extent to which a lot of really big, groundbreaking, incredible, amazing advances.

I mean, what's that famous thing, you know, Newton, Newton believed in alchemy, you know, Newton, Newton was, was, was, was trying to turn base metals into gold, you know, that kind of stuff. People who are pushing the edges and pushing the boundaries. are often doing so in some ways that are brilliant, in some ways that might be, might be slightly mad.

Yeah, 

Ben: there's a lot of people who debate Elon Musk along those dimensions, right? You just come with all of those things. It would be a, you know, it 

Daisy: would be a good modern example, for sure. 

Ben: Okay, last one on the education thing, we're sort of wrapping up on some quickfire things. I think about this just on the, on this idea of trade offs, you know, there's some evidence that, In england, if you look at piece of scores that the middle is kind of okay, and it's kind of maybe improved in things But there's some observational evidence maybe or some debate around I guess in the tales So those which we could say of high attainment or them high talent in in many dimensions you know, there's some things feeling that maybe they're a little bit underserved And then on the other side those with sort of learning difficulties Or somehow some other socio economic or lens where they're underperforming You You know, like you said, actually the government spend a lot, successful government spend a lot of money on that and people, again, feeling that it hasn't quite worked out, I guess those are things on, on the tails and there's a trade off between concentrating too much on the tails when you've got the 60 or 70 percent in the middle, which you're, you're trying to give good education towards.

But I was interested in your reflections on that. And maybe if there's anything on the margin you'd do for those either kind of high attainment or those where we struggling with learning disabilities or the like. 

Daisy: Yeah, so if you want to think about this in terms of the trade offs and the optimization curves, I think if we're being honest, there probably is, once you get to the extremes, probably a tension between optimizing for high attainment or optimizing for students who are struggling.

However, I don't think we've necessarily kind of reached that point yet because you would only reach that point once you've maxed out the gains that benefit everybody, the improvements that benefit everybody. So to go back to what I was saying earlier about cognitive science based repetition, these are things that benefit every learner from top to bottom.

And there's an element of which, if you do really good teaching, and this is something I often say about, you know, a lot of the things we're talking about, the SEM crisis, there is an element of, not maybe for absolutely everybody, but there's an element of what a lot of SEM pupils need is teaching that's good for everyone, just, just really good.

Right. We do have things about the way we learn that are different. We also have a lot of things we have in common. So again, you can look at this maybe in terms of medicine, but obviously people do react differently to drugs and they do react differently to different dosages and you have to take all those things into account.

Human beings also are human beings and do have some commonalities and they have similarities in terms of, you know, the circulatory system, the digestive system, what have you. And I think there's an interesting way of looking at learning like that, that there are things that all learners have in common.

And there are clearly things that, that are different. But my personal thing would be there are a lot of tactics and strategies that can benefit all learners and we are not maxing out on them nearly enough. And I would say why don't we max out on those because those are low hanging fruit that will move the mean, that will move the entire distribution.

Let's max out on those and be sure we are getting absolute maximum return for things like the things I've mentioned. Greater knowledge of cognitive psychology, greater knowledge of better revision tactics, you know, organizing curriculums to promote space repetition, this kind of stuff. Let's, let's, let's, let's get all the gains we can from them.

Before we then start thinking, okay and how do we now optimize for these, these smaller groups and, and, and try and get the gains there that feels to me the right way to do it. And I think the issue I have sometimes when we want to slice and dice pupils up into ever finer categories and craft a, you know, completely personalized individualized strategy for every individual student is.

You can end up in difficult places there, you can end up in some very un evidenced places. I am slightly worried that their attempt to kind of do that and come up with these personalised strategies. I write about this in my third book, Teachers vs Tech. It leads to a promotion of some ideas that don't have very much evidence behind them, like learning styles.

And you get students saying you know, I don't want to read that book because I'm a visual learner. You know, can't I just watch the film instead? And actually there are all kinds of good reasons why, but you can't. You know, reading is different from watching a film. So my personal thing would be, let's Let's, you know, get these high impact strategies that work for everybody.

Let's try and use them as effectively as possible 

Ben: first. That makes sense. We're not maxed out on good things to do. Absolutely. So let's do that. Great. So a couple of fun questions for, for wrapping up. So in Britain, we have a quiz show, University Challenge. And you were a team leader back in the day.

What did you learn from going through? University challenge, anything unexpected or anything you'd share from that experience? 

Daisy: Oh gosh, such a long time ago, I'm not sure I remember it. If you get the chance, if anyone's listening to this and wondering about whether to do it or not, I would say give it a go, it's an awful lot of fun.

It's quite nerve wracking. Quite, quite tense, but really exciting and kind of a great opportunity. And it's a, it's a bit of a UK national institution that's been running for many decades now. So it's nice to something that you say you've been a part of. 

Ben: I think one of the reflections I had on, you know, watching a little bit of the episode and then your work and the bar book and the education book, and even where there's conversations go, there is something about having a broad base of knowledge.

Which then intersects where you can pull from one domain into another, which is a kind of transfer and it's this kind of thing, I wouldn't even necessarily call it a skill or a knowledge. It's just something where you can draw upon an evidence base, which does seem to go across these things. And actually something like university challenge where you have a lot of a lot across different subjects.

That's something there too. And then I was reading your blog about how fewer people, fewer students are doing, I think, English A level or maybe even English degrees. And actually, this is also maybe in a reflection that people are reading less reading less full stop. Although I think in particular, reading less fiction.

Yeah. Maybe there's arguments that we think somehow STEM, maths, or business want some other type of things. But I was wondering, do you think we should be reading more fiction? Or is this an appropriate trend? And if we are, should be reading more fiction, why should we? 

Daisy: Yeah. So I did a degree in English literature.

And I wrote about in this blog, as you say, there's been a real decline in the number of students doing English literature at A level and at degree level. A lot of, a lot of university departments are closing down and, you know, you talk to people involved in teaching and usually it's a bit of a crisis.

It feels quite, quite raw. And it's one of the things I'm keen to state is that it's not just happening in England. This is happening in other countries too. There are some outliers which are interesting, but there is a global trend to this. Why is it happening? I speculate for a few reasons. I think, what are students doing instead of studying English Lit?

In England, they're studying Maths. So I, I've got a graph on my blog where you literally show the two lines, English and maths going in completely different directions. So maths has gone from kind of, you know, about 10th most popular A level to number one. And, and English, English has gone from the first most popular A level, it's dropped out of the top 10.

So it's, it's really it's really extreme and it's happened in sort of 10, 15 years. Very, very rapid. Is it a bad thing? So there's a lot of people who will, I'm kind of hand wringing about this and saying it's terrible, but a lot of people say, is it a bad thing? Is this just life moving on? Actually people, you know, if you go back 100, 150 years, classics, everybody did classics.

A member of parliament in, in the British parliament could, you know, quote something from Virgil or Horace or, or whoever and expect that the rest of the house would understand that. We don't expect that now. Maybe that's just the way the English lit's going to go. Shakespeare was a touchstone and a lodestar of our culture.

Maybe he just won't be. Maybe people are just not thinking like this anymore and, you know, things change. People are studying maths because it's more useful. They can earn more money with it. I don't want to be anti maths. I say this in the article I wrote about it. I think, you know, It's, it's, it's a little bit mean to maths to just say it's all just utility, but maths has a beauty of its own too.

It's, it's got, it's, it's, it's a, it's a triumph of civilisation as much as, as Shakespeare's plays are, I would argue. So it's not about trying to be sort of anti maths. I think there are a couple of interesting questions. One thing talking about to teachers is, have we got students studying maths who are maybe doing it because they think it's the good thing to do but are struggling with it?

Is that a good thing? Can argue it. You know, maybe if they work hard at something and get better at it, it can be good if, if they're working hard and struggling and then, then and, and then they're not cut out for it. That maybe is a challenge. That's one thing. Does it really generate the economic returns we're hoping for?

Again, you can get mixed views on this. There is a suggestion. I think that mass a level is one of the very, very few A levels that you can actually point to a caus a causative link with increased earnings in future. So that's very interesting. But there's another point of view that says if you really want to focus on on economic returns, actually degrees, there's a lot of non vocational degrees where a lot of it is signaling.

And to the extent they offer a graduate premium, it's not necessarily to do with what you're learning. It's to do with the, the prestige of what that, what that piece of paper says about you. So that complicates any factor, any attempt to kind of work out the value, the economic value of some of these non vocational degrees.

And then to go back to, is it a problem if students aren't reading? Is it a problem? And I think, again, you can, you can see it both ways. On the one hand, is there a particular cast of mind that reading gives you? something more thoughtful, more empathic, the ability to get inside someone's head that perhaps you know, in a patronizing way, it makes you a better person.

Is that true? Is it not true? Is that a sort of part of an outdated ideology in an era that didn't have? video and and podcasts and different kinds of technology. These are, these are tricky ones. I obviously feel being an English literature graduate and reading being such an important part of my life that the thing I say in the blog is even if you strip out the kind of moral and beautiful and cultural aspects of the value of reading, it does still feel to me there is a utility to it that is very hard to get away from in that a written sentence is an extremely efficient method of communicating information.

And it can do things that computer code, video, and audio cannot do. And I still think that's probably the thing where it's not going to go quite the same way as classics because there is a virtue, there is a utility to reading and writing that are quite hard to reproduce in other ways. Whether that will save literature, I don't know.

Ben: Yeah, I'm part worried. I don't know whether it's at the English A level level, but I think it is important communication skills, and maybe we'll touch on one last question to do with oracy, communication skills, so that speaking, I think is still really important. Even more perhaps writing or writing and speaking, which are interlinked.

And I feel very strongly, and I think there's some evidence for that. Your writing and your speaking skills are influenced by your reading skills. Cause they are interlinked. So if you lose reading skills, that does impact writing and speaking to some extent or persuasion and communication, which is still really.

important. And so if we lose too much reading, then that goes there. And I would say, particularly for fiction, I think there is something important about being able to think in the world beyond yourself. And I think we sort of alluded this to, you know, where do you just go to your own rabbit hole? And how do you get out of that rabbit hole to be challenged by things which aren't necessarily of your world or of your character?

And fiction is, I think, a really good way of doing that. In some ways. above non fiction in this sense because you don't have to feel too jealous or emotional about this character because you could always say it's fictional yet the the fictional world of those characters and stories can really influence your own world view in some way and therefore having no fiction in your life would impair that and I think that would make us more narrow minded and I think more narrow minded world is both not as good a world but also not as good for society in general.

Daisy: So obviously I'm inclined to agree. As I say, I spent, I spent a large chunk of my life studying literature and I don't want it to, I quite like to carry on. And when I sort of examine these trends, I can get a bit gloomy, but I, what I want to try and do is just, it's really easy, I think, for literature graduates like me to just get in a bit of wishful thinking and say, of course it's brilliant.

We did it. Of course it's amazing. So I do want to try and be the kind of, the rigorous thinker who tests the proposition. Everything you say, I want to instinctively agree with, but let, you know, let's test those propositions. So first of all, the value of fiction, the value of an imaginative world, does it matter if that imaginative world is in text or if it is, if it is video?

Ben: Yeah, I guess so. It could come from movies. Does that 

Daisy: matter? Now I'm inclined to say, and I would go along with the, you know, Marshall McLuhan's theory, the medium is the message. I think there is something different. So I don't think the two are completely analogous. I said that before, you can't have kids, you know, when kids say, oh, I don't need to read the book, I need to, I can just watch the film.

Your films are different, they are different media, and there's different ways that they allow you to think, and there's things they can do and there's things they can't do. So I'm inclined to say that they are different media. But if you're, if the thing you're saying is just about but in trying to, you know, the value of a story or a narrative, can, can they tell a story or narrative in the same way?

What is it you're losing? What is it you're gaining from, from, from not reading? I think for me, there is something, as I say, that the difference in the medium, the things that are going on in your mind when you read that is different from listening to something or watching a video, how valuable are those things?

I don't know. I mean, maybe we're about to take part in a giant experiment where we find out. 

Ben: And I guess you're right, and the trend is moving away from us, so maybe they will be, maybe. And I think 

Daisy: the other thing, where I, again, I feel quite gloomy about all this, is we can kind of pontificate with this all we want, and let's say we sit here and we decide, no, absolutely, there is a qualitative difference between both, the difference between words and video, and the difference between, kind of, reading lots of, inhabiting lots of other people's minds in fiction and not doing so.

Even if we decide that's really important, there may well be cultural trends that we are powerless to change that are just beyond us. And, and then, you know, what do you do? How do you react in, in, in a world like that? Kind of what, what happens? And I think there's an issue here with schools as well, is that I think things that schools can do, and I think they do have a lot of power, and I think the national education system, I think it is funded to the tune of something like 100 billion a year or whatever, and you know, lots of people work in it, and you know, the things that students have to do because of it, so it does have a lot of power, but it also, you know, it still has limits, and I see a lot of people from a lot of walks of life who think if I can just put something on the national curriculum, then bingo, You know, I'll put, I'll put financial awareness on knitting on the national curriculum and then everyone will have a warm jumper and won't get ripped off by a credit card company.

And you're like you know, would that it was would that the national education system was this magic wand that you could wave and it would, it would respond in that way. So there is a lot of power in the education system. There are also bigger, bigger trends in education and society is in society that.

To an extent, it probably has to reflect as much as it can change and shape. 

Ben: These are 

Daisy: tricky things. 

Ben: I always think to what ability can we teach people to love reading, say, if that's what, even if that's what we wanted to do. Or, you know, everyone says, Oh, I love reading. I mean, read it in business blogs.

We want people who are curious. Is that a teachable thing? And what does that even mean within that context? And maybe you can teach it to some extent, but I'm pretty sure in school, every book I was, maybe not every book, but certainly books I was forced to read or rather heavily encouraged to read never had quite the same joy as the book you discover yourself.

So I don't, I don't quite really know how that. How that works out. Great. Last couple of questions then is would you like to highlight any current projects that you're working on now or in the future? Are you going to be writing another book? Projects. 

Daisy: Yeah. One of the things we're working on at No More Marketing, we have this really nice comparative judgment system of assessing writing, which we've been running for seven or eight years now.

We've got a really cool new addition to it, which does use artificial intelligence. We are, we've been playing around with lots of different ways of using artificial intelligence. We are very aware of its flaws. We are very wary of just throwing it at a system because we know the errors it can make and we've written about them.

But we think we have managed to come up with An idea that works quite well, and it basically allows teachers to give some verbal comments on a piece of writing as they're judging it, and for all of the verbal comments that many teachers make on that piece of writing, the AI, first of all, the first step it transcribes them all, and then second of all, it combines them all.

All of the teacher comments into a nice polished piece of feedback for the student and the teacher. So that's something that hopefully will save teachers spending lots of time writing out comments. So that's, that's a cool thing we're working on at the moment. 

Ben: Yeah, that seems like a good project. Great.

And then last question, do you have any, I guess we'll call it life advice or advice, I guess, to parents or teachers or in your career or observations of the world that you'd want to share? 

Daisy: Oh, good question I don't know, is there anything that's sort of generalizable and relevant for everyone?

I don't, you know, we talked about spaced repetition. I, I really love it. I think it's really cool. I think even if you're an adult and you're out of formal learning, it's a lovely way to kind of just remember more of what you read. And the earlier you start, it's like a pension or compound interest.

The earlier you start, the better it is. So there's a, what the app I really like is called Anki. It's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit complex. It's got a lot of features. It's not necessarily sort of ideal for, for young kids. It's a little bit not necessarily the most friendly user interface, but it's a really nice way of building your own personal library of flashcards of your own sort of personal memory store.

And one of the, there's quite a few sort of power users out there. And one of them says the great thing about a Anki is it makes memory a choice. So you can choose, you know, if you want to remember something, if you put it into Anki. There is a very high chance you will remember it. So I would say, yeah, that's a nice life tip.

I use it and it's something I wish I'd started using when I was younger. 

Ben: Great. So yeah, spaced repetition. With that thought, Daisy, thank you very much. 

Daisy: Brilliant. Thanks Ben.