THE ADAM BUXTON PODCAST - EP.66 - MICHAEL LEWIS

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

Adam talks with American writer Michael Lewis (The Big Short, Money Ball, Liar’s Poker etc.) about his book ‘The Undoing Project’, which tells the story of the friendship and fascinating work of psychologists Amos Tversky and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman.Much of the work of Tversky and Kahneman focuses on the human capacity to make errors of judgment based on unhelpful prejudices and rules of thumb that frequently operate beneath the level of our awareness. Michael explains a few of these to Adam (who has never engaged in fallacies or systematic errors of any kind) as well as talking about the tensions that shaped Kahneman and Tversky’s friendship.The conversation was recorded when Michael was visiting London in November 2017.Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for production support and Matt Lamont for additional editing. Music & jingles by Adam BuxtonThanks to SonicCouture for instrument plug-in fun and Dan Hawkins for on-line bass. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You up for a walk, Rose? Let's go. Whoa. I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening I took my microphone and found some human folk Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke My name is Adam Buxton.

I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this. That's the plan. Hey, how you doing, listeners? Adam Buxton here. The Beast from the East. That's a great, great topical reference to the big freeze that is gripping the UK this week.

March 2018. It's this weather system that has swept in from Russia and it's had a massive chilling effect. Massive, massive chilling effect. Oh, my God, it's a chilling effect. Windy and freezing, yes, that's correct. Making everything more cold and dreary. It's Vladimir Putin's farts from Siberia.

Oh, dear. A little bit harsh on the vocal cords there. It's Vladimir Putin's farts from Siberia. Oh dear. A little bit harsh on the vocal cords there. Anyway, this is the first time myself and Rosie have been out for a walk in a few days. We've been indoors trying to keep warm. I've been mainly subsisting on a diet of Tonex tea cakes. I never realised they were so good. Holy Christmas.

But listen, I'll be back at the end of the podcast to ramble a little bit more, tell you about a new Radio 4 program that I've been doing, give you another podcast recommendation, etc. But let me tell you about this week's podcast conversation, which is with American non-fiction author Michael Lewis. Michael's books have made him one of the most successful writers of non-fiction in the world. Some of those books include Liar's Poker, which drew on his experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 80s. which drew on his experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 80s. The Blind Side and Moneyball, about how strategic innovations and data analysis have transformed American football and baseball, respectively. I mean, you know, more or less. I've oversimplified

there, but I love to oversimplify. And he wrote The Big Short, the build-up of the United States housing bubble during the 2000s. Those last three that I mentioned, The Blindside, Moneyball and The Big Short, were all turned into well-received feature films with high Rotten Tomatoes scores, which means that they are definitely good. Wow, I've just turned a corner. Woo-hoo-hoo! And it's really crazy out here now. We're on a big field up on high ground.

And the snow's collected up here and just drifted into huge escarpments along the tree line. What do you think, Rose? I think I can see Han Solo's town town coming over from Kringleford. Yeah, I think you're right. Anyway, back to Michael Lewis. This conversation was recorded in November of 2017

when Michael was visiting London, he was staying at a fancy hotel around Westminster. And we found a quiet spot in the bar there, or relatively quiet anyway. And we chatted mainly about his last book, The Undoing Project, which was my introduction to his work as you all hear and that book is about the friendship and work of israeli psychologists amos tversky and nobel prize winner daniel kahneman amos tversky no longer with us daniel kahneman still around as i speak kahneman and tversky's research in the 1970s essentially invented behavioral economics, or economics, if you prefer, or oeconomics, if you like saying oo. And that's a method of economic analysis that uses psychological insights into human behavior to explain economic, I'm not going to say that anymore, decision-making. And behavioural economics now affects everything in the modern world, from how we spend to how we are governed. That last sentence was stolen from Jon Snow on Channel 4 News, so it's got to be true.

so it's got to be true but kahneman and toversky's story is interesting not just because of the many psychological insights along the way and the work they did but because they were very different personalities whose close friendship and professional relationship was put under strain by the attention their work received in a way that will be familiar and relatable to anyone who's ever been part of some kind of double act. Which, of course, regular listeners will know is a favourite subject of mine to chat about. And I enjoyed hearing what Michael had to say about that too. Michael's a very good talker and an engaging guy, and I really hope you'll find what he has to say as interesting as I did. Here we go. Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat. Put on your conversation coat and find your talking hat. Yes, yes, yes. How did my book find its way to you?

So, I became, I mean, I was aware of your other stuff. Hadn't read it, I have to be honest. But the thing was that I was going on a Malcolm Gladwell jag. And I was watching a lot of interviews with him, and I saw you two talking about the Undoing Project. And I thought it was really fascinating, and I'm quite obsessed by double-act dynamics, having been part of a double-act myself.

Ah, there you go. Yeah. So it was this interview with Malcolm that alerted you to the existence of the book. Yeah, yeah. And so then I immediately got it, and I think I've read it a couple of times. It's yeah. And so then I immediately got it and was, I think I've, yeah, I've read it a couple of times.

It's great. It's different from my other books. But if you actually were threatening to go read my other books, I'd send you to Liar's Poker, which is the thing I wrote when I was 28 years old because it's set here. It's set here and it takes you into the world of finance

from the point of view of someone who knows absolutely nothing because that was me. It's an easy way to start. And then said i'd send you from there to the big short you see the big short movie yes i did yeah that was really good but you were you were worked in finance i did i worked here yeah i worked on well i worked in new york for six months and they they hired me here to come back here as a bond trader as a salesman as a sales different thing you're not taking a risk but they they thought by the standards of the day i had polish i could go to a dinner party and i

could and i had been here i'd spent two years here already yeah they slightly mistrusted english people so it was better to have an american who kind of knew his way around here so anyway i spent two years over in the city and then over Victoria Station. We had an office over Victoria Station. And I started my writing career here. I'd gone to graduate school, then I came back here and worked at Salomon Brothers for a couple of years, and then I wrote the book here, worked for The Spectator. And you were writing about economics? I was writing about all kinds of stuff. I had all sorts of odd assignments. I'll tell

you the funniest assignment I had. English journalism is great. There's a guy who edited You Magazine. You remember that? I remember, yeah. That was affiliated with the Daily Mail, wasn't it? Yeah. It had a circulation of six billion,

and they had all kinds of money. And he says, he calls me up, Nick. I can't remember what his last name was. He became, well, I think he became editor of one of the newspapers. But he says, all right, Michael, I want you to go fly to San Francisco and drive up to George Lucas' ranch. He's waiting for you.

And he just done a movie called Tucker, A Man and His Dreams. Oh, yeah. Remember the Tucker car? Sure. And he says he has two Tucker cars. You're going to take one of those cars and drive it down the West Coast and just write about what it's like to drive George Lucas' invaluable Tucker car down the West Coast. I say, oh, great, I'll go do that.

First class ticket arrives by hand at my door, and a car comes and picks me up, and off I go. I get to San Francisco, and I have a number to call. And I call, it's George Lucas' publicist, and I said, hi, it's Michael Lewis from You Magazine. I'm ready for the Tucker car. She says, who? And I said, I was told I was supposed to come and get the Tucker car and drive it.

She says, we've never heard of it. We've never heard of this. So I called Nick. And he says, yeah, yeah, we didn't set anything up. He said, you just go talk them into letting him have your car. Why? This car is worth, I don't know, you know, it's a half a million dollar car. He doesn't know who I am.

The idea that he's going to give me his car to drive down the coast and write about it, they say you're out of your mind. And so I called Nick. I said, they say I'm out of my mind, and it's not going to happen. He says, well, you write us a piece about how that bastard won't let you drive the car. And so that's what I did. And it appeared in the You magazine. There was a lot of stuff like that.

How did you get a piece out of that? I went over to Lucas Ranch. I made fun of how wary they were of me. They let me get in the car for a little bit. No, I didn't get much out of it. So anyway, yes, I wrote about economics, not economics so much as Wall Street culture. Right. But I was all over the place.

If you read Liar's Poker, you'd see I didn't actually ever think of myself as a financial person or a Wall Street person. I stumbled into the job in a very odd way, knowing that I wanted to write for a living before I did it. So it was an accident that that was my first material. And so when you were in that environment, you were mainly people watching. Were you fascinated by the personalities around you? People watching and zeitgeist watching. They taught me enough very quickly about how the business worked so that I became interested in the business. I mean, what was going on in finance. So the stuff I wrote was all pretty character driven, but it was also attempting at the same time to explain what the hell was going on.

I mean, there was a great mystery here at the time, and the mystery was why the hell would anybody pay some kid just out of Oxford or Cambridge 80,000 pounds to come work on Wall Street when they knew nothing about it? And I was in that. I hadn't gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but I was in that situation. And the whole book, one way to look at that book is as an attempt to explain it. Like, why would anybody pay me, who clearly knows nothing about money, clearly should not be giving financial advice?

And how does that work when I go and do it and people listen to it? All of it was preposterous. Yeah, and what was the answer? What was the conclusion you came to? That it's all about the strength of personality and the influence that that can have is more important than the actual economic acumen is that something close to what you discovered another way of putting that is that nobody actually knows anything

and even when you're in the very high levels of finance so i wasn't i wasn't talking to widows and orphans i was talking to big money managers. But they were as insecure about the decisions they were making with money as the widows and the orphans might have been. And so when someone from big time Wall Street firm calls up and says, we have this deal, they listen, even if that person himself knows very little. So the big Wall Street firms at the time exerted a psychological influence, oddly especially over Europeans, because that was a time when it was the Americanization of global finance. I mean, the old-line British banker was dying before our eyes.

Even if they were actually financially English people inside these Wall Street firms, they behaved like Americans. And the jargon, the kind of attitude, the ambition was all very American. And so people thought we knew something. We did know things. They were things that were very useful to them. We were in the business of creating lots of new kinds of securities that people could invest in and you could explain what those were and try to persuade them why they had to have them.

At the bottom of it all was this fear of kind of being left behind, I think, or being on the outside. And you were a gateway to the inside, and so people wanted to talk to you. And back when you wrote Liar's Poker, did you look back and think, gosh, I missed a lot of things about what was going to happen, or could you see those seeds already being planted? Oh, no, no, I meant, you know, if you'd have told me, I mean, the firm I left, which was Salomon Brothers, was in disarray.

It was kind of mismanaged, and you could see that it was vulnerable. But these big Wall Street institutions generally looked like they were going to rule the world. And they had essentially gotten to the point where they had first call on most of the best and the brightest young people around the world. And they had essentially gotten to the point where they had first call on most of the best and the brightest young people around the world. And I never, what I didn't see, what got me interested enough to bring me back to write the big short, I didn't see all those people coming together and committing essentially collective suicide. I mean, the firm I left was really good at contriving bets for itself to make,

and it would get its customers to take the other side of the bets. And it was stupid bets for the customers, but really good bets for the firm. They did that over and over and over. And I just thought that they'd do that to eternity because they had better information. The people inside were basically smarter than the people on the other side, so on and so forth. I did not see those institutions becoming so stupid that they should have collapsed. I mean, they would have collapsed if the government hadn't stepped in. So that actually got me interested in coming back. What on earth happened? I did not see it coming. The funny thing about writing about finance, it's one of those areas, politics is this way too a bit, where if you write about it, people think that you're qualified, almost obliged to predict the future. They're always looking for predictions.

Yeah. Even if the whole thrust of what you wrote is you should never believe anybody's prediction in this world. The predictions are all bullshit. Yeah. is you should never believe anybody's prediction in this world. The predictions are all bullshit. It's essentially a random environment, and nobody can tell you where the stock market's going to be tomorrow with any kind of certainty. All kinds of things will happen that are unforeseen. But even when you write a whole book saying,

don't believe anybody who predicts anything for you, and if they do it with great certainty, run as far as possible in the opposite direction because they're frauds. I mean, they may not know they're frauds. They may not know how little they know, but they're dangerous because they think they know things that are basically not only that they don't know, but that are unknowable. And when the book in addition says, and I definitely didn't know anything. And even then people come at you and all they really want after the book comes out is tell me what I should do with my money. Tell me where the market's going.

I had this very funny incident just a couple of days ago on American television. It was a financial news program. And of course, they did this again. Of course, what do you think of the stock market? Where do you think it's going to go? Is it rich? Is it going to collapse? And I said, not only should you not be asking me that question,

you shouldn't be asking anybody that question. And anybody who comes in and wants to answer that question, you should be very wary of. So the conversation got meta, and they agreed, okay, we won't ask you that question. Show's over. The host is walking me to the elevator. She says, no, but really, if you had to make a bet somewhere, would you make it? I said, you know, just because she was badgering me, I said, she said, what's the next big short is actually what she said.

I said, all right, if I have to make a bet against something, I'd bet on the collapse of the NFL with the Professional Football League. But it feels very topish. The viewership's a little off this year, and these concussion problems they're having, I think it spells doom for the game because the game's all about violence. I said it as if I thought we were just talking, her and me. She goes back into the studio, either says it on air or writes it up.

It's all over the internet. I predict, short the NFL. What it is is a hunger for certainty. Of course. It's a hunger for certainty. And that's what runs through the Undoing Project as well. Absolutely. It's one of the things that runs through the undoing project that the trouble people get themselves in when they substitute for a probabilistic sense of

the world a falsely certain sense of the world yeah and one way of looking at danny and amos like kahneman and diversi's work is exploring the various ways people do that it's like all right we're going to tell stories that are falsely certain about what's going to happen in the next election, or what's going to happen in the stock market, or what those symptoms you have amounts to in the form of a disease. There are many situations like this. And that story, because we want to feel certain about it,

is going to be wrong in predictable ways. And they were exploring the predictable ways in which it was wrong. Right. And a lot of it is to do with various forms of bias. They had several avenues of research. One of the things they did is try to classify the various rules of thumb people use when they could be doing statistics to get a right answer, but they don't do the statistics. What rule of thumb do they use to get an answer? And these rules of thumb lead them astray in predictable ways, in these predictable ways they call biases. Right. So common examples of bias, I suppose confirmation bias would be one that

a lot of people are familiar with. There are many, many phrases that have been tossed out, and they did use the phrase confirmation bias. But there are other phrases like, I don't know, hindsight bias or... I like the peak end rule, which seems to be the way things end have a disproportionate influence over a person's experience of the event. And they had various experiments to illustrate. And it's ingenious, the peak end rule, which was led by Danny Kahneman. But Danny had this notion, and it was a response to the economists, even though they weren't economists.

When he heard the economist's notion of that people maximized happiness, Kahneman had this very original take. Well, what happiness, he said? Is it expected happiness they're maximizing? Is it with the happiness they actually experience in a moment? Or is it remembered happiness? And then he went out to show that those three things were completely different things.

And the way he did it, he did it with a reverse of happiness, but looking at pain. Instead of pleasure, he looked at pain. He did this experiment with colonoscopies, which were at the time painful. So my first colonoscopy was five years ago, and it was painless. And I didn't understand that because I'd read these Kahneman stories that Kahneman had done these tests on people who had colonoscopies that were very painful. But anyway, at the end of the colonoscopy, I said to the nurse, can I see the doctor just to say hi? And she said, I don't think he wants to talk to you.

And I said, why not? And she said, you don't know what you said to him? And of course, you're drugged up. You're just saying stuff. And I said, no, no, no. What did I say? She said, in the middle of the procedure, you looked up at him and said, when you were a little boy, did you imagine this is what you'd be doing with your life?

Is this what you wanted to be when you grew up? And I was apparently making fun of him the whole time as he had this pole on my butt. And anyway, Kahneman did this study to explore what he called the pecan rule, where he put one group of people through colonoscopies, and the normal colonoscopy, the used to be anyway, the most miserable point of it was at the end. And then he put another group of people through an identical colonoscopy, but just let it go on longer. So they ended it on a more pleasant note. The sum total of discomfort experienced by the second group was greater because the thing went on, they did every, they had all the experiences of the first plus some but they end on a less unpleasant

note and that group reported it is a much more pleasant experience or less unpleasant experience than the first group which is illogical and you know the theory is as every movie maker knows the note on which an experience ends has a disproportionate effect on your memory of the experience. This is why the endings of movies get tested and retested. How people feel when they walk out of the theater turns on those last moments of the movie. We're talking about biases. That's a form of bias. Your judgment about your own experience is queered by how it ends.

Your judgment about your own experience is queered by how it ends. A chunk of Danny and Amos' work in this sphere, they did other work too, but this examination of biases were the biases caused by the tricks of memory. A terrorist attack has an effect on your sense of how dangerous things are in a way that the constant drip, drip constant drip drip drip of street violence does not even if the street violence is actually riskier yeah if you're driving down the highway and even though you know the statistics are that this is a dangerous thing to be driving down the highway you know the carnage on the roads is a spectacular thing million people a year die in automobile accidents around the world. But you're, you know, there's no sense of danger. Everybody's moving fast. You're driving whatever, 70 miles an hour. You see an accident, a gory accident. Everybody sees that and slows down to 55 miles

an hour. It's a very odd thing to do in some ways, because what your mind is saying is, oh, the probability of having an accident just went up. But in fact, the probability went down because everybody else is being more careful. But you're responding as if the problem, because it's vivid and it's in your mind. So your memory leads you astray is one of their big points. Thank you. We're all in it together. The unsettling thing, of course, is that you immediately think about the ways that those failings or cognitive fallacies can be exploited by other people. And obviously, in the olden days, we would have thought in the modern world about advertising.

And Vance Packard's book, The Hidden Persuaders, was one I read when I was at college that sort of turned me on. I mean, that was from the end of the 50s, that book. But it's still quite relevant today in a lot of ways. And it sort of alerted you to the way that advertisers would exploit these biases and fallacies and weird little kinks of thinking that we have you know that's true and amos would say when asked what he studied he said i don't know anything a really good used car salesman doesn't know right but the used car salesman knows it intuitively not as so much as

a set of rules yeah and what what danny namus did that put some polish on the used car salesman's wisdom is they built a scientific discipline out of it and that's a big deal because if if this is like if we're hardwired for this if people can go systematically wrong markets can go systematically wrong and if markets can go systematically wrong, markets can go systematically wrong. And if markets can go systematically wrong, it's a real problem for economics, the models that economics lives by. So making that kind of little leap was an important part of their contribution. Yes, you talk about car salesmen anchoring bias. So there you go. Here's, you know, to back up for a sec, one of the things that intrigued me about their collaboration was, although after the fact, they and others classified their work into,

oh, well, this is work on judgment and this is work on decision making. And some fraction of their work was neatly kind of packaged and tied up with a bow as academic papers. Mostly they were just kicking around ideas about how people are. And they'd find stuff that they couldn't really... It didn't fit into... Didn't fit in anything. So this is what, I mean, they would, they call it anchoring.

Was it a bias? They weren't quite sure if it was a bias. But the idea that you could, well, I'll give you an example of one of their little experiments. They brought people into a room with a wheel of fortune, and on the wheel of fortune they were on 99 numbers, or 100 numbers, 0 to 99. And they'd have the people spin the wheel of fortune, and it would land on one number. And after it landed on a number, and the person had observed the number it landed on,

the person was asked to guess the percentage of the countries in the United Nations that came from Africa. And the people who had landed on a high number systematically guessed a higher number of countries in the United Nations from Africa than the people who landed on a lower number. You can do this in all kinds of various ways. At Harvard Business School, apparently, to show the students who were on a lower number. You can do this in all kinds of various ways. At Harvard Business School, apparently, to show the students who are full of themselves when they arrive that their minds are not as solid as they think, the professor asks them to write down their last two digits of their cell phone number

and then does the African country question. The higher the number of the cell phone, the higher the guess for the African country. A totally unrelated piece of information, the number jammed up front of a question that requires a number as an answer, queers the answer. So another version of anchoring, I think they thought this was another version of anchoring, is they would ask people, they give people two math problems, simple math problems. They'd say, but you just kind of give me the answer kind of intuitively. You're not going to sit down with a pencil and paper and figure it out.

One group of people are asked to multiply 1 times 2 times 3 times 4 times 5 times 6 times 7 times 8. And the other group of people are asked to multiply 8 times 7 times 6 times 5 times 4 times 3 times 2 times 1. Same product. But the first one starts with a low number, 1. The second one starts with a low number, one. The second one starts with a high number, eight. The people who are asked to multiply the products that starts with a high number come up with like six times the sum of the people who start with a low number. I mean, Donald Trump gets this.

If you like lead with billions, you're not going to get back to the real number of 142. It just, your mind is warped by irrelevant information that's the principle on which you haggle have you ever been to morocco and haggled in fact not only have i been to morocco and haggled i went to morocco with a friend who was a girl from high school and we basically got kidnapped it was a very odd experience we were in Tetouan and a Moroccan guy offered to lead us through the medina we went into the medina the medina for people who haven't been the market to Marrakesh is the big labyrinthine mark yes it's a labyrinth that you're you're in a you're in a maze

he intentionally got us lost and left us inside the store of some unscrupulous people who physically separated the two of us a little bit violently, took my friend into the back room. I thought, oh, my God, what's happening to her? Took me into the front room and then pulled out the carpets and the handbags. And he pulls out a carpet. This is an anchoring story. And he pulls out a chalkboard,

and he puts a line down the middle of the chalkboard and kind of you me you give me your number and i said zero and i thought i was going to get stabbed he was so angry but i thought that's what i'm doing if i start at zero i'll end up at some so at the end of this exercise my friend and i are brought back together i have two possessions she has 10 i'm paying 120120. She's paying $800. You know, she got anchored the wrong way. But that's exactly what they do. You're right. They start at a very big number. Yeah. And most people, I think, I'm certainly the kind of person that feels embarrassed.

I could never start at zero because it seems too disrespectful and confrontational. Yeah. So instead, I go for something that I think is fair. Yeah. Well, that's a whole other question. Yeah. disrespectful and confrontational yeah so instead i go for something that i think is fair yeah well that's a whole nother question yeah um but when you're put in a position where you feel is inherently unfair to start you become a little bit confrontational yeah exactly but you're right you're funny you know this you actually bring up something that is a a byproduct of danny and amos's work a whole field called behavioral economics was spawned by their work. One of the insights of this field, which they draw from Kahneman-Dversky, is that people

care about more than just maximizing their self-interest. They care about fairness. And experiments were designed just like the Moroccan negotiation to show this. I actually was a lab rat in one of these experiments in the early days when I was a graduate student at the London School of Economics. And there was an old classical economist who was trying to disprove the work of the behavioral economist. And the way he did it is he took, it's a game called the ultimatum game. And the way it works is you are put in one room. I'm put in the other.

We can't see each other, but we can communicate. And one of us is the – we're told there's going to be a pile of money. Let's say that we have a dollar that we're going to split. One of us gets to decide up front how we're going to split it. And the other just has to decide to accept it or reject it. Now, let's say you're deciding how we're going to split it. You're the proposer to decide to accept it or reject it. Now, let's say you're deciding how we're going to split it. You're the proposer and I'm the disposer. Classical economics would say, you're going to keep 99 cents for yourself and let me have a penny because I'm

better off having a penny than nothing. And if we can't come to some agreement, we both get nothing. And you're just going to be selfish and keep as much for yourself. That's what people do in economics, in economic models. So in this game, the old-fashioned economists would predict that the equilibrium would be you taking 99 cents and me getting a penny every time. In fact, what happens is people settle out at 50-50 pretty much, or 51-49. That's what people do. Because you sitting there as a proposer are thinking, that's not fair for me to take it all. And me as the disposer, if you propose you're going to keep 99 cents and I'm only going to get a penny, I would be so furious that I don't care if I'm worse off. It's not fair. Think about the psychology of that. The person who says,

all right, I know that I'm supposed to just accept a penny from you, you bastard, who says, all right, I know that I'm supposed to just accept a penny from you, you bastard, but I'm not because I'm angry. It sort of explains, Trump voters, that one of the mysteries in American politics right now, and maybe Brexit too, for all I know, is that you've got all these voters who seem to be voting against their economic interests. The world has been offering them a penny or a nickel out of the dollar. And Trump comes along and he's going to actually make things even worse for them in so many ways. They can see him taking things away from them. But he's stiffening the guy who's keeping 95 cents or 99 cents. He's stiffening the people who are on top, the proposers. And that

makes them feel good. They're willing to suffer themselves if it feels like it's making the world more fair. Uh-huh. After spending so long thinking about these little tricks that the human mind plays on us all, does it make you more aware of the things that you do strangely or the biases that you're vulnerable to? Danny Kahneman said something that is stuck in my mind

that is a byproduct of their work. He said, with risks that are remote, like remote catastrophic risks, your child is going to be abducted, kidnapped, your plane is going to crash, a bomb is going to explode when you're in Trafalgar Square. They're all remote risks. If you think about them at all, you think about them too much. I think about remote risks all the time. And I find, oddly, as I get older, I think about them more. And I don't know what

that is. And I watch my father, and I can see he thinks about them all the time. I think I'm on a trajectory where I'm going to be worried about every step my kids take because I think of the world as a collection of remote catastrophic risks. So I have a highly attuned fight-flight impulse, and it kicks in crazily. I'll be on an airplane, and I'm not afraid of flying exactly. I'm not afraid of flying exactly. I'm not afraid of flying at all. I fly all the time. But there is at some point on every flight when I start to vividly imagine the plane crash. And the minute you attend to it, you attend to it too much.

So I noticed that in myself. I changed something about myself as a result of their work. I changed something about myself as a result of their work. So Danny and Amos, both Israelis, were involved every which way with the Israeli army. Amos Tversky was a war hero, fought in two or three wars. Danny Kahneman reshaped the Israeli army with a battery of psychological tests he created when he was 21 years old. They're both soldiers. But Kahneman, later in life, spent time teaching Israeli Air Force pilot instructors how to teach. So he himself didn't know how to fly a plane.

The one time he went up in a fighter plane, he threw up in his gas mask. He wasn't that kind of guy. But he's so cerebral, he could think about the theory of how you teach these pilots. And when he got involved with that, the Air Force pilot instructors, who were, as you imagine, kind of hard ass, smart hard asses, tough coaches, said to him, as almost throwaway line, that when they worked with these young studs who were flying the planes you never praised them criticism was the only thing they responded to and condom and stuff in the mouth toughen them up and kind of and come said well why do you think that and the instructor said

well it was obvious because they'd learned from experience that if a pilot did something wrong one of these guys did something wrong and you you laid into him, you criticized him, the next maneuver was always better. But if he made some really slick maneuver with the plane, better than usual, and you praised him, he went soft, the next maneuver was bad. Comet said, that's just a statistical illusion. That's called reversion to the mean, that whenever anybody does anything that's extremely good, the next thing they're going to do is likely not quite as good. And whenever anybody does anything that's extremely bad, likely the next thing they're going to do is not as bad. The world is sending us this signal constantly, not just to fighter pilot instructors, that our criticism works and our praise doesn't.

And I realized that that signal had come through to me as a coach of young kids. I coach all my kids in various sports. And I started to flip the way I spoke to the kids just to offset this tendency to overvalue one's criticisms and undervalue one's praise. I had that sense that I didn't think my praise mattered very much and I thought my criticism mattered a lot. And so that's another example. And do you feel as if you're getting better results? I do. And not only do I get better results, the kids have more fun. So let's just say neither criticism nor praise matters very much. They're at least enjoying it. But what does happen is that you create with praise an atmosphere of trust. When the person you're evaluating or helping or teaching has the sense that you're trying to like them, they're much more likely to actually listen to the criticism.

This should have occurred to me long ago, but it took Kahneman's insight to make me understand why I might be misperceiving the value of my words. We're both parents. With children, certainly the modern way of doing things seems to be based around praise and friendliness. That's what I always imagined myself doing. That's progress. Yeah. You know, it's supposed to be a belt.

It's supposed to be violence. Right. Right. Yeah. You know, as opposed to a belt, as opposed to violence. Right. Right. But then I suppose there's people who now think that people are too indulged that actually, oh, they they miss the old days when people knew what was what. And people were a bit tougher and they say, oh, no, these children, they're over coddled. And now we've created this kind of narcissistic generation of people who are all obsessed with themselves and feel they have the right to be treated nicely. And that's not what life's like. It's tough. And they should learn that at an early age. Why does life have to be that way? It's my first thought. If everybody is raised with love and praise, maybe life won't be that way. So that's the first response. The second response is, I don't think that it's mutually contradictory to be raised with love. You sense that people

aren't trying to just toughen you up. What they're trying to do is make you a happy person. I don't think that necessary conflicts with being tough. I think you can still emerge from that tough. I don't think you have to be whipped and criticized to become tough. Actually, the kind of toughness that emerges from that regime is often fragile. And there's got to be a lot of resentment. Oh, all that anger. Yes. Yeah, they say just violence begets violence. Meanness begets meanness. So I don't think, It just, violence begets violence. Meanness begets meanness. So I don't think, for example, the Dalai Lama is soft.

I think he's a tough son of a bitch. So I just, I don't think they're mutually contradictory. අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි අපි So let's go back to the double act dynamics. Yep. I know a lot of comedians who are in double acts. And when we get together, we always talk about it. And I think I was the Danny Kahneman uh part of the partnership is that right yeah so insecure needy in some way doesn't have to be a danny there doesn't have to be one who's that way i don't think you don't think i can understand why it happens a lot but i don't think it's necessary i think the roles can change back and forth quite a bit right i i don't think the roles have to be stable no it's not so clear-cut i mean i always think of

these things in music terms and you can see the dynamic in bands a lot when one person there's a lennon and there's a mccartney exactly right but it's not so clear-cut as one being the hard guy and the other one being the sort of softy appeaser man. You know, they had elements of those things, both of them. Right. And that's what made it interesting. Right. And that clearly is the case with Tversky and Kahneman.

And then part of the great thing from my point of view about the book is you exploring that moment when the rather more insecure member of the partnership, Daniel Kahneman, just feels crushed by all the attention that Tversky starts getting when they move to the States. And he wins all these awards, he's given the Genius Grant, and it's like his worst

fears are being realized. So I loved all that, having spent a long part of my life in a double act. Did you find that fraught? Everyone I know who's in a double act has had very similar experiences to me, either that have spread across years of their partnership or that just pop up now and then. I don't really see how you can avoid it. But with Tversky and Kahneman, you know, Kahneman seems to fall into the category of the insecure one,

the rather more needy one, despite the fact that they're both brilliant. But Kahneman, for example, was stung by criticism in a surprising way when he was teaching and a student would criticize his class. It would throw him into confusion. Is that right? Yes, absolutely right. He was sensitive and needy. Needy in a way that Amos Tversky seldom had time for, but he identified clearly Kahneman's brilliance. One of Amos's great contributions to the world is to identify just how valuable Danny's mind was. I think others didn't see just how original what was coming out of it was. But in their relationship, there's no question that Danny is the stay-at-home wife and Amos is the alpha male who's like coming home with red meat every night.

Right. You know, and everybody thought Amos was the genius. And Amos said, would say, it's the strangest thing to me that everyone thinks I'm the genius because Danny's the one who's got all the ideas. Right, right. But Amos Tversky had this mesmerizing effect on people socially. They would come away from encounters with him saying they just met the smartest man they'd ever met. I interviewed dozens of people who said, Amos Tversky is the smartest person I ever met. There was a psychologist at University of Michigan named Richard Nisbet, who after he got to know

Amos, designed what he said was the shortest intelligence test ever created. He called it the Tversky test. And it was the longer it takes you after you've met Amos to figure out that Amos is smarter than you, the stupider you are. Even Danny had that reaction to Amos. Because he's so mesmerizing and charismatic, he gets all the credit for the work. People look at Kahneman-Tversky and they say, what does Tversky need Kahneman for? Even though if they thought about it, they should have thought, wow, this work is different than anything Amos ever did by himself or Danny.

It's an alchemy. It's something that neither could have done alone. So you say that every double act has this tension in it. A lot of academic partnerships aren't quite double acts because they don't get that much attention. Now, the double acts come under this public scrutiny. You're on stage, you're on air or wherever you are, and you have a sense of being watched by people and evaluated. As long as Danny and Amos were in Israel and in a very small place, I don't think they thought of themselves as performing for an audience. But they moved to the United States for complicated reasons.

Amos didn't want to go, but Danny followed a woman there. And the moment they were on a bigger stage and the rewards were increased, the stakes were increased. So instead of both working at Hebrew University, all of a sudden Amos has the fastest appointment ever to Stanford University, and Harvard and Princeton and Yale are calling too, and Danny has trouble getting a job anywhere. And Amos gets the MacArthur Genius Award for basically the work they did together, and Danny isn't mentioned. I mean, this sort of thing happens over and over and over again.

mentioned i mean this sort of thing happens over and over and over again that it puts the pressure onto an academic collaboration that would normally only be put on a double act on a performance act and it exacerbates the problems already in the relationship that danny needs affirmation yes and was he able to articulate that to Tversky? Not well enough. I mean, that's a very difficult thing to do. So the letters, they have a kind of manly reticence about them, but when the relationship starts to fracture, and it does have the, their relationship has the shape of a love affair. When they meet, it's like love at first sight,

and there's this passionate 10 years, and they're not having sex but the kind of children are ideas i heard you um liking it to broke back mountain but they fuck each other's ideas that's exactly right but and then they fall they have this horrible falling out the letters amos saved the letters from danny and danny's articulating it there in so many words what danny's articulating is more subtle than, I'm sick of you getting all the credit. I want some credit. What Danny's articulating is, I'm growing weary of you believing the way the world sees our relationship. The more adulation you receive, the more dismissive

you're becoming of my ideas. The more I think that you actually believe that you're the stronger person in the relationship and you don't need me. And the fuel for the work Danny felt, and I think he's right about this, was a feeling of uncritical acceptance between the two of them. Because Danny was an idea factory. He just spewed stuff. Some of it was useful. All of it was probably interesting, but some of it ended up being useful and some of it not. And Amos' gift was to dig through it and see what was really valuable and give Danny then the confidence to see that it was valuable and then to shape it and make it ready for prime time. The minute that Danny starts to feel Amos is criticizing my ideas

as opposed to accepting them, or Amos thinks my ideas aren't so good, he starts to clam up. And the dynamics are, I mean, it's very much like an improv comedy relationship. It only works if both sides feel the other is trying to make them look good. If both sides are accepting whatever the other person does and building on it. And Danny did say from the very beginning of their relationship, this improvisational aspect to it

only existed when they were in private. They were in a room with just the two of them. It was fine. The minute they were at a party or in front of a class together, they became competitive with each other and it vanished.

So he said, actually, in writing the book, I was going to have a problem, that no one could ever have seen how we were together because we weren't that way when other people were watching us. Right. And then when Tversky was made aware of these feelings, he said to Danny Kahneman, I don't get your sensitivity metric. You just picked the only line you need to know to get the flavor of the relationship. Two lovers falling out.

Woman is upset the man's not paying enough attention or sensitive enough to her needs. Any man who can write that line, I don't get your sensitivity metric, is not going to get anybody's sensitivity metric. That's a robot. Yeah, that's sensitivity metric. That's a robot. That's a robot. That's exactly right. And it's so strange, isn't it, that someone as intelligent as he clearly was, wasn't more sensitive to those things. Because Kahneman himself, when he later won the Nobel Prize after Tversky's death, was meticulous about assigning credit and sharing credit, was he not? It's even better than that. When Amos died in 1996, there were many people who have told you that Amos might have gotten the Nobel Prize alone. Now, I don't think that would have happened,

but it might have happened. Because the narrative was, it was Tversky and Kahneman, because the narrative was it was Tversky and Kahneman, and Kahneman was an afterthought. Now that Amos is dead as post-96, it's their work in action, right? It's what you remember. Danny becomes more vivid in everybody's minds because he's alive, and Amos starts to vanish. And after a while, that four or five years, people start to talk about Kahneman and Tversky instead of Tversky and Kahneman.

The Nobel Prize committee was wary enough of Danny that he was actually asked to come. They didn't put it quite this way, but he saw it this way, to audition for the Nobel Prize. He had to go give a talk to the people who were going to bestow this prize in Stockholm. No way. I didn't know you had to do that. Sometimes you do people who were going to bestow this prize in Stockholm. No way. I didn't know you had to do that. Sometimes you do and sometimes you don't. Oh, really? No, I don't think often you do.

I think it's unusual. That'll make him feel less insecure. So he actually went and talked about his work on the Pecan Rule and the colonoscopy studies and all that, which he'd done mainly by himself. Because he wanted to show this work I do by myself is very, very interesting. I don't need Amos to be interesting. Kahneman, and this illustrates just how unusual a cat he is, when he was a child, he was Jewish and trapped in France during World War II with his parents. He was chased by Nazis for three or four years, living in horrible circumstances,

watched his father die, so on and so forth. He said he discovered then in himself that he had an oddly vivid imagination, and that if he imagined something, it was like it happened. And he had this fantasy life where he would imagine defeating the German army all by himself as a little child, that kind of thing. He found after the war that this vivid imagination cost him, he thought, because if he imagined getting something he wanted, it was as if he had it and he lost his motivation to get it. So don't imagine being the class valedictorian

because you've now had the satisfaction in your head. It's an odd thing, but he actually thought this. So he never allowed himself to imagine getting the Nobel Prize because he sensed in some way it was going to undermine his ability to get it. 2002, he's sitting alone with his wife in his house in Princeton, New Jersey, waiting for the Nobel Prize call. He's given to believe that he's going to get it this year or not at all. And he really doesn't know if he's going to get it. Call doesn't come. His wife leaves. Oh well, too bad. He allows himself to imagine getting the Nobel Prize. And what he imagines is the first

thing that comes to mind is all the things that Amos wouldn't do for him, he would do for Amos. Amos was dead and people were starting to forget about him. He wouldn't let that happen. He was going to bring Amos' family with him to Stockholm. He was going to weave a biography of Amos into his Nobel Prize speech. When he spoke, he was going to have a giant photograph of Amos behind him, all this stuff. He's in this fugue state when the phone rings, and he gets the Nobel Prize. Wow, yeah.

And he did do all that. Yeah. And he's been so aggressively insistent that Amos not be forgotten and that Amos get the credit, even as he gets more and more famous. And I think it's because all those years where he thought about Amos, if I was in your shoes, this is how I would do it. Right. The funny thing is, I really do believe Amos wouldn't have cared.

The problem Amos had is he could not imagine being like Danny. He was so self-assured. He thought prizes were all bullshit. He actually thought prizes shouldn't exist because they made 100 people people unhappy for every one they made happy because a hundred people thought they should have got it for everyone who got it. Like the Booker Prize is making novelists miserable every year. And also there's so many arbitrary considerations that have nothing to do with the actual quality of the work. And the quality is subjective and so on and so forth. So Amos, he actually couldn't feel what Danny felt. And he thought, at some level, I think he was a little embarrassed for Danny that he felt it.

He thought, you shouldn't feel it. And that, in a way, he was treating Danny with greater respect if he didn't honor the feelings than if he did. I think that's what was going on. Because he saw it as a failing, really. Yes. Amos, when he got the MacArthur Prize just by himself, I interviewed the woman he was with. At the moment he got the news, she said he was furious.

Yeah. He was actually livid. How could they do this? It is outrageous. Now, how many people get the MacArthur Genius Award and are furious? I bet he might be the only one. But he didn't tell Danny he was furious because he thought it was beneath Danny to care one way or the other.

Right. And he was furious because he felt this is absolutely toxic for our partnership. Yes. Exactly. So it's a very odd combination, being furious but not having the ability to reach out to the other. You'd think that would be the first thing he would do. not having the ability to reach out to the other. You think that would be the first thing he would do?

That he would do. Pick up the phone and say, listen, mate. Yeah. These bastards just did this. And, you know, he could have turned it down. He could have got up and given a speech. He could have sent the money to Danny. There are all kinds of things he could have done.

So he was not just a jerk about it. Yeah. It was a complicated set of emotions going on. He was a complicated robot. Yeah. Yes, exactly right. He was a complicated set of emotions. It was a complicated robot. Yeah. Yes, exactly right. It was an unusually programmed robot. Yeah.

That's right. An advanced AI. Ha ha ha ha! Thank you. I was going to ask you a little bit more about some of the things you've taken away from studying Kahneman and Tversky. From my point of view, with a comedic background, so much of what they were exploring, other kinds of things that comedians explore when they're trying to get bits you know the way that people behave making observations

minute observations that not everybody is aware of and the hallmark of a successful observational comedian is to nail a thing which everyone can immediately relate to even though they hadn't previously that's funny you say that that's and it's funny because i my mind naturally went to improv comedy when i thought of their relationship yeah so this is absolutely true and they have they have bits that they end up never doing much with or are the observations they never end up figuring out what to do with but you're right there they're constantly making the observations and one of those avenues of exploration was the part that regret plays in decision making. Am I right in thinking that was, say, an avenue that they eventually abandoned? So they're trying to figure out, they're puzzling through essentially a mathematical paradox

that nobody's been able to figure out. And there's no need to explain the paradox, but there is a need to explain Danny's solution to the paradox and why a person would decide they prefer it A over B sometimes and B over A other times. And he says what's going on is the anticipation of regret in one case. And we underestimate, he said, the role regret plays in decision-making, that people, exactly the same circumstances can be attended to We underestimate, he said, the role regret plays in decision making. That people, exactly the same circumstances can be attended to with different degrees of misery.

If you just miss your flight by a minute, you feel a different kind of pain than if you knew two hours ahead that you weren't going to make your flight. Yeah, that's right. And how did he explain that? Well, they didn't ever exactly explain it. They explored it. So what they did is, I think they did really funny little tests. Like they put people through lotteries. You get a lottery number, and they would measure the regret felt by the person whose lottery ticket number was just one away from the winning number.

Winning ticket is 984. Right. And if you have ticket 983, you feel much more regret than if you take number two, as if you came closer. You didn't come closer. It's a random lottery. You are closer to having won the lottery, but you can create the illusion of proximity or almost having gotten it, and that creates unhappiness or regret.

Yeah, missing the train by 30 seconds, and then you start rewinding the events leading up to that moment. One of their students does a study where he shows that silver medalists at the Olympics are less happy than bronze medalists. There's a Seinfeld bit about that. Yes, well, so that all comes from them. They explore the idea that regret comes from the feelings of coming close, but not quite getting there. Also, people tend to regret what they do rather than what they don't do. So there's a bias towards inaction because you're going to regret it if you do it.

But then they abandon it. They just abandon it because they figure out that the solution to the puzzle they're trying, the paradox they're trying to solve, can be more neatly solved another way. And so they just leave it on the cutting room floor. But that investigation into, and particularly that way that people unpack those events and try and replay them, that was the undoing process. Well, so they come back to, I mean, this is the way a comedian would get a bit. I mean, this is the way a comedian would get a bit. Danny's nephew, beloved nephew, was an Air Force fighter plane navigator.

And he'd been in the Air Force for whatever, five years, whatever their tour of duty is. He'd been in wars. He'd been in dogfights and almost got shot down. The day before he's going to get out, he dies. He dies because a flare goes off in front of the pilot's face when they're up in the air and they get disoriented. And when you're going that fast, you can't feel whether you're going up or going down and thinking they were ascending, they were descending and they flew the plane right into the ground. Danny goes back for the funeral. And being Danny Kahneman, he doesn't experience grief firsthand. What he does is he watches everybody else's grief.

And he realizes that a lot of the conversation is the form of if-only statements. If only he'd gotten out of the Air Force a day earlier. If only someone hadn't shot that flare up. And he realizes there's a structure to these things. It's that what's going on there is people are imagining alternative realities. We're watching the human imagination at work. And it obeys rules. What people are doing is starting from the end of the event and working backwards and undoing the first thing they can undo to undo the event. This happens in sports. Your favorite team loses in sports. Something that happened at the end of the game is likely what you're going to blame it on if it's a

close game. Even though there might have been something much less vivid that happened earlier in the game that had a much greater effect. So in like American football, field goal kickers are getting blamed all the time for having missed a kick at the end of the game. I mean, people have committed suicide because of this. And so anyway, he realizes they can do a project where they get people to undo reality and create alternative reality, and they will, in fact, study the human imagination. But this comes at a point in their relationship, Danny and Amos' relationship, where Danny is becoming increasingly sensitive to Amos' growing fame

and has an increasing sense that Amos is not interested in him. So he writes these long letters to Amos about it, and he feels like Amos' response to these letters is inadequate. I found a folder in Amos' file drawers where he has all these letters from Danny, and he is intensely trying to turn Danny's insights into mathematical formula or into a logic that they can publish. He's clearly really interested in it.

And he labels this folder the Undoing Project. So when I showed Danny Conham in the folder, he was ashen. And that's nice. He really went white. And he went, oh, my God, he was still listening. This changes my way of thinking about what was going on. He was really disturbed by it. I called the book the Undoing Project in part because of that,

in part because I thought, well, one way to describe their whole enterprise was they were undoing a very false view of human nature and replacing it with a much better view. And they were doing it, you're right, in the way comedians would go about doing it, by starting with small insights and building from them, saying, what does that mean? What can I do with that? He's so good on so many things, on clutter. Unless you're kicking yourself once a month for throwing something away,

you are not throwing enough away. Yeah. So, you know, Amos, graduate students described to me walking into Amos's office when he was dealing with his mail, which he'd neglect for his stretches. He'd have it on a desk in piles, one for each day. And he'd like open one or two things, look at the rest and sweep it in the garbage can unopened. And he said to someone, what can they do to me, rule. If they can't do anything to me, I'm not going to bother with it. And that he had this sense. He behaved as if he knew his life was going to be short and time was scarce.

He didn't let anybody intrude on his time. That reminds me of his policy of leaving social gatherings that were boring him. Well, this was, you're reminding me of my own book. It's funny, I'd forgotten about that. It is a wonderful thing. So Amos was really, really good at getting out of anything he didn't want to do, but occasionally he'd find himself in a faculty meeting or a party that he just got dragged into. And he'd tell people, you know, when you're sitting there, it's very hard to think of the excuse that you need to leave. He says, but if you just get up and start walking out, it's very hard to think of the excuse that you need to leave. He says, but if you just get up and start walking out, it's amazing how quickly your mind will think for you.

So he says, get up and leave. And if anybody asks why you're leaving, something will come to you. Have you ever done that? Yes, I have done that. I tried it. He said, absolutely right. This is deadline pressure. Something came to you.

Yes, things will come to you. But you know this, if you've done anything on deadline. Procrastination is giving yourself an option not to think anything. The minute you have to put something down on a piece of paper, it's amazing what comes. Wait, this is an advert for Squarespace. Every time I visit your website I see success, yes success. The way that you look at the world makes the world want to say yes. It looks very professional.

I love browsing your videos and pics and I don't want to stop. And I'd like to access your members area and spend in your shop. These are the kinds of comments people will say about your website if you build it with Squarespace. Just visit squarespace.com slash Buxton for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, because you will want to launch, use the offer code BUXTON to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. So put the smile of success on your face with Squarespace. Yes. Yes. Continue. Patience.

Hey, welcome back, listeners. Michael Lewis there. Thank you very much to him. Before I go, I just wanted to tell you about a couple of things. I've been doing a program for Radio 4 called You're Doing It Wrong. Whoa. I'm doing this wrong. I should be indoors. But the first episode went out on Wednesday. This is crazy, actually. Hang on, I'm going to have to try and get some shelter.

And then I'll get back to you. Hang on. That's slightly better. So yeah, this radio program I've been doing for Radio 4 goes out on Wednesday mornings at 9.30 and it's only short 15 minutes or so although there is a longer slightly longer version available as a podcast it's called You're Doing It Wrong and the description for the program says Adam Buxton takes a sideways look at some of our confusing modern ideas. Oh, I love to look sideways.

That's what I'm known for. Most people just look at things straight on, don't they? But not me. I'm the sideways looker. The programme is basically a series of conversations with people about certain ways that we could be doing things differently in our lives, starting from the premise that I'm doing a bad job of most things, and I'm interested in finding out about possible alternatives. So we talked to people about work, that was the first program that went out this week parenting

the nuclear family food or diet and the environment the bulk of the work on the show i should say has been done by emily knight she's a bristol-based producer and writer and i more or less just did what i was told and provided the theme tune radio for wednesdays 9 30 a.m you're doing it wrong podcast recommendation now this is a very late to the party podcast recommendation people have been telling me for ages how good athletico mince is that's the podcast that bob mortimer does with andy dawson comedy writer aka profanity swan on twitter and probably the reason i didn't get around to actually listening to it because i did download it but it sat there in the in the giant podcast bin for a long while because I don't really care that much about football

and I thought that they were just going to be doing jokes about football. And I suppose there is a bit of that. Some of it goes over my head. But the episode that I listened to the other day, Crunch Crunch Oops, the most recent one as I speak. Wow, I was really laughing. check it out if you haven't heard it before if you don't experience pure joy listening to bob mortimer's hey it's the fun bus song then well look i'm not saying we can't be friends but it's going to be hard for us, especially in the dark times. Athletico Mints, if you like funny men talking bullshit.

News for Adam Buxton podcast jingle fans. You may have heard a new jingle in this week's podcast. I made that jingle using some very real-sounding virtual instrument plug-ins from a company called Sonic Couture. C-O-U-T-U-R-E, all one word, Sonic Couture, and they got in touch and said, would you like to try out some of our plug-ins, and if you use any, perhaps you could give them a mention. So I was happy to do so.

They were really fun to use and enabled me to make a slightly different sounding jingle for a change. And also, it was augmented with the help of Dan Hawkins my online bass guy he's provided bass lines for a couple of my jingles in the past and as I've done previously I sent Dan an mp3 of the jingle in its early stages he sent back about five variations for a bass line within a couple of days. Thanks very much, Dan. If you've got a project that would benefit from an actual real bit of bass playing, and that's beyond your abilities the way it is mine, search for Dan Hawkins Bass and you'll find him.

Rosie's got a snow beard and I'm worried she's going to turn into a dogcicle, so we're going to head back in. But thank you very much to Michaelael lewis once again thanks to seamus murphy mitchell for production support and matt lamont for additional editing thank you for listening right to the end the quartermasters not everybody does but you're special you've got a good attention span and your award of course is the best jingle in the podcast. Like and subscribe. Because, hey, you've got an appreciation for the peak end rule. Right? Now, for goodness sake, get warm.

Get under a blanket. Give somebody else a blanket if they need a blanket. Don't come out from the blanket. And until next time, we're together. Remember, I love you. Bye! Bye. Subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe, like and subscribe.このように、私はあなたを愛しています。私はあなたを愛しています。私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。

私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。 私はあなたを愛しています。私はあなたを愛しています。 Thank you.