393. Can Britain Get Its “Great” Back?

On last week's episode, we spoke with former British Prime Minister David Cameron about his fateful decision to hold the Brexit referendum, and how things did not turn out as he planned. This week, an episode we recorded live in London, just a brisk walk away from No. 10 Downing Street, where Cameron lived and worked when he pulled the Brexit trigger. We've gone to London with a very particular purpose in mind, and, as you will hear, we were not the least bit disappointed.

Hope you feel the same. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the host of Freakin' on the radio, Stephen Dovner. Thank you so much. Thank you.

This week's show, being recorded live at the historic Cuduggan Hall, which is in London, which is in England, which is part of the United Kingdom, although by the time this airs, none of that may be true. Now, in any case, we've come here with a particular mission. As we all know, Britain has had an extraordinary history of discovery, and just about every realm you can imagine. You have discovered oxygen and penicillin and the circulation of blood, the electron, the first practical steam engine, the first jet engine.

You've produced extraordinary literature and all those Scottish philosophers. You've produced some of the best dead economists ever, as well as the modern banking industry. And, of course, you've explored massive swaths of the planet Earth and promptly colonized most of it. So, a tremendous history of discovery.

But emphasis, we're being honest, on history. It strikes us, and maybe this is just because we're arrogant Americans, that for the past century or so, you've been pretty crap. We've been busy inventing the internet and life-saving drugs, sending people to the moon. You've been busy deciding whether to break up with Malta and Cyprus and Scotland.

But let me say this. We've still got faith in you. We believe in you. And we thought that if we came over here, and we invited some very clever people to this beautiful auditorium, we might find that rather than just limping into the future like some sclerotic former empire, that London and England and the UK are in fact brimming with remarkable new ideas and discoveries.

So, that is our mission tonight to discover the discoveries that may be lying just out of sight. And I've got a friend to help me. He's a Londoner. He is host of the massively popular, massively wonderful podcast, No Such Thing Is a Fish.

Would you please welcome Dan Shriver. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So, on the topic of discovery, Dan, I'd love you to share with us maybe one of your favorite personal discoveries.

So, I'm constantly discovering stories that may have got lost in time. And years and years ago I was in Sydney, and I discovered a book called My Amazon Adventure by Sebastian Snow, a British explorer. Never heard of him. I went online, couldn't really find anything out about him.

He was born 1929, died 2001, so it kind of didn't quite make the internet. But he discovered three lost-incon cities. He travelled the length of the Amazon first person to do that, and he climbed too previously un-summitted and he's peaks. But what's most amazing is that according to every explorer who ever met him, he was the most accident-prone person to ever live.

He once had to be rescued from the side of a mountain because he trapped himself in his own sleeping bag. They found him wriggling inside and had to unzip him. Should have died at every single moment. He was just completely useless.

Never carried a gun with him. Should have carried a gun. Didn't carry a gun. Not because he was a pacifist, but because his friends didn't let him.

They were worried he would shoot himself. And I've not found anything about him largely, as I say, because he's not on the internet. But also because when I do google him, there's another Sebastian Snow who's a chef who gets in the way the whole time. Any time I'm googling, this chef in Oxfordshire comes up, and as a result, Google has just messed for me.

I can't find anything. So that's been a huge problem. And I finally had a breakthrough two years ago when I was talking to an explorer, and I said to them, did you ever meet Sebastian Snow? And they said, yeah, I went on an expedition with him.

I said, can you put me in contact with anyone who knows him? And they said, you could try and contact his sons. One of them's a chef. He lives in Oxfordshire, actually.

It was his son. My Google nemesis was his son all this time. And I messaged him and we're now friends. And he's hopefully going to write a book on him so the world can know about Sebastian Snow.

Dan Shreiber, thanks for that. Thanks for joining us tonight to hunt down what other discoveries may be happening in Britain right now. Our first guest tonight, and we are starting at the very top. Would you please welcome the mayor of London, Saadik Khan.

Mayor Khan, we so appreciate you joining us tonight. First question, what is one remarkable thing that you've discovered about London that you didn't know until you became mayor? I know you grew up here, but I'd like to know something nice and specific, as opposed to the standard, you know, it's a beautiful tapestry of people from all over the world living in harmony kind of thing. Firstly, that is true.

But many people outside of our country think London is home only to wealthy people. But in fact, in London, we have the largest number of households and the largest number of children living in poverty of any region in the UK, 37% of London children live in relative poverty. And one of my missions is to try and reduce the inequality in our city. I've read that due to the encroaching Brexit that roughly $1 trillion of assets from London's financial district have already moved elsewhere.

So there is a big concern if we have Brexit, but even worse, a catastrophic no-deal Brexit that could lead to an exodus of jobs, growth, prosperity, but also businesses. At the moment, businesses are waiting. Look, even if we believe that EU, the underlying strengths of our city will still be there, which are our people. We've got the best universities in the world.

Economy is not just finance, it is finance, it is legal, it's an accountancy, it's a life sciences, it's tourism, it's culture, it's tech. And so the underlying strengths of our city aren't going to change. Now, Londoners in particular, in those starting, they're pretty familiar with your personal biography, but many of our listeners do not know. So can you give us a quick version?

Sure, I'm quite shy about talking about my family. Not many people have heard this from me. It may be exclusive to free economics. My dad was a bus driver.

I know he was a bus driver, but he trained as an engineer. He was in the Air Force and he was an engineer. So the first in three generations of cons who's not an immigrant. My grandparents migrated from India to Pakistan, my parents came to London, my dad first went from Pakistan to Australia and said, I don't really like Australia.

And then came to London and fell in love with London, not with some of the challenges then. And then he called for my mum to come over and my three eldest siblings, two brothers, two brothers, two brothers, two brothers, two brothers. But the rest of us were born in London. And my cousins in Pakistan and India made the point that what we've managed to achieve in London, they've never achieved and could never achieve in Pakistan or India.

That's the wonders of London. So you became a lawyer, you held many posts in government. People outside of England may be surprised to learn that you were just the third mayor of London. So why did it take so long for London to have a mayor?

I'm assuming it could have used one at some earlier point. Yeah, we are. I worry to keep your mind, we claim to be one of the exporters of democracy. We are the most centralized democracy in the Western world.

White-source Mr. Horde, a lot of power. So it took us some time to move towards the mayor model, which America's had for decades and decades. So some of your top priorities include better public transportation, cleaner air, more housing and more affordable housing.

So it's sort of standard mayoral issues. But as I understand it, the mayor of London retains just 7% of taxes raised in the city versus, for instance, 50% in New York and 70% in Tokyo. So does this mean that London is essentially subsidizing the rest of the UK? And if so, why does the rest of the UK hate on London so much accusing you of snobbery greed and whatnot?

Well, firstly, yes, London does benefit the rest of the country. But that's not a bad thing. I believe in the nation's state. I think it's important for us to, you know, as those with the broader shoulders, to carry the rates, but help those parts of the country that need support.

So I'm not in favor of, you're literally declaring independence. But it sounds like you're open to it. Listen, I love the side of El Presventi. But my point to our friends in government is, look, we think we can do even better with more devolution.

So I've got no problems sharing some of the tax revenues with the rest of the country. My argument to the government is, give us more control over the money we raise in London and we can do better jobs. Alright, let's take this conversation back to the Brexit vote. You were elected mayor of London in May of 2016, and one month later voters in the UK decided to leave the European Union.

But there's no link between that and you've been elected. They're separate. So, and just to be clear, London voted overwhelmingly to remain. But now there is an official London Independence Party.

You have talked publicly, including just a moment ago when you nominated yourself El Presventi. You've talked about the appeal of running some kind of city-state. I am curious the degree of independence you would like to see. And was the Brexit vote then?

I'm starting to wonder, just a conspiracy engineered by Londoners to get rid of the rest of the country, perhaps. Yeah. So my argument to the government is, we should have more control over our taxes fiscal devolution. So we pay huge amount of money, I don't know, just any income tax and corporation tax.

But I think of stamp duty, property taxes, we pay. We're in charge of the tubes, the buses, the trams, and we run them very well. We're not in charge of the commuter trains coming into London. We think we should be in charge of those.

We think we should be in charge of the types of homes built in our city. We have lots and lots of luxury homes, which is empty, which I've bought by foreigners as gold bricks. I have nothing against foreigners, so my best friends and family are foreigners. But I think we should be building homes that Londoners can afford to live in.

And there's good use of badges. The good news is that, at the head of the government, is somebody who should understand this stuff because he used to be the mayor. The badges is Boris Johnson. And so we're going to, Londoners, we're going to use a charm offensive to try and lobby him to give us more powers.

You can be the charm, I'll be the offensive. So we actually interviewed Boris Johnson several years ago when he was mayor, and we talked about this very topic. Here's what he told us then. We have now in London, 72 billionaires, which is more than New York.

New York has only 43 billionaires. And how about that? Paris has only 18 billionaires, and Moscow has, I think, 40. So, you know, London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the Urangutan.

So, I don't really have a question for you other than, would you agree that London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the Urangutan? Can I say to all the free economics listeners from outside this country? I apologize for Boris Johnson. Please don't judge us.

I'd like to ask you a bit about immigration and integration in Britain, especially in light of your family's background. So there's a law professor in philosopher named Haskell von Kriegstein who recently made the argument that it is logically impossible for an immigrant to not integrate. The immigrant can adopt British values and attitudes, the immigrant would therefore be perfectly British, or the immigrant can reject British values and attitudes, but since moving to another country and then spurning, that country's values, language and attitudes is a quintessentially British behavior. The immigrant is, again, perfectly British.

So, I'm curious how you see immigration and integration in Britain these days, especially for someone whose skin is not white. So, let me see my family's own experience. Well, my dad first came here in London, and it's hard to believe now. There were signs in guest houses, restaurants, pubs that said, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs, and by blacks, I mean anybody who wasn't white.

And then a government, a Labour government, passed a law to make it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of race. So, those signs could no longer be put up. This is what year? 68, the legislation was passed, the Rights Relations Act.

My dad came here, signs up saying, no blacks, no Irish, no dogs. The city he came to, his city voted his son to be the mayor of that city. That's London. So, when you wonder how great is London as city, we're London as a city that can vote for the son of an immigrant with working class parents from a councilor state who is not just an ethnic minority, but a Muslim at a time of the greatest amount of Islamophobia, the Western world has seen.

So, when I say in response to your question, how worried are you about Brexit? Of course I'm worried about a nodal Brexit, of course I'm worried about the impression that they give to London as a non-brits, but I'm so confident in our abilities Londoners to do what they do with their own people. So, along those lines, let me ask you this, you are the mayor of London, you grew up in South London, but when it comes to soccer, what you call football, you are a Liverpool supporter. Can you tell us that story?

The truth story about why I saw Liverpool is, and it goes back to what we were talking about about integration. So, my big brothers, you sport Chelsea. On one occasion, they went to this Chelsea game and they were chased away by the national front because they were not the colour skin, but those who in the stadium and sport should be. I didn't go to any matches except for when I went to where I was also the best experience because of my skin.

The only experience of football was watching on TV or listening to it on radio, and the Liverpool team of those days were just a great team. There's a great saying, you can change a job, you can change the house, you live in, you can even change your partner, but you don't change your team. So, Liverpool's best player these days is Muhammad Salah, who is Egyptian and like you would develop Muslim. And he is extraordinarily popular among hardcore Liverpool fans who are, shall we say, not always the most inclusive fans in the world.

And yet, one chant that they've been singing lately goes like this. If you can make that out the lyrics where Muhammad Salah, a gift from Allah, he came from Roma to Liverpool, he's always scoring, it's almost boring. So, please don't take Muhammad away. There's a better one.

You can sing it. If he's good enough for you, he's good enough for me. If he scores a few more girls, I'll be a Muslim too. Close Salah, most of all.

So, several political scientists at Stanford recently did a study looking at whether Salah's popularity has had any effect on Islamophobia in England. They did this by surveying Liverpool fans and measuring changes in hate crimes and anti-Muslim tweets. And they found that indeed Salah's popularity has significantly decreased anti-Muslim sentiment in England. So, I'm really curious, Maricon, what you think about this research whether it rings true to you and whether it might have a lasting effect.

Because, you know, when Salah or any player starts to decline or if he messes up, will it make life worse for Britain's Muslims? And along those lines, what about you as one of the most prominent Muslims in the country? If you decline or mess up, does that change public sentiment toward Muslims? So, I remember as a Liverpool fan, when John Barnes is a black British person who played football very talented, and those days when he played in the 80s, it wasn't uncommon for bananas to be thrown in the pitch to the black players.

But because he was so talented, he changed the way people thought about black footballers, including some Liverpool fans who may have been racist, but they're actually changed because they were mixing in England and idolizing this black footballer. And the same goes with Maricon, you know, Marnay, Shaqiri, three Liverpool players, all Muslims, and they started the game at the beginning, praying in front of their teammates. And you heard from the football chant, it's educating ordinary people about a religion that I could do a thousand speeches, and you could do a million pieces of research, it won't change people's attitude unless they experience themselves. So, I'm confident that the attitudes that people have towards Muslims are going to regress, as long as we are complacent, we've always got to be vigilant.

There's an assumption that many of us who have progressed has made, which is, you know, progress only goes one way, whether it's gender equality, whether it's to do with sexual orientation, to do with ethnicity. It doesn't, it can go backwards. And we've seen that around the world with the rise of nativist populist movements, from America to Hungary to Italy to Poland in our country as well. So, yeah, of course it's possible if players have a certain ethnicity or religion, miss a penalty, or play a run of a few games, then some people can revert to the prejudices.

So, over a period of time, people understand that actually whether it's a solemn, un-exercury, whether it's a Brazilian goalkeeper, it makes people realise that we're a team, owned by Americans, managed by a German, with representatives from all around the world, where do you know, nations, and with champions of Europe? So, it's very interesting to me how fragile that is, you know, the sociologist and political scientists talk about the difference between contact theory and exposure theory. If you're just exposed to someone different, it may not change. If you have contact with someone that's unlike you, it can establish a different relationship.

I'm sure you've met a lot of people who probably thought they were not going to take a liking to you for whatever, it's been 100 reasons. And I'm curious what you've learned to have that much contact with so many people outside your circle. That's quite unquestable. I realise, often through no full of their own, there are some people who will have prejudged me, they have preconceptions for a variety of reasons because of the parts I belong to, because of the colour of my skin, because of my religion.

And so, I make an extra effort to try and get them to know me, to meet me. Not just going to churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, but going to big companies, small companies, schools, that's the best way to change people's attitudes by spending time with them and breaking breaks. So, for those people who may, for example, think there are parts of London that are no-go areas or may think that it's not possible to be a Muslim in a westerner, I hope you'll realise that actually your life would be enriched by really understanding that diversities of strength are nothing to be scared of. American, it's been great having you Dan Shreiber before we let the mayor go.

I'm curious whether you have any facts about American or marriage generally that you might want to share with us. So, first interesting fact about American here is he's human. In America, you can't always guarantee that when you have a mayor. This year, actually, in Fairhaven, Vermont, a three-year-old Nubian goat was voted in and made mayor, she's called Lincoln.

Her first action after being sworn in was to defecate on the floor. Actually, a former mayor in America was born in London in the Underground, and that was Jerry Sprayer. That's right. Very cool facts.

I've got a fact. As good as that, by the way. In the entire history of the Underground, only three people have been born on the tube. Jerry Springer's one of them.

Wow. He was born because his mum joined the Second World War Underground where he was at his mum. Didn't fancy having a bag on the tube. Well, actually, I'm going to throw another Underground fact package.

It's quite fun having a fact off with the mayor about the Underground. Whitechapel, the Underground there, is a station in London, which we have an overground as well. It's a station where the two meet, and it's the only station in London where the Underground is aboveground, and the aboveground is underground. Dan, I thank you and mayor Stutti Khan.

Thank you so much for being on our show tonight. Coming up after the break, discoveries about how we spend our time, about what lies beneath the ocean, and how Liverpool football managed to obtain Muhammad-Salah, and what it would take for Liverpool to part with him. Your minimum starting bid would be 150 million euros. I wish the answer would be no.

Stop wasting our time. Hey there, Stephen Dunder. We recently spent an evening in London with a live audience and a series of guests who, in the spirit of Britain's rich tradition of exploration and discovery, told us about their discoveries. Dan Schreiber, from the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast, was writing shotgun.

And what have we learned so far? London mayor Stutti Khan revealed that London, the city that did not want the UK to break off from the EU in the Brexit vote, may in fact want to break off itself from the rest of England. Our next guest was a professor of the Sociology of Gender at University College London, and co-director of UCL's Centre for Time Use Research. Her name is Oriel Sullivan.

Thank you. Thank you. So first, if you would, talk about the data you've used, where the data come from, how good the data are, and whether these are the typical sort of data that have been used in the past to measure how people spend their time. So what we do is we collect time use data surveys using diaries, and we archive it in a way that makes it comparable both across time and across country.

And these go back how far? These go back to the 1960s. And when you say diaries, is it what we think of as a diary with paragraphs of writing? Well, some people do wax lyrical about what they're doing, but in general, people's answers tend to be relatively shorter.

You have a record through the day where you record what you're doing in sequence, and we also have some interesting additional fields like who you were doing it with, whether you were enjoying yourself at the time. And the reason that it's good data is that in the past when people were asked how they spent their time, those questions tended to be just conventional survey questions, like, last week, how much time did you spend doing unpaid work? Now, I understand that one impetus of your research was to look at the notion of whether technology has sped us up, or otherwise changed the way that we spend our time. There's a kind of media panic we call it in sociology about the way in which our life is constantly speeding up, and we never have enough time to do the things we want to do.

And we always have too much to do. And one of the surprising things that we found is that, in fact, when you look at the actual evidence of how many activities people are doing, and how much they're multitasking, because multitasking is also something that appears in the literature as being a major contributor to having too much to do. We don't really find any change in that over time. And we also don't find that people's perceptions of feeling always rushed have changed over time.

If anything, there's been a general decrease in people's reports of feeling always rushed for time. That is so interesting, because what your data say seemed to be the opposite of what the media say and what most people feel, yes? Absolutely, yes, it is. So why is the perception thus and the data, what's the opposite of us?

I'm sure you have a word for it here. There may be several things involved, but I think one of the things is that the kinds of people who write about feeling terribly rushed are not students living on their own. They're also not retired people. Both categories who might have a certain amount of time on their hands.

They tend to be people in mid-career, possibly also with small children. Are you saying that journalists are not 100% excellent at representing the reality in the world? Well, not just journalists, but professors as well, because we exist in the same category of mid-career professionals, and we have families, we have families, we have families, and we have families. We have children, and our perceptions are largely determined by how things used to be for us.

I'm very curious to know whether your data reveal interesting differences in different demographic groups, particularly gender. You mentioned unpaid work, can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure, women report feeling always rushed considerably more than men, and that was true in 2000 and it's also true in 2015. The gender difference is far larger than the difference between social classes, for example.

That's a really interesting finding, and I think it reflects women's double burden of continuing to be thought to be responsible for the domestic work, but at the same time being increasingly expected to participate in the labor force. Women spend how much more time doing unpaid work than men? Well, they do about three to four times the unpaid work than men. Three to four times?

Yes, since the 1960s we've seen women's time spent in unpaid work, this is all unpaid work, and childcare as well, has gone down from about five to four hours a day, whereas for men it's increased from about one to just under two hours a day, but most of that increase for men has come in perhaps more desirable activities like shopping and childcare activities rather than in the core housework activities. Can you put some numbers on the value of the unpaid work? In 2015, the value of unpaid work came to £450 billion, that is one quarter of total national GDP, and that proportion has been pretty constant since 1961, so imagine that all these people who do these kinds of unpaid work activities stop doing that. And then our entire social care system would collapse under the weight.

Our elder care system would collapse, our childcare system would collapse. So, you know, that gives an indication of the extent of the contribution that is made by this kind of work. I am very curious to know what's your preferred way to spend a day, and whether during this research you noticed or realized anything about yourself? Not really, no, because...

This is what we call in the business a dead-end question. Yes, absolutely. I hope you'll cut it from the finished version. I think we're making great radio right here and now.

So Dan, I'm sure you have some interesting additional facts about time use? Yes, I read that according to the Vatican, you can reduce the time you spend in purgatory by following the Pope on Twitter. And this is probably my favourite little time-related fact that I found. So, Dolly Parton has a theme park in America, which is called Dollywood.

Do you guys know that? It's just a big theme park, right? Okay. Does anyone here know what the opening hours of Dollywood are?

It's 10 to 6! What is she doing? What a missed opportunity! Next up, we welcome to the stage two guests, Lucy Woodall and Oliver Steeds, from an outfit called Nectin Mission, which conducts undersea expeditions.

Woodall, a marine biologist at Oxford, is Nectin's principal scientist. Steeds is the firm's chief executive. We began by asking them about the primary goals of their project. So, exploring concern for the ocean, to try and gather more understanding about the oceans changing, try to gather that data to help inform the protection of the consensus.

We need about 30% of the ocean protected by 2030. Currently we've got about 7.5%. We've got a long way to go. They've begun an ambitious project to explore the Indian Ocean, the least explored ocean, even though it covers 14% of the Earth's surface.

Yeah, we are often the first humans ever to see that bit of our planet. Some people consider it the floor notion, but actually it's amazing, very, very important ocean. There was a large percentage of the population that rely on the Indian Ocean, and it's one of the least protected as well. So, how does it work?

Do you own ships? Do you rent ships? What kind of ships? Et cetera, et cetera.

No, we don't own the ships, we don't own the subs. That's part of the challenge. If you're going to go to deep ocean work that we do, you're either island gas company, you've got billions, or you've got billions. Or you've got about a billion, where it's more charity.

We're neither. So, now we go and charge everything. And so, our last expression was say shells. We've charted a vessel in, which was 87 metres as we adapted it.

So, it could launch and recover some mercibles, remotely operated vehicles and robots, put a team on board. But it was hugely challenging. So, as much as you can, just paint a picture. What's it like to go down?

What's it look like? What's it sound like? And what's it feel like? Firstly, amazing.

But I guess you want slightly more than that. You're very hot. And then slowly, as you descend, you come out of the light, and as you go down, you lose those large visitors, it gets cooler and cooler. And then you're starting to notice.

The sharks, the manta rays, often a turtle as well. And as we go down from the light loving animals and plants, down through the water column, there's less light. We've got more pressure. We have temperatures that decrease as well.

So, this means the whole host of animals and plants that live their change. So, we go from some of these typical coral reefs that we might have seen on the TV, and we get to different types of corals. These are black corals. They're stem is black.

But actually, they're amazing, vibrant colors, yellows and oranges. And they look just a little bit more like trees wafting around. And this is a really important zone. That actually, until 2016, we did not know existed.

Is this the rarefotic zone that you're describing? Absolutely. So, the rarefotic zone isn't one of our discoveries. It's something that we found that another research, Carol Bewain, in the Caribbean, had already discovered.

So, is it safe to say that most ocean explorers in the past have looked at the surface and the floor, and you're kind of doing the middle? Yes, the neglected middle? So, traditionally, there has been a lot of work done on the surface, because it's kind of easy to get there. You're like scuba diving, but that's generally to 30 metres.

And then we really like the deep diving. Because that sounds kind of cool. Let me ask you a question about the difference between biomass and biodiversity and whether volume of living organisms happens in one place, but in another place where there may be less volume, there may actually be more variance. Yeah, so on the sifts of the ocean, we have a lot of life.

So, that's the amount of life. But actually, as we go down into those middle zones at around about 1000 metres, that's how we have our highest diversity. And that's really interesting. And as scientists, we're really still trying to understand the reasons why.

Are you discovering new species hand over fist or what? Yeah, sure. And one named after you, what sort of thing? Because actually, every time we go into the ocean, we find something new.

It's because nobody has been to these places before. And if they've been there, maybe they haven't collected everything. They haven't observed what we're able to do in the summers, because all of these new things that we're discovering have already had benefits to human life. We call this bioprospecting.

There is medicines and other industrial processes that are only possible because people have gone into the ocean. Just collected once more thing. And then for years and years, they have looked at those molecules. So I'm curious, given what we've read about pollution in the oceans, about overfishing, about climate change and how that may affect the oceans, as you've gotten in there yourselves with these expeditions to parts of the ocean that perhaps have never been seen before, are you more or less optimistic about the general welfare of our oceans?

I'm more optimistic, because I've met the most amazing people who are doing fantastic work in their own nations and trying to help people understand why our oceans are important. I want to be optimistic, I really do. And we need to be optimistic. He didn't say I have a nightmare.

He said I have a dream. And we need to give people dreams. That would have been a whole different movie. You look at how the oceans are important at the moment, and we're hearing about the nightmare of the oceans constantly.

And that only gets us so far. We know what we need to do. We know that we need to protect 30% of our ocean by 2030. The solutions are out there.

But we're moving too slowly. Can we fix it? Yes, we can. Are we able to?

I hope we can. We have to be optimistic. No offense. I like Lucy's answer better.

You too. Dan, try for some fascinating stuff here from Lucy Woodall and Oliver Steedes about the ocean. Do you have any oceanic discoveries to internet? Yeah.

One is that scientists have discovered that if you drop your shoes into the sea, the right foot will go one way and the left foot will go another. A consignment of Nike shoes fell off the back of a cargo. And slowly they've been washing up on various shores. But largely the left shoe is on one shore.

And the right shoe is going on the other. And it's all to do with asymmetry in the shoe in the way that the currents and winds send it. So that's a nice little nugget. And probably my favorite bit of ocean news from the year is that two students from Christ Church Academy in Florida swept out to sea and with no help in sight, they prayed to God to save them.

Soon after, they were saved by a passing boat called Amen. Oh, nice. Very nice. Dan, thank you.

Lucy Woodall, Oliver Steedes. Thank you so much for telling us about your mission. And would you please welcome our final guest this evening. He is, as chance would have it.

One of the men responsible for bringing the mayor of London's favorite soccer player, Muhammad Salah, to Liverpool. Would you please welcome the director of research at Liverpool Football Club, Mr. Ian Graham. Ian, great to have you here.

Congratulations on Champions League Trophy. I'm sure that was mostly you're doing. Yeah, about 80%. Let's start with the discovery idea.

Which football player would you claim as your favorite discovery? So it's important to say that signing a player is a multidisciplinary exercise. So you've got the traditional methods of scouting, some newer methods of video scouting, coaches of the manager have to be onboard and enthusiastic about the player. My role is the data analysis side of analyzing football, which is the newer side.

And the sorts of players that I really like are players who shine through in the data but don't naturally shine through for your typical football fan or even your team. These are sort of awkward, ungainly looking players or players that have been overlooked for various other purposes. One of my favorite players is Andy Robertson, our left back. One of the best back in Europe and the European champion of course.

And is he hardly ugly or something? What was the problem? No, so Andy Robertson's problem was his background as much as anything. So he only started playing English Premier League Football maybe at the age of 22.

He played for Hull City, which was not a very good football team. They got relegated from the Premier League and he was the best young fullback in Britain at the time. He was a really strange case of really attacking fullback, playing in a really poor defensive team. And which metrics particularly could you look at would identify that ability?

So we get data on every ball touch that every player makes in the game, where it was in the picture and will happen next. We can see where all of the players are 25 frames per second. It's done with optical tracking. Same technology that is used for missile tracking originally.

It's much easier to track a person than to missile and travel a little slower. Can you name just one or two on field metrics that are measurable that really matter a lot but which are not obvious to fans and maybe even managers and scouts but you can identify the data? That's a really good question. We try to put everything into one currency.

So football is measured in goggles because that's what gets you a win. So we try to take whatever action a player does on a picture, whether it's a pass or a shot or a tackle if you're a defender and ask the question, what was this team's chance to score a goal before this action happened? And then what was the team's chance of score a goal after that action happened? We call that goal probability added, which is a really catchy name.

And so the thing that I'm really upset about is the risk rewards pay off of passes. So some of the best passes in the game have some of the lowest pass completion percentages in the game. And that's because the risk reward payoff is very, very skewed in soccer or football. We are in London, not in New York.

So it's very easy to massage your statistics and get high pass completion percentage by playing very conservative passes that do nothing for your team's chances score in a goal. And the passes I really love are the passes that go in behind the opposition defence that take four or five defenders out of the game. Those passes are really hard to make. Someone who gets those passes correct half the time would be a world class attacking the field there.

That is really fascinating and a great illustration. Is it difficult to identify those high risk passes in the data? When we look through the lens of the data, it's not a perfect lens. You see a kind of smeared out view because you don't see all of the details of exactly how much pressure this player was under or exactly where the defenders were.

But the players who play a full season football attempt at that sort of pass or the good ones at least attempt at that sort of pass. Often enough that the low of large numbers come into play and you can get a good statistical reading of the player. So let me ask you this. You got a PhD in theoretical physics at Cambridge.

I don't even need to laugh at that part. It's a good thing of this. Yeah, no. But how do you go from that pursuit to analysing football?

A lot of luck and questionable career decisions is the answer. So I was doing a postdoc after my PhD and responded to an advert that asks would you like to do football statistics for a living? So it was pretty straightforward really. Yeah.

So let me just ask you a very basic question in your job, the director of research for the Football Club. In which way is analytics more important? On-field play, the actual game and the athletes or the allocation of resources when it comes to buying and selling players? So it can help a lot with both things but the place where it really can help is the acquisition of players in terms of helping out a scouting process.

In Premier League football and European football in general is a worldwide free market of football players. So if we spot a player that we would like to play for Liverpool and we can pay the price that the selling club demands, then we can buy him. And the real power of data analysis is when the data sets large. So we have detailed data on hundreds of thousands of players.

Maybe only 5% of those would be anywhere near a Premier League level player. But that's still 5,000 players which is two biggest set of players to scout everyone in depth and in detail. So we can really help that filtering and identification process. Now I understand that you played a role in hiring Jurgen Klopp, the manager of Liverpool now, correct?

Yes, a small role. Tell us about that quickly. And me and all my colleagues were huge fans of Jurgen and his Dortmund team in the early 2010s. They played the most exciting brand of football in Europe and come in from a place really not of financial dominance.

So they went to the German under the twice at a huge financial deficit compared to Bayern Munich. And so he was always one of our dream hires for manager. But his last season at Dortmund was disastrous. So they were in the relegation zone and the German media said it's all over for Dortmund, Klopp's lost it.

There's no way back for them. Aaron Alis has showed something quite different which was that they were still clearly the second best team in Germany. But the performances did not match the results. So I analysed ten seasons of Bundesliga performances and Dortmund were the second unluckiest team in that ten year history.

It was just some terrible luck cost Jurgen that one season. In addition to being a wildly successful manager with Liverpool and Dortmund before, Jurgen Klopp also appears to be an extraordinarily kind and thoughtful human being. Can you please tell us about something horrible that he's done? I'm going to have to disappoint you, right?

My concern about Jurgen was his act that you see on the cameras every week was just that an act and that the real person would be someone different. But it really isn't. That is disappointing. It's very disappointing.

I mean, digital analysis is something that is because it's new and football is a very conservative sport. It's something that is difficult to get across and it's very understandable for a manager and has a hundred other things to worry about to just say, you know what, I'm not interested in this. But Jurgen took the time and was kind enough to let me explain our approach. He understood it and appreciated it, which already puts him in the top five percent of managers in my opinion.

Okay, but I've got something on him. I've also read that when Klopp came to Liverpool and you needed a striker, that you brought to Klopp a list of what you thought were the ten best available strikers. And at the top of the list, I believe was Muhammad Salah, who at that point was playing for Roma. And Klopp came to you and said, this list, my friend Ian Graham, is not good enough.

We don't want those players. Give me more. You gave him more. Then he said, these are even worse.

And then went back and ultimately you did hire Mo Salah. So what did he not see that the rest of you did see and how much nicer was he to you after it all worked out well? So luckily enough in a aggressive way that Jurgen would have asked this question. I wasn't the person that he was demanding these answers from a reason role play.

I'll be you. And you be him. Sorry. I'll be the person who's not you that he's yelling at and you be him.

So I'm afraid my German accent would be culturally insensitive. Do you want to do it in a neutral... you're Welsh, yes. Do you want to just do it in neutral Welsh then and we'll imagine?

Well, I think so. The process that we go through is to... I can tell by your disembling you're not going to tell me, are you? Yeah.

I can be directed if you like. No. So Liverpool, you paid Roma $41 million for Salah, yes. I'm not sure the exchange rate is about right.

What's he worth? I realize he's only a year and a bit into a five-year contract. Yes, that's true. He's not for sale.

If he were, what's he worth on the transfer market right now, do you think? I think if we could benchmark him against a recent player that we sold that was Filipino to Barcelona, your minimum starting page would be 150 million years. Yeah. I wish the answer would be no.

Stop wasting our time. Last year he had a phenomenal year. One, the Champions League, came in second in the prem with enough points to have won in just about any other year. So there is this statistical concept we all know called regression to the mean, which suggested a particularly good result, or a particularly bad result, is usually followed by a more average result.

So considering your season last year, how many trophies do you think Liverpool wins this year? Well, I shall give you a straight answer. Just about half. Let me give you the details.

The book makes us kind of agree with our internal opinion, which is nice. So Premier League, 25%, Champions League, maybe 12 to 15%, League Cup, 12% Epic Cup, 12%. So the chances of at least one trophy is greater than 50%. Which trophy do you want more this year?

Premier League. Well, as a rational person, I should say the Champions League, because the income, the difference between winning the Champions League and semi-final, for example, absolutely dwarfs the difference between first and fourth in the Premier League. So, rationally, I'd take the Champions League. Does the director of research get a pretty nice cut from the Champions League victory?

A small cut. Do you want to tell us how small? I do not. Dan Schreiber, do you have some other football discoveries to share with us?

Yeah, I discovered that for the last 12 years, there's an annual football cup that's been played called the Tolstoy Cup. Have you heard of that Ian? I have no idea. It's amazing.

Okay, there's only two teams to play actually. It's the War Studies Department at Kings College London and the Peace Studies Department at the University of Radford. So they've met 12 times, Peace has beaten War, 8 Games to 4. And then this is, I got told this by a fellow researcher, I really hope it's true.

As part of a holistic training regime, footballers at Sweden's Uster Sun's football club are contractually obliged to read Dofda Yetstee. I don't know if that's put into your training with Liverpool. It's not mandatory. It's advisory.

Dan, good stuff. So Ian, I'm guessing you're not aware of this, but Freaknomics Radio actually sponsors a soccer team or football club. They're called Dunkau FC. They're in Shrewsbury.

And this began with an email out of the blue from the club's media manager and third string goalkeeper. His name is Alex Simpson, and we decided to sponsor the club when we realized that Alex Simpson was actually 15 years old at the time. And it worked up the gumption to write and ask for sponsorship. His dad is the team's manager and the star player on the team is his older brother.

So Dunkau, they are a Sunday League amateur club who are playing right now about 17 tiers below the Premier League, but they've received three promotions in the past few years. So it's possible that in 17 more years they'll be playing with you in the Premier League. And Alex Simpson is now studying history and politics at Keel University. He's actually here tonight.

And he's got something for you in Ram. Alex, would you come on up? So what we've got here is an official Dunkau FC jersey. It's a free economics radio logo on the breast and you can see on the back gram.

So before you actually take permanent ownership of it though Ian, let me ask Alex to ask you, Alex, I know that your ultimate goal is to get Dunkau all the way to the prem and you've got here a guy who probably has some good analytics software. He could maybe loan you. And I'm just curious if you have a shot here with Ian Graham and he's on the spot and you've just given him a beautiful free jersey with his name on it. I think you should try to get some info from him.

So we've just been building Oscar Wilde for the new season which starts next Sunday. And there's one position we think we're slightly could do with an extra body there, which is a quick centre back. You can also pay right back like Joe Gomez for Liverpool. So from your analytics side, what we should see in those players.

And you're playing the 17th tier of English football. So the fuel of data analysis is data. In the English game, our dates probably only goes down to the eighth level. We might know some names of players that low.

So in terms of specific recommendations, I'm stuck. You seem so nice up until this moment. Without data or nothing. I mean, my general observations about lower league football is that the level of quality flattens out quick.

So as you go down the levels, the impact of athleticism becomes higher and higher and higher. So just get big strong players who can run for 90 minutes because that's going to be a limiting factor. I am curious though, Alex, when you're trying to recruit players to an amateur team, you're dealing with different issues and just athleticism like reliability, right? 100%.

Yeah. And I know that even at the top level of all sports, there are athletes who are 100% on the physical ability scale and very low on the reliability scale. Yeah, absolutely. Do you have anything to help Alex scout for reliability?

That's a really good question. So, a few years ago, we did a study with an unnamed club's academy where we asked the players to rate themselves on talent and we asked the coaches to rate the players. And we also asked the players of the coaches of personality questionnaires to say, you know, are you strong minded? Are you punctual and so on?

And the correlation between the players self-rating of ability and the coaches rating of the players' ability was zero. The coaches' rating of ability was only correlated with ability to obey instructions and punctuality. So that's the way to get far, even after sort of good academy level, is to do what your coach says and turn up on time. That was not necessarily the best players.

So if you have a mercurial talent, as long as you can somehow get him on the pitch, they might be difficult to manage, but that's the sort of player that will be overlooked by your rivals. Alex, your dad, the manager, is former military. Does he do a pretty good job of getting people to show up and fall in line? Yeah, definitely.

We have one club rule for signing players, which is no t-ket. The problem is if everyone has that rule, there's going to be a surplus of really talented t-ket. They can really believe me. Oh, yes.

I love my job. I really do. I'm afraid, however, it's time for us to go. It has been a remarkably interesting evening, at least for me.

I very much hope for all of you as well. I have to say, I feel that our faith in the spirit of British discovery has been at least partially restored tonight. So thank you so much to all our guests, Ian Graham of Liverpool FC and Alex Simpson of Duncow FC, Lucy Woodall and Oliver Steedes of Nectin Mission, Oriel Sullivan of University College London, Sadik Khan, the mayor of London, the truly wonderful Dan Schreiber, but most of all thanks to all of you for listening this week and every week to Freakonomics Radio. Good night.

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio. Have you ever wanted to be a princess? There's a multi-billion dollar industry out there with some potentially massive side effects. Seeing the audience going, oh my gosh, am I destroying my daughter?

We'll hear from a teenager who happens to live in my house. So I would wear that yellow dress. I would wear it everywhere. Do you remember?

We'll hear from some researchers. You know, Hollywood is leaving money on the table. We'll hear from the head of Hollywood Studio. And then we started to realize, wait a second, we may have a tremendous opportunity here.

And we'll hear from the Hollywood actor who's been fighting this fight for a long time. I'll tell you what I'll blink. Yes. Yes.

That is Thelma from Thelma and Louise, known in real life as Genea Davis. Yes. In fact, I put that in my email to you in a subject. It was from Genea Davis, the actor, not some random Genea Davis.

What princessism has done to Hollywood and beyond. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode is produced by Matt Hickey, Alice in Craiglow, Greg Rippon and Harry Huggins.

Our staff also includes Zach Lipinski, Daphne Chen and Corin Wallace. Our intern is Ben Shaiman. We had help this week from Stephanie Tam. Thanks to everyone at Cuduggan Hall in London and a hat-tipped to Robert Cottrell of the browser for alerting us to the essay about Britain and integration by Costco von Kriegstein.

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