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When I found out I was going to be a parent, I immediately felt a lot of anxiety and worry.
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Visit betterhlp.com slash Freakinomics for 10% of your first month of therapy.
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
The other day, I sat back and I took a look at the work we've been putting out on Freakinomics Radio for the past few months.
I'm really proud of it. I think a lot of the episodes are very strong, but a lot of the topics are tough.
The continuing opioid epidemic, the political and economic issues around immigration, both legal and illegal,
the boom in fraud among academic researchers and how the private equity industry is making our economy ever more top-heavy.
Like I said, good episodes, but yeah, serious stuff.
Also, there are wars going on all over the place. Our former and maybe future president just became the first presidential felon.
I could go on and on, and I'm sure you could too.
So today, we are bringing you something a bit different, a bit lighter to head into summer.
Something to think about, maybe talk about on your cross-country road trip, or while you're working in the garden,
or maybe flying to another continent to visit family or go to a wedding or catch your breath.
As you know, we spend a lot of time on the show simply looking for interesting new things in the world and trying to explain them.
Today's guest is very good at finding such things, for instance.
There is this thing called Takubin.
If you're traveling around Japan, rather than hauling your bags from hotel to hotel, there's a whole system every hotel apparently has it,
you send an order and they ship your bags around for you.
I'd never heard of that before, and then you sort of think, well, why don't we have that?
Yeah, why don't we?
That I don't know. I only know the facts, nothing else.
Today, on Fricking Amics Radio, facts that will make you think twice that may make you grimace or laugh,
that will hopefully help you catch your breath and look at this wondrous, weird world of ours in a slightly new way.
This is Fricking Amics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Alright, first things first. A proper introduction is in order.
Tom Whitwell, I am a consultant and a... you've probably stuck with my difficult question, first of all.
Okay, let me help out a bit.
Tom Whitwell works at a London consulting firm called Magnetic. They specialize in innovation and design.
Not your usual consultants is how they put it.
Among the clients that Whitwell has worked with are National Grid, the big UK Power Company,
Vogue Business, a spin-off from the Fashion Magazine, and the Candy and Chocolate Company Mars,
which, as we will learn in today's episode, also makes something that is very much not Candy or Chocolate.
Before he got into consulting, Whitwell was a journalist with magazines and with the Times of London.
He also designs Electronic Musical Instruments, some of which have been bought by Tom York, a radiohead.
But none of that is why we're speaking with Tom Whitwell today.
We're speaking with Tom Whitwell today because of another thing he does.
Every year I write a list called 52 Things I Learned.
Whitwell has been publishing his list of 52 Things he's Learned every year for the past 10.
He publishes it himself on the blogging platform medium, but then it ricochets all around the interweb,
or at least certain precincts of it, where it is greeted with enthusiasm and wonder.
It is a weird list in the best way.
Nearly all the items are at the very least informative and interesting, summer sad, but summer joyful.
The joy is generated by, as Richard Feynman might have said, the pleasure of finding things out.
And for Whitwell himself, the pleasure of sharing these things.
The items are short, pithy, word perfect.
Here's one from last year's list.
Only 28 books sold more than 500,000 copies in the US in 2022.
Eight of them were by romance novelist Colleen Hoover.
Here's one from the 2015 list.
In China, cigarette companies are allowed to sponsor schools, with slogans like,
genius comes from hard work, tobacco helps you become talented.
And this one from 2021.
10% of US electricity is generated from old Russian nuclear warheads.
As a consultant, Whitwell engages with a wide variety of topics.
I asked if most of his 52 things are a byproduct of his day job.
There's certainly bits where part of the job means I will be immersed in one particular subject for a few months.
And then another subject for a few months afterwards.
I think if I went back and looked over the years, I would say,
that's why I was doing an electricity project.
Well, that's where I was doing a fashion project.
How much do you enjoy your day job?
I enjoy it a lot.
The variety is the key thing.
Typically, a project might last three weeks to about six months.
So every few months, you're fundamentally changing your in a completely different environment.
A couple of months ago, we were asked to help Mars, who produce chocolate and pet food.
They have a chain of stores around.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to laugh, but somehow chocolate and pet food in the same sentence.
Exactly.
I mean, I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that's why I think that
and they came to us and said we want to be sure we're using the best technology to track them to monitor them to understand what they're doing and we want somebody to just spend a little bit of time looking around the market and suggesting different ways you might do this and so I spent two weeks or something researching that area how do people track animals how do they understand what they're doing how do they monitor them.
So a project like that gives you an opportunity to find pet related facts that might appear on the list of 52 things you learned that year.
Yeah. One year has a piece about weightlifting dogs and that came from some research we were doing for Mars who I hasn't
throughout us any not considering weightlifting dogs as a things trans cell.
Oh, you mean a person lifting a dog? I was imagining a dog on a bench press.
No dogs lifting weights dogs wearing for example weighted little waist coats dogs having protein shakes dog influences who are big musily dogs who advertise dog protein shakes.
And I think there's some kind of yard equipment that are good for dogs to lift things up. So essentially dogs bench pressing things.
I see and is that something that the dogs choose to do?
I didn't get too deeply into that. I discovered this thing existed. I was asked in that to say let's look at the outside edge.
What are the strangest things that pet parents are doing? Something like that will leak over into 52 things because if I'm spending a few weeks researching something like that,
I will normally find quite a lot of interesting things and store them away to put in the list.
Whitwell has a history of curating odd and interesting things back in the 2000s. I wrote a blog when people had blogs called music thing that was all about here are interesting funny weird pieces of music equipment.
Can you give a couple examples? It's kind of endless. There is an enormous installation on the coastline, which are pipes that are played by the waves coming in and going out.
There's a big music conference called NAMM, which is the big trade show. And every year you will find extraordinary things that people invent to do music, whether it's quadruple nectar guitars or folding drum kits or whatever it is.
It's one of those areas where lone entrepreneurs and inventors can come up with things and they can find a big audience and they can get things out there.
Okay, so take us through the origins of your 52 things I learned list in 2014. I had left the times I'd fallen out with the editor and it became clear and it's a different job.
While I was unemployed and looking around for things to do, I had this idea of collecting things that I'd found during the year.
I was always a fan of the Lister colors genre and my ambition for it was that I was obviously looking for a job. So I was looking for ways to kind of reach out for people in London who I could reach out to.
And I thought, well, if I can get a thousand people to look at this, then that would feel like out of that a few of those people are going to be people who might be able to offer me a job.
So it was kind of a creativity resume or ingenuity resume. Maybe you're showing people what your brains interested in hoping they'd be interested in your brain too.
Yeah, it was exactly that or it was content marketing for me, I suppose.
Can you describe the you know, either the characteristics of something you discovered that you know will be a good link or maybe the emotion you feel or the cognitive jolt you get when you come upon something that you know will be good.
The simplest thing is it's probably something that is counterintuitive. It's not what you expect. It's something that maybe seems to have some slightly bigger resonance, but it doesn't have to.
How much do you care about a sort of news peg if you sent yourself something in February that was on a topic like transportation safety and then that year there happened to be a bunch of bridges collapse. I assume you tend to gravitate toward the peggy things.
Not really not. I probably do ignore that completely. The news peg. There was something that always slightly frustrated me working in newsrooms.
And there will often be stories that are you know two years old five years old ten years old they don't need to all have been published. That year at all I don't really pay any attention to that.
Let's go to 2022 52 things you learned in 2022. This is item number 30. By the way, is there any relevance to the order just shuffling really try make sure the first ten are really good.
And then there reasonably random city that three similar ones. So number 30 from the year 2022 was in the 1920s new car sales were falling. So the industry promoted the term J walking to blame accidents on pedestrians rather than aggressive drivers.
That is such an appealing catnipy item on so many levels so talk me through it and what I really want to know is how confident we are that that is in its totality true.
With something like that the question is is this clickbait or is this a real thing. And I would be very confident that was true because I was going to say red I haven't read I flipped through the book fighting traffic by Peter de Norton which is all about the early years of the car industry.
The critical point seems to have been in around 1922 23 24 when it wasn't to decline in sales was a decline in growth. At the same time there was this feeling that cars were pretty dangerous people were getting killed by them.
There was a petition in Cincinnati to limit the speed of cars to 25 miles an hour which I thought was interesting because at the moment the speed limit across most of London is 20 miles an hour. So car companies saw that this was a problem.
And this notion of J walking which should have evolved I think organically as a word really the idea that people were kind of country bumpkins and they were walking around.
And they didn't know that there was big car zooming past and a J was a word used by whom to mean what I think it meant country folk kind of rustics American it was an American in American yeah this is all American I think before then roads were for people if you look at pictures of roads before cars.
You had big wide roads and they were full of people and horse drawn vehicles basically I suppose they look in some ways like when you see pictures of Chinese roads in the 80s when you see enormous torrents of bicycles going across but you wouldn't see cars in this idea that.
The curb was a barrier that must not be stepped across I think the really nice explanation this was when the idea of J walking came along.
The pedestrian felt they were wrong they felt they were wrong to be in the road that the road no longer belong to them it belonged to cars exactly car firms would hire boy scouts to give cards the pedestrians saying we're new era this is old fashioned what you're doing don't be a J don't be a J don't cross the road like that.
And how strong is the evidence that it was actually the auto industry that built and encouraged this movement to the point where laws were written forbidding it.
I am only basing my evidence on Mr. Norton's book but he tells a very clear story that's the relationship between the American automobile association and the National Safety Council got closer and there's a guy called Charles Price who had worked for the National Safety Council and he was the person who came to the industry and said you need to own safety.
For example go into schools and say we're going to teach people road safety road safety meant get out the road is not for you.
So how did J walking laws come about and was any segment of the auto industry directly affiliated with that I don't know exactly that I think they came in it's funny coming from the UK.
This whole concept of J walking is alien to us we have no law like that but pedestrians do seem to be quite obedient in the UK because there are crossing lights and all things like that yeah we just don't have laws about it no policeman will ever go and tell somebody off or give them a ticket for crossing the road to be fair I think that almost never happens in America the only time that's ever happened to me in my life and I J walk always everywhere was in Vancouver.
And I wasn't even crossing mid block I was crossing at the intersection against the light there was no traffic and someone you know stopped me and I laughed.
I mean from reading about it it does seem like people like you or me are generally not stopped for J walking.
I have read that there was a department of justice report on the Ferguson Missouri police department the place where Michael Brown was killed by a police officer which became a flashpoint in racial policing.
So that 95% of the people there cited for J walking are black. I don't know what share the population there is black but still that sounds like an aggressively high number.
I'm curious what kind of feedback you received or additional information maybe about J walking when you publish that piece.
I don't remember I mean you got to remember that piece was what 14 words so I don't think I saw anything particularly with that I mean there's a sort of thread of those kinds of stories.
The kind of story where an industry or a company or maybe a government is behind something that you may think emerged naturally is that what you mean by that kind of story.
Exactly that one of my favorite ones which was a fact checking challenge but I do think was probably true.
The way I wrote it up was that fondue was invented by the cheese industry which does seem to be more or less true in that fondue did exist as a kind of niche Swiss dish but the Swiss cheese industry extensively promoted the idea that this was something that families in America might be doing and that you could buy a fondue set.
Another item in this category then of inventions that come from perhaps interested sources rather than disinterested sources would be your item about the invention of the carbon footprint.
Yeah this was really interesting so this was in I think 2001 BP British petroleum it was called BP amaco previously it used to be British petroleum they even changed their name didn't they.
They called it beyond petroleum I'm not certain if that was actually their official company name or if that was their slogan but there was a great piece by one of the ad executives who worked on it who said how oil company advertising always used to be aimed essentially at investors and the industry and it generally consisted of helicopter shots of oil tankers with somebody with a kind of Morgan Freeman.
Morgan Freeman voice saying we're working hard to help the world work hard or something like that that was the way all companies were advertised and then come 2000 and you've got the real beginnings of concern about I mean not the beginnings of concern about global warming but more and more of that and I think at this stage the only all company that
global warming was a real thing was BP and their advertising switched completely instead of these kind of helicopters shots and we're making the world go round they went out onto the streets and they interviewed people talking about climate change and talking specifically about their part in climate change and what they should do.
And they created a calculator so you could go on and tap in stuff about your lifestyle and how many holidays you went on this kind of thing and you're saying this carbon footprint calculator was created for BP by its ad agency the very famous Ogilian May there is that right yeah you got some kind of some for how much weight of carbon you were responsible for.
It just seems like such an interesting and tell tale shift the idea from we are the company is making the world go round to as soon as that becomes kind of problematic or questioned it's now we're interested in you and your responsibility and what you as a consumer doing it does strike me as interesting if not paradoxical that you a consultant who helps firms do a variety of things but especially change
behavior either their own behavior or the behavior their customers and so on are highlighting in many of your items the fact that advertisers marketers and firms are trying to change behavior in order to suit their own needs without those
needs being obvious I suppose so I'm not somebody works in marketing I may be slightly more skeptical about marketing than some people when you say you may be slightly more skeptical why is that something like the J walking story or the carbon footprint story I think is amazing in how it genuinely changes the way
we as individuals perceive the whole playing field it's not like you're thinking product X is better than product Y there's that famous story about when they're trying to get women to smoke cigarettes and the idea of torches of freedom which is to encourage women to that feels quite direct
but the entire notion of how we interact with the street being changed by a marketing campaign feels amazing to me how many people each day thinking slightly differently as they walk along the pavement because of that campaign a hundred years ago
after the break more echoes of the past and perhaps more harbingers of the future I'm Stephen Dubner this is Freakinna McTradio and we will be back with Tom Whitwell right after this
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Tom Whitwell is a collector of interesting facts he spends his year reading widely websites and blogs newspapers and magazines books and journals
and then he presents his harvest each December in a list of 52 items most items are short just a sentence or two often they have nothing to do with the previous year for instance this one about even betuta the medieval explorer
when even betuta visited China in 1345 facial recognition was already in use all visiting foreigners had their portraits discreetly painted and posted on the walls of the bizarre here's another when users download the Kenyan mobile loans app
oh cash the software's terms and conditions quietly give it permission to access their contacts if they fall behind in repayments the app starts to message all those contacts to shame the user into repaying the debt
Whitwell's skill at distilling a long thing into a short thing comes from his time as a magazine editor
it was almost a bit like you know pull quotes and magazines where you've got a magazine article you find the little quote that is the important bit from the article
that important bit is then reprinted in a bigger font inside the body of the article this acts as a sort of billboard or secondary headline for the article
and that's the thing that often gets read far more than anything else because people don't read the body copy but they scan over and read the pull quote
often what I was doing was reading an article online and then finding the pull quote and keeping that in a list keeping a store of that
given the state of AI in 2024 if I give chat GPT or perplexity a 2000 word article and I give Tom Whitwell the same article
do you think you'll do better at finding what might be judged to be the best pull quote or worse
I've tried this quite a lot I've done experiments with this over the years I think I would probably have a pretty good chance of finding a more interesting more distinctive take
I've done things like obviously asking GGBT to come up with things for the list and it can cart with fictional ones that are kind of fine
but obviously the fact that fictional does make them a lot less interesting than if they were real I think I the moment does seem to struggle to find that sort of quirkiness and distinctiveness
let's go to 2017 item number 18 the NHS National Health Service that's the British National Health System uses more than 10% of all pages in the world
tell me about that how much we trust that claim etc
so this is a really really interesting one so 2017 I saw an article in the economist that had this stat in it
and because it was the economist I trusted it I put it on the list after 2017 it became a sort of political issue in the UK
the fact that we were using pages somehow showed that the NHS was not in a good state it was not being well managed
in 2019 the government put out a press release that said pages are going to be banned by 2021
they did say they're going to be banned except for emergencies which obviously in a hospital context is quite a large loophole I think
and obviously between 2019 and 2021 quite a lot happened in the healthcare sphere
so I don't think a tremendous amount has really happened with this I think there are still a lot of pages in use in the NHS
now the pro-pager people argue that it does fill a gap right that it can be more reliable under certain circumstances
less prone to dead spots and so on what do you know about that I think like anything it's a combination of
there's issues around the technology and then there's issues around culture and etiquette and how it works
I think these are also quite poorly understood so I was talking to my dad my dad used to be a hospital doctor
he started working hospitals in 1968 and he said they had pages then these battery powered handheld devices that would go off
and then you had to run and ring a number and they worked on a private radio network within the hospital
in the UK they called bleeps which I always think is quite sweet
I just found this really interesting I actually spoke to a doctor called Constantino Regas
who's an NHS doctor in Southampton and he previously sent free of information requests to every NHS trust in the country
to say how many pages are using how much are you spending on it what are you doing with it
he's definitely anti-pager
because why he said it's a weird legacy aberration he would talk about you're on an eight hour shift
you finally get a chance to go to the bathroom and then you get bleeped you have to run and it turns out it's a nurse
who wanted you to prescribe some paracetamol somebody who's going to be discharged tomorrow
so that he found very frustrating he said different wards were different some were good some
yet the phrase bleeped incessantly which I imagine must be very irritating
but he also talked about having a crash bleep so this is where you are a doctor around the hospital or a nurse around the hospital
you have this thing on you and it bleeps and you have to run to save somebody's life
literally I read an interview with a finally a medical student who said
the first time I carried a crash bleep I was more self aware I felt older and more responsible
and I'd ever felt in a clinical setting so there's a kind of status thing but there's also etiquette
you need a method to gather people you need a method to communicate with the hospital
and some people do that well and some people do that badly
and that frustration has been mapped on to a particular device
which I think is unfair I am in some ways pro-pager
the basic story with the NHS uses 10% of remaining pages
I would imagine the other 90% are in American hospitals
so whether or not that 10% is accurate and I've seen it challenged on a couple dimensions
but whether or not that's accurate the fact is that if you look around the world a little bit
you do see that older technologies often have long and productive after lives
can you talk about any other technologies that you see that are used maybe not so prominently
but seriously that one might think had disappeared
facts machines are still used in Japan quite a lot
my assumption is that is something to do with handwriting
and having a very complicated script that may be wrong
what about computer programming that is in languages that almost nobody learns anymore?
that absolutely is an issue
cobalt is one of those languages and you often see stories where
a particular organization it might be an old pension fund
has that requirement that they need to hire people to bring those things left
the other big one is floppy disks
I think until very recently there were systems on Boeing 747s
that relied on floppy disks
these legacy systems do exist and often work well
they are often just fine with the pages
the idea that you can spend an awful lot of money
tearing out one system and putting in another system
is an idea that people who sell systems often promote you
in that press release when the pages were banned
part of their evidence was they said there are 130,000 pages in the NHS
and it is costing 6.6 million pounds a year
you hear that and you go well that sounds bad until you realize that's 50 pound per
page per year it is less than a pound a week
for a critical healthcare piece of infrastructure
it is probably the best bargain ever
here is an item from your 2023 list that I was particularly interested in
item number 5 says job satisfaction in the US is at a 35 year
high not low which is what I think everybody would be expecting
you're right that in 2010 less than 45% of people said they were
satisfied with their jobs from in 2022
over 62% said they were and you're right further that
you need to go back to the 80s to find satisfaction is high
as today
talk to me about that first of all were you as surprised as I was to read that number
I was really surprised by that
it was at a time when we had high inflation
a real sense of uncertainty in the economy and uncertainty in people's
careers it did absolutely seem just really counterintuitive how can this be
right there obviously are other surveys
this was the survey by the conference board
which is funded by whom or represents whom
it's an American organization I don't know an enormous amount about it
but it does seem to be a very large and well trusted industry body
and the things people were satisfied were the people they work with
commuting more than 65% of people were satisfied with commuting which I found
interesting job security physical environment
but what I found really interesting was the sort of change
so over the last maybe 10 years
one of the big changes has been in performance reviews
which I was just interested because it's such a sort of unglamorous part of
working life no politician has ever stood up and said I've got a grand vision
for performance reviews and this is how I'm going to change the world
but this survey suggests that there is a real fundamental shift in the last
just 10 years that you've got millions of people
who were made unhappy by that process
who now are happier and more satisfied
I think we've all met people and possibly had experience
yourself of those old school performance reviews
where once a year you go and sit with your boss
and they would say something that annoyed you or made you think
they really don't understand who I am at all
they don't understand what I do in this company
and you are furious for the next six months
and that idea that training in HR
is actually fixing things like that
I found counterintuitive and really interesting
I do see that the conference board is a non-profit
and non-partisan research group
made up of over a thousand public and private corporations
and other organizations in come six to the countries
maybe it's not so surprising that a firm representing big corporations
says hey guess what people at corporations are actually
much happier than you think but let's assume that there's some truth
in these numbers
I'm curious to know what it may say about the rise
and or triumph of the HR department in firms
do you think it's kosher to make that kind of connection?
That's how I understood it
I do think that that is an area which has said
is very unglamorous and rarely celebrated
but it's a place where there are people who are very committed
to what they're doing and they're experimenting and they're changing
like instead of having one big annual review
we should have continuous assessment
these sorts of things
those ideas spread in five, ten years
and they seem to work a lot better
So this is about job satisfaction in the US
what can you tell us about in your country, the UK?
I don't know because I haven't read a survey
as extensive as this
I think the real challenge is that
counter-intuitive split between
a kind of national narrative
which certainly in the UK is of quite a lot of doom and gloom at the moment
for a whole range of reasons
considerably more than the US at the moment
as much as ours may feel gloomy
Yeah I think there's a classic newsroom thing
which is something that is bad and critical
is reportable and is interesting and is seen as important
something that is this is improved by five percent since last year
is almost impossible to report
and that's not because there's a grand conspiracy stopping it
it's just very hard to make that sort of story work
but after a few years of five percent improvements
you really start to get a change in the way people work
and people feel an impassiveness
Here's to finding happiness
wherever it can be found
after the break
if someone tells you they are 100 years old
should you believe them
I'm Steven Dubner
this is Freakonomics Radio
we'll be right back
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Given that we are in the sixth month of the year
in our 12 month Gregorian calendar
Tom Whitwell is roughly halfway through collecting items
for his 52 things I learned list for this year
Can you give us any kind of preview of 2024
or do you not do that or would it be impossible even if you wanted to do that?
Well let me just look in my 52 things folder
and see what I've posted in recently
one that I saw just last week was
there is a wonderful graph of
it's not a wonderful graph
there is a fascinating graph of global deaths from disasters
what's really striking with this is how much it varies
there's a really interesting thread about how we are getting much better
coping with those kind of disasters
so there's a period from 2016 to 2021
when it was extremely low
Okay I'm looking at this graph now too
and I see that in 2023 there was a spike
we go from it looks like an average of around 35,000 deaths per year
from natural disaster then 2023 was like a tripling of that
so the point here is that life in this category is extremely random yes?
It is but the thing I find interesting is that idea
that there are ways that we are getting better at some of these
so there's a whole thing about typhoons in place like Bangladesh and India
where they spend a lot of money building big concrete shelters
that he used to schools during the normal periods
but then everyone piles in and the deaths in some of those things have gone
from being tens hundreds of thousands of people dying to much, much smaller
I really appreciate that you seem to be a person who generally looks for
you know the best in people or the world
but in one case in your list from 2023
item number 15 you are basically calling a bunch of
sweet cuddly old people a bunch of liars
you write the number of super centenarians in an area
tends to fall dramatically about 100 years after
accurate birth records are introduced
walk me through this one please I'm especially interested to learn how much
lying or maybe misremembering or uncertainty there may be
for people who think they're over a hundred years old when in fact they're not
so this is an amazing story one of the things I always look at
with these lists is something where it's a little tiny
nudge you know it's a few lines but if you go and get into it
you will discover this extraordinary rabbit hole
and that's what I've done with this business of
super centenarians a lot of this relates to in the mid-2000s
this idea came about around blue zones
if you were somebody who read Sunday supplements of newspapers
or if you watched national geographic
they spend a lot of time talking about blue zones which were areas where
people lived remarkably long like a hundred and ten years old
they talk about eating beans drinking red wine
not too much food little amounts of meat
natural exercise not going to the gym but you know gardening
having friends having a sense of purpose
a couple of academics Italian and French academics I think identified an area in
sardinia that they felt had unusual longevity
all the astra it's gold yes one of the things I thought seeing this very
casually I thought the blue zones referred to like blue skies and
blue sea it's just the software they used to draw the graph
put a blue circle around that area anyway they wrote this paper
they had a few suggestions in the original paper about what might be causing
this longevity which was slightly odd they were to do with
inbreeding and genetics and a lot of it was about male and female
longevity being different a lot of that got lost because the paper
caught the attention at the guy called Dan butner
he started his career running celebrity croquet tournaments
he then did these three enormous transcontinental bike rides
where he rode across the Americas and Soviet Union
and I've got in with national geographic discovered this report
and in 2008 published his book called Secrets of the Blue Zones
or something like that with these kind of instructions around eating beans
and drinking red wine and this has been an incredibly successful
notion who's on Oprah just last year he had a Netflix series about this
but if we all sat around eating tomatoes and garlic sitting in the sun
drinking wine with our friends we would live to be 110
and you Tom Whitwell are here to tell us this is kind of all bullshit
well it's not me it's an academic at Oxford called Soul Newman
he's a demographer so he's been publishing a pre-print of a paper
he published it first I think in 2019 and he's updating it updating it so
it gets kind of longer and longer and I can't say I've ever read any other
papers about developmental biology but if they're all like this
I want to read more than because this is an extraordinary document
he just tears the entire thing to pieces from beginning to end
so a centenarian if somebody lives past a hundred
a super centenarian if somebody lives past 110
soles point is really that this is all not true he says in Europe
where birth records are generally pretty well recorded so in the US
they've always been very poorly recorded I don't think birth certificates
we use nationally until 1946 in the US but in Europe they were pretty well recorded
and these were usually state records or church records or family records
I think in small areas they were sort of community records I guess
he says remarkable longevity is predicted if you want to find
areas of remarkable longevity and this is like 110 and above
you look for areas with poverty, low per capita incomes,
short life expectancy, high crime rates, worse health, higher deprivation
as he says relative poverty and short lifespan constitute
unexpected predictors of centenarian and super centenarians latest
so his hypothesis is that these figures are not true
and are they not true primarily because of actual fraud
lying people saying something that they know to not be true
or the lack of good records or just general uncertainty
I think it's a combination but probably fraud is a big part of it
the way I imagine this is you're living in a small rural town in remote Greece or Italy
somebody comes to you with an idea they say I've got a mate who works in the council
and if we pay a bit of money he can change your age so that you as a 50-year-old
and now 60 so you get your pension
so it's not just you turn whatever 91 and you start telling people yeah I just hit
100 just for pride you're saying this was financially driven fraud sometimes
this is the suggestion I got much darker much faster than I expected to I thought
it was just lovely old people exaggerating a little bit but you're saying they're
shakedown artists and there's lots of other things I think there's probably stuff around
insurance where you'd get you know much cheaper insurance if your age was different
and then there's also these complicated family situations where you might not want
the crazy cousin to inherit the farm so it's very useful if the mother becomes
the grandmother or vice versa or children where the parenting of the child is slightly complicated
so there are a lot of possible things that and this isn't unknown
so 2012 after the financial crisis in Greece
20,000 people who were getting pension payments or welfare had that stopped
they were obviously investigating government spending because they were dead
mostly a quick side note Whitwell got the number wrong here on the number of
Greeks who lost their benefits it wasn't 20,000 it was 200,000
all right moving on you might say well that's Greece but what about Japan
which generally has you know much stronger records in 2010
230,000 Japanese centenarians were discovered to be missing
imaginary clerical errors or dead this was an 82% error rate
and what are the blue zones in Japan? Okinawa is the blue zone in Japan
World War II was not good for Okinawa supposedly about 90% of their paper
records were destroyed after the war if you needed documents
you would go to the US led military government they didn't really speak a great deal of Japanese
and they use a different calendar from the one in Japan so the opportunities for
confusion were significant in those places where there are supposedly a lot of
older people much older people are there particular days of the month or
months of the year were suspicious birthdays tend to cluster for instance
there is a lot of that things like people are born on the first of the month
which just suggests that it's probably been kind of chucked in rather than
thought about in too much detail but the paper is relentless it just goes on
and on and on things like in France there are 19 people over the age of 110
in the overseas departments so that's Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana
Paris is population is 7 times larger and it has 17 of these people
which suggests that fraud of this sort if it's fraud is easier in certain
precincts than in others where the record keeping is very different?
Yeah, fraud or just chaos but there is more so there's another big factor in this
his argument is that it's very unlikely that really anyone is 110
it's very very unlikely that there are clusters of people who are 110 in
very poor areas with low life expectancy but he then goes back to look at
the main argument of this blue zones movement is that people live a
long time because they live what seem like healthy lives and he looks into
these areas to find how well they align with those healthy lives
Okinawa is the one he chooses so one of the claims is people in these areas
they don't go to the gym but they live in environments that are nudging
them to move without thinking about it they have gardens that sort of thing
unfortunately Okinawa out of 47 prefectures in Japan has the highest
rate of obesity and it's not the lowest for gardening because not
surprising Tokyo and Osaka are lower but it's the lowest after them so
they're not healthy and they're not gardening now it's possible that
there was a cohort however yes that was you know an older cohort that did
garden or that is not obese right we shouldn't know that is certainly
possible I mean if you look at cohorts another of his is they have a
concept called Ikegae which means kind of purpose in life and where I get up
in the morning unfortunately Okinawa has the fourth highest rate of suicide
in over 65s in the country it's not a very happy place generally
he goes through all of these things like their meat consumption the
idea is that people in these blue zones eat very small amounts of meat
maybe five kilos of meat a year in Okinawa the average is 40 kilos
Okinawa residents each consume an average of 14 cans of spam per year
well it could be that spam has some magical longevity properties that we
don't know about yet because that wasn't what he was telling Oprah I don't
think it's not like the blue zones thing is evil the advice does seem quite
sensible I'm sure we should all eat more vegetables we should have a better
social life I do worry about connection between the idea that very poor
people living on very very mega resources can magically live a long
time in the problem with that supposition is what well it's that
actually the opposite is true so rich people live longer rich
countries the average life expected disease 80 plus poor countries it's 60
plus it's not mysterious or subtle so what has been the response of
Dan butner and the pro blue zone crowd I have not been able to find any yet
there has certainly been back and forth with the early versions of the
paper I think the stuff that the blue zone organization is doing it's
not like it's a terrible thing but it does feel from reading this like
the basis of the research is it's probably quite a lot more complicated
the blue zones organization did in fact issue a response to Saul Newman's
critique attacking his analysis along a variety of dimensions for instance
even though some blue zones are high poverty areas people there do they
wrote enjoy very good or excellent public health services
Saul Newman then responded to their response here's a quote it was
basically what you'd expect if you told the yeti hunting society that
yetis did not exist is there a link or three from the past that
you are just exceedingly proud of or happy about I don't know about
proud of a happy about when you ask that there are some that seem to
kind of take on a life well it's more that they sort of makes it so
I remember I think in probably the first one there was a story that
China has completed a major dam project for every day since 1949
which to me just seemed like such an extraordinary way of understanding
the worlds and kind of ambition and scale are there topics or
types of ideas that you avoid there's definitely a kind of positive
thing I remember quite clearly in 2016 doing the list and thinking
actually this feels quite important to do a list that is full of
you know progress and things that are good in the world's because
why 2016 why because we had Brexit and Trump essentially and
so there was such a strong narrative amongst people often on
the internet of just doom and gloom everything is terrible in the
world and you are constantly seeing stories and suggestions and
evidence of things being terrible and trying to find those
stories that were about progress or growth or improvement those I felt
were important
can you just describe the process a little bit I'm curious how formal it
is I'm curious how it unspools during the year and whether
you're diligently reading and saving up links and maybe even coming up
with way more than 52 that you have to weed down or is it the opposite
you find that in November December there's this rush to get enough how
does it work so I do it during the year the way I do it now is when I
find a link I email it to myself with the words 52 things in the
title my Gmail has a filter it drops them all into a folder and
then come November there's usually a hundred or so in there and
I just start going through it and in the cold light of days some
that excited you no longer excite you I assume yeah absolutely and
some I will have sent myself an article that kind of seems interesting
but doesn't you know I hadn't actually worked out what the fact is I
am glad that Tom Whitwell has taken it upon himself to work out what
all the facts are and I'm always delighted to read his annual
list of 52 things maybe we'll check in with him again at the end of
this year to see what he's come up with thanks to Tom for the good
conversation today and thanks to you as always for listening if you
have learned some good things so far this year send them along I'd
like to hear them our email is radio at Frekenomics dot com coming up
next time on the show if you are someone who used to go to the
theater but is kind of given up on it you're not alone but there is
a new play on Broadway a play that like Tom Whitwell's list is
weird in all the right ways called stereophonic it's the one all the
rock stars are going to see the Tony Awards are coming up and stereophonic
may bring home a bunch of them we will find out why the show works the
way it does and what that might mean for the future of Broadway that's
next time until then take care of yourself and if you can someone
who's to Frekenomics radio is produced by stitcher and Renbud
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where we also publish transcripts and show notes this episode was produced by
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