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Episode 303 • 6th July 2022 • Cognitive Engineering • Cognitive Engineering
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Why is YouTube full of documentaries and Netflix packed with drama? Which comes first, the medium or the content?

In this week’s podcast, we traverse the history of media consumption, examine YouTube consumer behaviour and explore the differences between traditional programming and the production of YouTube videos. We debate whether we are living in a golden age of series drama and speculate on where you might find the next media growth area. We end by sharing our concept ideas for YouTube channels of the future.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]



This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:

Podtrac - https://analytics.podtrac.com/privacy-policy-gdrp

Transcripts

Speaker A:

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I am here with Tom Spence, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing why there's no drama on YouTube. Nick, why is there no drama on YouTube?

Speaker B:

Well, I don't know. Thank you for listening. I, but let's start by making the claim that there isn't. Okay. So let me just fill you in on that. Yeah. I'm quite, I like a bit of YouTube. I subscribe to lots of channels on YouTube.

Speaker A:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

And it occurred to me only the other day that I've almost entirely stopped watching any drama at all. Like, you know, you know, like actors pretending to be characters. Yeah. And pretending to converse with them. Yeah. But they're not really, what they're doing is they're reciting a script. It's not their words. No. Exactly.

Speaker C:

He only watches the Kardashians now.

Speaker A:

So I want to interrupt you. Sorry. And we'll definitely come back to this briefly. Let's just say, what do you watch on YouTube? Because I refer to it quite a lot and actually I'll kick, I mean, I do it for me. YouTube is a kind of how to thing. Right. So I've got lots of how to play banjo, how to play ukulele, how to play guitar, I think. And then I've got lots of stuff to do with barbecue and pizza cooking. Okay. That's how I use YouTube. Have I come into this too early? I don't know.

Speaker B:

Well, so the things that I tend to watch are sort of mathsy theory type things. Okay. Board game reviews. Cooking. Yeah. Quite a lot of cooking people. Not people. No, not actually cooking people. That's a very niche channel. But I think the ones I really like, the ones that release very infrequently, sort of every six months and are really, really good at talking about one particular thing. Okay. So the three that come to mind are a guy called Ahoy, who does these documentaries about computer games and the history of computer games. Okay. And they're incredibly well done, really well researched. And you get about an hour of him every six months. There's a guy called Let Me Know, who does these really well-made documentaries about specific, weird, interesting cultural phenomena. It's a great coincidence he was born with that name, wasn't it? Jay Foreman, who does this series. He's been doing this series for about 10 years called Unfinished London. And every one is about a specific, weird aspect of London's sort of urban landscape and why it's like it is. But yeah, so it's a wide variety of things, but all documentaries.

Speaker A:

Okay. So knowledge gain for both of us. Mine's more how-to, yours is more kind of like researchy, educative. Chris?

Speaker C:

ostalgia, mainly. So a lot of:

Speaker A:

Okay. All right.

Speaker C:

And Jordan Peterson keeps getting thrust to me. I must have watched about five minutes of Jordan Peterson in my life. And now every time I open up, it's like, do you want to watch, you know, Jordan Peterson destroy Cathy Newman or something?

Speaker A:

Tom, there's no point asking you. You're all about TikTok, I know. No, I'm not even on TikTok. So tell us, Tom.

Speaker D:

I'm old and wizened now.

Speaker A:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what are you watching on YouTube?

Speaker D:

A mixture of some of the things you've described. I do like a bit of a bit of football highlights, whether they're kind of old highlights from, you know, for me, more kind of 90s and noughties games or new ones. I like a good cooking video. Again, not cooking of people, but cooking by people. I also have a soft spot for a kind of slow TV equivalent on YouTube. So, you know, an hour long video of a man making a shed in silence. Oh, it's exceptionally soothing. Just all you hear is just the maybe a bit of sawing. Lovely.

Speaker A:

OK, what an interesting group we are. Actually, also, I quite like old BBC documentaries about Royal Marines, things like that. I like that kind of stuff. OK, nice. How to play the banjo and old documentaries about Royal Marines. Nick, I'm so sorry.

Speaker B:

I completely cut you off and go through, pick up wherever you were. Well, I think that's proved the point, really, which is that, you know, if you where do I watch dramas? Really, very infrequently. But, you know, there's plenty of dramas that I do or have watched, but always on TV and on a channel like the BBC or Netflix.

Speaker A:

Does it tend to be an actual TV? Is that what you just said? An actual TV.

Speaker B:

Somehow it feels very wrong to me to watch, you know, a period drama or something on on on a on a yeah. So anyway, I just I didn't know how prevalent this was. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's maybe it doesn't seem like it isn't. But is it a question of demand? Is it something to do with the the way that people want to consume different types of product? Is it something to do with production? Is it something to do with just habit and culture? Is it a purely path dependent thing that we've got? You know, we're just not used to watching dramas in that way. Or is it something to do with pricing and the business model or what? I don't know. But I thought it was interesting. Not something I'd really thought about. It suddenly came to me. I was like, why? Why is this so different? So, yeah, let's let's work out the answer. OK, who wants to pick this up?

Speaker D:

When Nick posed this question, my kind of immediate thought was time and length of videos. Because while I have admitted a soft spot for really long, slow YouTube videos, most YouTube videos are short. You know, they're 10 to 20 minutes long. Actually, when I when I tried to do some research for this, finding data on popularity of YouTube videos against time was a bit tricky. But all of the guides for YouTubers who make their own videos say that about 10 minutes is the optimal time for YouTube's algorithm itself. Right. That's been creeping up over time because YouTube wants to keep viewers viewing for longer so they can see more adverts. But 10 minutes is about what's recommended right now. Whereas I'm sure, Nick, the few dramas that you do watch on TV are probably more along the lines of an hour, right? An hour seems the norm at the moment. It is.

Speaker B:

Although it's weird that when I was a kid, you would have said half hour. Everything was half an hour. And somehow we went, I don't know how, but yeah, we've gone to it being an hour now.

Speaker D:

Yeah.

Speaker B:

So it feels short changed.

Speaker D:

Tube in the second quarter of:

Speaker C:

What I... See, that's interesting. But on the gaming videos, and I think quite a lot of other things, the length of the video, there's a sort of assumption that, okay, you turn on the telly, you watch one program, and then you turn the telly off. But definitely my observation, probably of myself, but definitely of my children, is when they're watching gaming videos or how to make slime as it was a few years ago, or how to decorate dolls or something like that, they watch video after video after video. So I'd be quite interested to know what the viewing time, like in a session, you know, because my guess would be somebody who sits down and starts using YouTube, or definitely some users, will be on there for longer than somebody who sits down and watches the telly, or at least a comparable length.

Speaker A:

Sorry, perhaps to interrupt you both, but I think we're overlooking something really obvious and simple here. And apologies, I don't know if you had more to come, Tom. No, no, go ahead. But isn't it obvious that, why is there no drama or not much drama on YouTube? Let's assume that's correct for a minute. But the type of platform that it is, and how the content is generated for it, and where it's come from. And, you know, drama, because it's a high-cost thing. So, you know, to show an unboxing video, sorry, to make an unboxing video costs pretty much zero to make. But to produce a sort of a beautiful… Yes, and then it's quite a lot. Although the unboxing itself doesn't cost much. No. But if you want to do a beautiful period drama or something with paid actors and lighting, that costs a lot. But it's just, you know, drama comes from TV. Well, this is what I thought. Yeah.

Speaker B:

Yeah. So I checked that out. I was intrigued to know what the kind of, you know, difference in cost is. Obviously, there is, TV has a kind of, there's a filtering mechanism, which is that I can't just put my own 60-second video straight onto TV.

Speaker D:

Unless it's on, you've been framed.

Speaker B:

That's true. Although, curiously, you can do that with Amazon. You actually, Amazon Prime video, you can make your own film and stick it on there. Yeah. It's a fact. Okay, cool. But anyway, I thought, well, how much does it cost to make a, you know, drama versus a documentary, for example? So Game of Thrones, about… I'm going to guess. Between six, oh, go for it. I was going to say… How much per episode? I was going to say a million quid per episode. Lol. 10 million. Think 10 million, yeah. So we're talking about this, and this is one of the most expensive programs ever made. Yeah. Roughly $100,000 per minute. Wow. To make Game of Thrones.

Speaker C:

And Lord of the Rings, Amazon series, is supposed to be, I think, a billion dollars for the first series. Wow. Which is probably 10 episodes. Which is a bit more than 10 episodes, perhaps, but you're talking about, you know, maybe almost an order of magnitude more.

Speaker B:

But of course, actually, I mean, you know, these days, an episode is often the same length as a film. But The Blue Planet, which I think is the most expensive documentary ever made. That may not be true, but it's certainly up there when you search for what's the most… About $3 million per episode, allegedly, which is 50,000 pounds, $50,000 per minute. Okay. So that's only half. Very particular kind of documentary. That has high costs. How much does a YouTube video cost? If you want to get a nice, there's a channel called Kurzgesagt, which do these very nice illustrated, animated kind of explainers of things. I have seen a claim that that costs $10,000 a minute because, of course, they're not very long. And one would assume that there's a lot of production that goes into them. And then I also just, I sort of thought, well, how much of that is paying for quality? So I tried to find out how much… Have you heard of a film called The Room? It's widely regarded as the worst, well, one of the worst films ever made. The best worst film ever made. Yeah, that's right, because it's so brilliantly bad. But that was $60,000 a minute. So what I suppose my conclusion is, it's not dramatically different. Like a good YouTube video actually, you know, costs, what are we saying? Costs about 10 times less per minute than Game of Thrones. Whereas I think you might expect there to be a much more significant disparity. So anyway, I'm just talking about cost. There isn't. It's not like…

Speaker A:

I think you're talking about a really small proportion, portion rather, of videos on YouTube that would cost that. But anyway, Chris.

Speaker C:

Yeah, well, I was just going to say, I think there's… I think it's quite instructive to look at other kind of older media and consumption and ask the question, for example, why don't we or why didn't we read novels as broadsheets and our news as paperbacks, right? Why were they consumed through different media right now? And I've come up with a little theory for this, which is the first thing is the setting, right? So when you read your newspaper, it was traditionally done on the kitchen table, right? So the setting in which you were consuming it enabled you to have something bigger. And when you read your novel, it would be in bed or maybe on the move or on a sun lounger or something along those lines. So the setting is quite key. And then what are you actually consuming? So the form of what you're looking at. And newspaper content is partly visual, right? It's got photographs in amongst it. You read it kind of quite promiscuously. So you, you know, do I want to read that article? You scan the headlines. They didn't have scrolling then, obviously, don't forget. So you wanted to be able to see as much of your content in one go as possible. So you had this big thing. And a novel is a completely linear process, right? And you read it completely. So you don't suddenly go, oh, I wonder what's in chapter nine. I'll just flick forward and let you go through it. So it sort of dictates the way that you have it. And the other one which we touched on a lot is cost, but not necessarily cost of the production, but the cost of the means of getting it to you. So a newspaper was cheap and throw away, right? You know, the famous phrase of tomorrow's fish and chip paper, you know, and whereas novels were more expensive and they were perhaps stored and shared, they need to be more robust and compact and so on. So I think you can apply those to media in the virtual landscape. So if you take YouTube, you know, the setting, I was quite surprised, actually, that they're mostly consumed on phones because I think about it as a laptop thing that I watch on my laptop. But nevertheless, they're watched through some kind of device. Documentaries, if that is the content, then as Tom alluded to, they're not particularly visual, you know, you don't need to see things. They're not a visual spectacle, whereas drama is. Netflix you watch on TV. If you're watching drama, you want to see it on a big screen. Like you go to the cinema to watch a film. You would watch drama on your TV. And then costs, you know, YouTube in terms of delivering something to YouTube is effectively free, right? You know, you set up your YouTube channel and you deliver it. To deliver something to Netflix, to have a TV production company even has cost associated with it. They themselves, to get to customers, YouTube is free through to customers, whereas Netflix has a subscription service.

Speaker A:

So I do think the costing is important because you need to recoup those costs, right?

Speaker C:

Yeah, that's right. And it's through adverts. So I think if you look at those things, the setting, the form and the cost, you get a sense. And if you apply that to like short form video of like platforms like TikTok, I think the same thing is the case. You know, they're definitely consumed almost entirely on phones. So that's the setting. It's about sharing content with your mates, little clips. You know, you don't need to view them through anything other than your phone. And they're super cheap to make and get out there.

Speaker B:

So that's prompted a thought. Actually, I had the beginning of it when Tom was talking just about this, thinking about the different interface possibilities. And I hadn't really made this connection with the newspaper. But that if you think about a newspaper is essentially needing to present you with a menu of things you could read and you are going to click on one of them. In the old days, we used to call it reading it. But you basically pick the bit that you want to read. But you need actually choosing which article to read is a significant element of the interaction that you have with the newspaper. You know, actually just picking the article because there's so many articles and you can't read all of them in sequence typically. And we face a similar problem with YouTube, for example. YouTube, obviously, it's user-generated content. So there's tons of it. Actually finding things to watch is quite a significant task. And really, a PC is a great way of navigating that task, right? Because it allows you to see lots of things at once and you can just move the mouse around and click on something and try it out. It's actually very hard to do that on a TV. So I wonder if there's purely and simply something about the interface. So the reason that you need a broadsheet is to be able to see all the options at once. And the reason you need to use a PC is because actually you need to be able to select from a menu of 30 things, but potentially every minute or two, which you don't have to do on TV or is very, very difficult to do on TV.

Speaker A:

Sure. Okay. I want to bring in Tom. I just do think there's a lot of legacy follow through on this as well, especially with the drama where we're used to seeing it. But anyway, Tom.

Speaker D:

So I think building on Chris's and Nick's point about the format, you've both come at it from a consumer's point of view, but I think there's also something you said from the producer's point of view. In a novel, you start at the beginning, continue to the middle, and at the end, you finish. In a newspaper, position of the different articles is important. Their context, where they are, how prominent they are. There's an editor deciding on those things.

Speaker C:

What's going on the front page is always the biggest question. Exactly.

Speaker D:

What's getting buried in page seven. And also what's next to what else, even within a page. And that is very much something that YouTube does. YouTube is constantly working on where to best place videos to keep people watching, to keep people engaged and interested. What videos are going to be more successful, what appears on your front page. I mean, you already said, Chris, you get bombarded with suggestions that you don't necessarily want, so it may not be perfect, but it's an important part of YouTube's selling point. Now, interestingly, more and more TV is doing the same. Netflix and Amazon Prime also present a menu of options, and they prioritize them, and they want to give you the things that you want. But if you look back at more conventional cable or satellite television, you're not presented with that same set of choices, really. You have a certain number of channels, and what is on them is on them.

Speaker A:

You watch what's on it at that time, or you don't. Although there is still some targeting in terms of time, right? Yes. Of when it's broadcast.

Speaker D:

But a much lower degree than on something that's kind of served on demand like YouTube or Netflix or other streaming services. And I think that almost gives a bit of chicken and egg aspect to the formats, which I think comes into what you were just slightly raising there, Fraser, which is, are there no dramas on YouTube? Because there are no dramas on YouTube. If you're making a drama, your first thought isn't going to be, I'll put this on YouTube. Is it just that it's so entrenched as dramas go on television? It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Speaker B:

So I think there's this question we have to think about. To do with the kind of returns to scale you get with producing different things, that might drive length, right? So given that I think we think length is important to do with the way that people interact in different platforms, which we've discussed, but why might it be that dramas are long and documentaries are short? So I just had one thought, which is to do with the production function. So in other words, the relationship between output and cost, something you touched on earlier, Fraser, which is if you want to make a drama, there's a lot of cost involved in getting before the cameras start rolling. You've got to write a script. You've got to hire actors. You've got to cast tons of stuff. Tons of stuff you've got to do. Once you get there, actually, a five-hour film isn't going to cost a lot more than a one-hour film, really. For drama, I mean, because, you know, and actually if you've got, if you're filming a drama, normally you'll end up with tons of unused footage, which, you know, ends up on the cutting room floor. And often the challenge is getting it down to the length that you want, not getting up. Whereas if you're- There's an economy of scale that means that, I mean, but yeah, keep going. The length is not, it's like most of the costs are up front. And once you've got there, length is going to increase costs a bit, but not that much, right? Whereas just contrasted with, say, making a documentary where the, I, and again, this is a hypothesis, but, you know, that roughly a 60-minute documentary would probably cost you twice as much to make than a 30-minute documentary because you haven't got to do all that stuff about actors and scripts and all that. It's only a hypothesis. As I said, I can't prove that with any data that I found. And the other thing that occurred to me is just to do with, and this is sort of to do with the same thing, but that unless you spend a lot on a drama, it's going to be bad because actors, like basically actors are really bad until they're really good. Like suspension of disbelief is expensive. There's a lot around it that needs to help support that suspension. That's why production quality is really important. Like in a way, everything has to be right. Whereas a badly made documentary actually can still be 50% as informative as a well made one. A badly made drama is horrendous to watch. But how does this all fit into where we view it? Right. So I suppose going back to that original question is if you're making a drama, you don't want to do all that and then make a 10-minute drama. Like the optimal thing is to do all that and make something really, really long. Crank that handle as long as you can.

Speaker C:

Which explains why you have seven or eight seasons of all these things.

Speaker B:

Whereas if you're making a documentary, it can just be as long as it needs to be. Yeah. And so that is a driver of length. And then combined with the other observations we've made, it might explain why you get a special place for short documentaries and a special place for long TV programmes.

Speaker A:

Just before Tom comes in, and something we haven't mentioned about is, by the way, how much drama there is around at the moment. Because we posed the question, why isn't it on YouTube? But actually we're living in the golden age of drama, they say. You know, because there's loads of it being pumped out everywhere. Let's have Tom and then I want Chris and then we need to move towards a conclusion.

Speaker D:

So my point is very brief. I just think another driver of length in dramas is cliffhangers. A lot of dramas, to get people to watch the next episode, will end with a cliffhanger. Either a big one or a little one to tease, make you think, oh, I'll come back and watch the next episode. If there was a cliffhanger every 10 minutes of the drama, one, you'd need to have terrible writing to support that. Two, it'd just be exhausting. I'd get three cliffhangers in and think, god, I'm not watching any more of this.

Speaker C:

Although they do want to drive you through the programme because obviously some people just stop watching it after a period of time. And I think the other thing we've overlooked is a documentary is very easy to watch in a one-off, right? You watch one documentary of a season of documentaries, that'd be fine. You can't do that with a drama, really. You have to buy into the whole thing. So it's not just, oh, a drama is an hour long and a documentary is half an hour. It's like a documentary is half an hour and a drama is potentially 50 hours because you're watching a whole load of them.

Speaker A:

By the way, I know I want you to continue, but I'm just thinking about my point about that there's a lot of drama around at the moment. There's a lot of serial drama and I think a lot of it's quite overcooked and a bit too beefed up these days. They've turned it into a 10-part series, but it could have been done in an hour and a half film back in the old days. I find that a lot, I feel.

Speaker C:

estion. And so YouTube users,:

Speaker B:

ength when YouTube started in:

Speaker A:

Interesting. OK. All right. I've got a question. Imagine a future, say, five years from now, and each of you has your own YouTube channel, which is a raging success. You get a fair chunk of change each month from YouTube because you've got so many subscribers and so on. What is your YouTube channel?

Speaker D:

Well, based on Chris's analysis there, it seems to me like shorter is better. You know, TikTok's growing very fast with very short videos. I think the next thing is just going to be still images. Mine's just going to be pictures. One second.

Speaker A:

But this is so cynical. It's going to make me loads of money. What about 24 pictures a second? No, but hold on. Hold on. And each one is slightly different from the previous one. No, but hold on, because I think you've not taken this in the spirit we've asked it. Because first of all, you're saying, hey, this will be really successful. Well, actually, you're already a success. So and I don't think actually you're really into single images. So, young Spence, I want you to think about that and answer again. Not right now, necessarily. What are you dying to tell the world? What is it you what is yeah, what is it your uniqueness that you can share with the world?

Speaker B:

Anyone? Well, I would. There's a channel called Heavy Cardboard, which does playthroughs of board games, but usually big, serious board games that take three hours. And so they just have these they live stream people playing board games. Yeah, I love it. I would go there, but I would I would I would crank up the production quality so that and have sort of historical commentary and things. So I'd like I'd like to get, you know, two people, for example, playing, playing, you know, no retreat, the Russian front or something. Yeah. But as they're doing it, there's a group of historians analyzing what's happening and saying, oh, this is just like, you know, the Battle of Sevastopol or something. I would love that. I would. I would watch nothing.

Speaker C:

Well, there's time commanders, but I was going to say on BBC two, like in the late 70s and early 80s. Yeah, there was a there was a chess. There was a chess. Oh, yeah.

Speaker B:

Raymond Snoddy is to present.

Speaker C:

And I used to I used to watch it bizarrely. And it was really entertaining.

Speaker B:

People watch sport, right? And they watch video games. So why? I mean, I'm just saying, let's do the same. Let's take the same production quality, but do it for board games. Well, I would love that. Yeah, nonstop.

Speaker A:

That sounds good. I like the nice answer. And what's nice is we already know that that's a massive success because I said to you, as I said, you know, five years from now, and you've got all these followers. That's what you're doing. Brilliant. Great. OK, I can see why they follow you. Yeah, Chris.

Speaker C:

Yeah, I mean, I think for me, when I think of YouTube, I think of and, you know, other kind of video platforms, I think of influencers. Right. So when you asked the question, I was thinking, well, what on earth would I do? And I found it's such an abhorrent concept that essentially I wouldn't want to do it for all the money and all the followers in China and the rest of the world. So I'd just be recluse. Like, you know, the thought of being in the Truman Show or something. Yeah, just like the Queen's Jubilee recently. I was like, well, you know, there's no way anybody can imagine that as a life of privilege living in a goldfish bowl like that. So so, yeah, just not on not on any kind of channel, but getting the money anyway.

Speaker A:

And as we know, you're a massive success in doing this. You've got lots of subscribers. So you remind me of of of of of Black Mirror, 15 million credits, whatever it's called, an angry man holding a shot. Oh, yeah. That's you shouting at the camera.

Speaker D:

Yeah, I'm picturing Chris just uploading hundreds of videos that are just five minutes of silence and a black screen. Yeah. And everyone loves it because it's a chance to. Yeah.

Speaker B:

Yeah, it's a popular trope, isn't it? Like in Reginald Perrin, when he sets up that shop called Grot because he wants it to be a failure in the producers, you know, where I can imagine Chris trying to set up a deliberately bad YouTube channel that'll fail. And he accidentally he does it so well that he's the most subscribed channel in the world. Yeah.

Speaker D:

Yeah. OK, nice. Tom. So if I was showing my interests on YouTube, I would like to have a channel about spices. Spices are really interesting. And there's a lot of different things you can say about them. You can talk about the chemistry. You can talk about the history. Yeah, the history, the botany. I just like spices have great histories, really, in a way, spicy histories of smuggling and crime. And this is brilliant. And then there's also a cooking element. You can learn how to use them, especially with more obscure spices. So I think that would be something I would enjoy doing. I hope other people would enjoy as well.

Speaker A:

Because also, I suspect that I wonder if there's I doubt there's anything like that now, because there'll be lots of it will immediately be like cooking stuff that's out there right now.

Speaker D:

I think I think the the division at the moment would be more in the genre rather than the content. So you'd have things about history that might touch on spices, cooking that might touch on spices. But it wouldn't be about spices with a range of different genres.

Speaker B:

Well, the thing that that sounds most similar to to me is the periodic table of videos, which is this fantastic series on chemistry. I've never really been into chemistry. I don't really get it. But it's this Professor Polyakov, I think, who is a crazy haired chemistry professor. And every every episode is about a different element. And they just talk about all the stuff that that element is used for and why it's interesting. And it's about 10, 15 minutes. I can imagine there being cinnamon this week. And, you know, you get the history, you get you get the cooking tips, you know, you get the chemistry of it. It would be really good. Nice. Yeah. I'm really glad I asked this question.

Speaker A:

Fraser, what's Fraser TV like? Well, yeah, no, I'm scared. But just to say, even though you're a raging success on YouTube with that, that lends itself really nicely to podcasts, I think.

Speaker D:

Oh, I've also monetized it into a series of bestselling cookbooks. Good, you spun it out.

Speaker A:

Yeah. Great. Brilliant. Mine, I don't know. I mean, I'd like there's a few other things need to happen first for mine for what I think I want mine to be. But first of all, I mean, well, mainly I need to transform myself into an amazing blues pianist. OK, I'm already an OK. Well, no, I'm actually a quite poor blues pianist, but it would be some sort of travelogue where usually I'm going. I think it's going to be going around America, mainly in the Deep South. And it'll be a travelogue with me. And actually, Jules Holland did this once. I've seen him in BBC Docs sitting down with people like Fats Domino visiting these blues legends and sitting with and exploring different branches of blues and jazz. But there's always got to be a bit where I'm performing with a legend or in a band and adulation. And there may be some bits where I'm saying, well, you can do this as well, showing, you know, that's what I imagine. Each one at least.

Speaker C:

Where you teach the blues legends how to play the piano. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker A:

Yeah, that would be good.

Speaker C:

Is Jules Holland with you on this trip?

Speaker B:

No, it's just me.

Speaker A:

It's just me and some blues legends.

Speaker B:

I think Fraser would expose Jules Holland for the piano fraud that he is. So something like that. You don't want to show poor old Jules up.

Speaker A:

I think we're talking a minimum of an hour for each episode.

Speaker B:

You better get a move on because a lot of these old blues legends aren't very around anymore. Well, absolutely. And that is an issue.

Speaker A:

I think that's what mine would be.

Speaker D:

You could always edit in the bits of you being really good at piano later. Yes. Start with meeting them. Learn later. Yes.

Speaker A:

Yeah. But I definitely need to sort of get on the learning blues bit, I think, you know. So, so, yeah. Okay, we'll stop there. Um, I enjoyed that. Um, thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Chris Wragg, Tom Spence and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.

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