Can you guess the surprise 'ending'?
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- Опубліковано 22 лис 2024
- Hannah Witton, Mike Boyd and Geoff Marshall discuss a question about a twist in the tale.
LATERAL is a weekly podcast about interesting questions and even more interesting answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcas...
GUESTS:
Hannah Witton: @hannahwitton, / hannahwitton
Mike Boyd: @MikeBoyd
Geoff Marshall: @geofftech2, / geofftech
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2023.
Well, if you were to live to 70, 15% of that is ten years. That’s quite a bit.
also not to forget - you likely lose quite a bit of quality of life before you die from it... its not like issues from getting old get easier when you smoke
15 % only refers to the life span, not the health span. The health span can be be significantly shorter, up to 30% shorter.
@@SharienGaming Also also, the immediate effects of smoking is that non-smokers find it difficult to tolerate being around you and talking to you because of the smell.
I believe that the misconception around "15% isn't that much" comes from thinking about the last 15% of your life being the least healthy - so "sacrificing" those doesn't seem that much. This misses that - on average - smoking will make those infirm/unhealthy years come sooner, so you're kinda sacrificing a bunch of good years to get a few crappy years in return.
And yes, ON AVERAGE. There will be relatively healthy chain smokers and non-smokers who are run over by a car in their twenties. It's still a bad gamble with a very limited commodity.
Yeah - alive but struggling
The old people you know who smoke are the few who made it that far.
Just for balance, I am 52 and have emphysema through smoking and can barely walk up a mild incline. It IS that bad.
I'm 57, and I quit 10 years ago. I have mild emphysema, but more to the point I have pulmonary sclerosis. I probably won't get to see my grandkids grow up. So, yeah, it's that bad.
Yeah, the issue isn't REALLY that your story ends sooner, it's the quality of the story for the years up to said point.
Yeah, my Grandpa died of lung cancer and emphysema, and it was NOT a quick or pleasant way to go.
"Is that 8 inches?" says sex educator Hannah Witton.
Hannah is a material thinker and I appreciate it so much
6:57 There's a literal survivor bias there: _if_ you can smoke every day and live past 40 (not getting lung cancer), then you can probably smoke every day and live to 80. That's an exaggeration, but I would guess that there is some actual statistical effect.
yeah...its also just anecdotal rather than a pattern...
and of course... 15% is not that bad? i mean... on an average lifespan thats still over a decade...
and of course... just because you live to that point... doesnt mean you may not have been battling with respiratory illnesses for a considerable stretch of that time
Not just that, in ye olde times, smoking was more common, so if everyone smokes, every person who is old is also a smoker.
@@juanignaciolopeztellechea9401 On the other hand more than 50% died before they were 50. And smoking was part of it.
Like asbestos:
High levels of asbestos exposure will increase the risk for lungcancer significantly (abut five times) but not quite as much as smoking without asbestos exposure (about ten time).
The combination smoking and breathing in asbestos is 50 times. So when most people smoked, unprotected asbestos workers really did hava an extreme risk of lung cancer. And if you were not smoking, you still got plenty of second hand smoke.
If the risks were unrelated, the expected risk would be 15 times.
@@57thorns of course, but look: say out of 100 people born in the 50's, 70 smoked (the specific numbers are made up), and 50% of smoking people died while 20% of non-smoking people did. Then there would be 35 smokers, but 24 non smokers. Most of the people born in the 50's and still alive would be smokers. What i'm trying to say is that smoking was so common that still most old people smoked.
I get your point but that’s not an example of survivorship bias. Survivorship bias is a sampling bias - you only look at data points which meet some condition which is relevant for the measurement - which is not present here since statistic is taken over the whole population.
15% of 80 years is 12 years. It's not small.
First instinct, you have to smoke the whole packet to see the paper, and then the paper has a picture of diseased lungs and says "well done!"
I always blurt out "You know they die at the end" as a joke in regards to any sort of just-released media that someone's talking about. It's not always a good idea. When "Thelma and Louise" hit theaters. I had no idea what the content was whatsoever, but a couple of shall we say strong women were discussing it and I said "You know they die at the end" and the one who had seen it was furious at me, so I tried to make it clear that I was just blurting out nonsense by saying "Ummm... yeah -- the car exploded and everybody went off the cliff!"
That didn't help at all...
Mike Boyd is describing survivor bias as the reason to go ahead and smoke XD
"Smoking doesn't change your behaviour." ? Are we talking about those idiots who have to sneak out of the meeting every hour to repair their shield of repulsion?
I love the way they are obsessed with making the exact 5 x 8 inches
Can we have this whole episode upload on UA-cam?
The reactions from these group is exceptionally funny😂
Where are the whole videos uploaded? Patreon?
@@AnasHartas far as I know, they aren't released, at least, yet
This has to be one of the most controversial episodes ever. I loved it! 😂😂
Mike suffering from survivors bias. Of course all the old chain smokers say "It's not that bad." Because all the chain smokers who died at a younger age don't have a chance to say "it's bad" at their "centennial interview". 😅
As an American, growing up in a country with incredibly strong tobacco lobbies, it never would've crossed my mind that a cigarette company would allow anti-smoking charities to put anti-smoking pamphlets inside their packaging.
I think you are right about that, but there is one circumstance where a tobacco company might be convinced to include such inserts in their packages. I could see one of the states suing tobacco companies for the health effects of smoking might make such inclusions a requirement for settling the suits. Of course, tobacco companies might prefer paying more instead of eroding their customer base even faster than it is eroding without such inserts.
The big anti-smoking organizations in the US are actually owned and funded by the tobacco industry. If you google it FOUNDATION FOR A SMOKE-FREE WORLD comes up a lot but that's just because that's the latest one exposed. Each of the big companies have their own organization. Some do it out of the settlement for a lawsuit, some do it for more nefarious reasons (FFASFW is a great example of that), etc.
They would allow the information pamphlets because they come from their own organizations, likely.
Where I live, cigarette packs are required by law to have the entire back covered with a picture of e.g. an autopsy of tar-filled lungs and "SMOKING KILLS".
@@JanTuts I started working in a pizzeria that sold cigarettes in 1986 when I was 18 years old. I was amazed at how young some of the kids were who came in to buy cigarettes for themselves. I saw neighborhood kids as young as 12 smoking. Legally, you needed to be at least 18 to buy cigarettes, and I refused to sell to anyone younger than that. Unfortunately, I was pretty much the only one that refused to sell cigarettes to minors. I recall one 17-year-old who was dumbfounded when he discovered I was serious about not selling him cigarettes. To be fair, I had actually been buying cigarettes since I was 5 years old and never had a problem buying them. Of course, it was obvious to the people in the stores that I was not buying them for myself.
My Dad died of congestive heart failure brought on by smoking at the age of 59. Some years before that, I had decided that I would no longer buy cigarettes for him. If he was in such bad shape that he couldn't walk (or drive) the 2 blocks to the store, I wouldn't enable him to continue to smoke. I recall one evening when we were in the middle of a major snowfall, and I refused to buy him cigarettes. Boy, did he ever curse me out. But then he put on slippers and a coat and walked the 2 blocks in the street to the store to buy them for himself. My brother and I were shoveling the snow so we could watch him the entire way. He cursed me out again when he got back. I remember thinking at the time that I had chosen the best way to quit smoking. As a young kid, I saw that everyone I knew who smoked wanted to quit but found that extremely difficult. My genius idea? I would just quit before I ever started smoking.
Yeah the corporate corruption is through the roof
I find smoking changes a person more than drinking. However the only place I really deal with either is at work. Drinkers want to leave at the end of the day, just like everyone else. Smokers vanish come break time to go get their fix, running outside in freezing rain.
This is based purely on nothing scientific so take my observations with a grain of salt, but alcoholism feels more destructive to the individual, but it also feels like most people who drink aren't addicted to alcohol, at least not depending on it to get through the day. Meanwhile, cigarette addiction is significant but less outright dangerous to an individual, but it seems to me like the vast majority of smokers ARE addicted. I don't know for sure, these are just my very unscientific rantings from cultural osmosis and being around people who used to smoke. Certainly drinking is still going strong, but thankfully I haven't caught a wiff of cigarette smoke in a very long time.
@Gakulon well if someone is having a glass of wine each day they are addicted
@@romainsavioz5466 True, but I wouldn't count that the same as literally needing alcohol to get through the day. Nicotine, as far as I'm aware, never gets that bad.
7:23 “smoking doesn’t change your behavior […]” um, have you actually _met_ anyone who smokes? Smokers will go to extraordinary lengths to feed their addiction, engaging in behaviors that would be shocking and/or unacceptable in any other context.
(One of the most powerful anti-smoking moments for me came when my parents had 8 year old me and my 30-something cousin on a canoe camping trip in northern Minnesota, and my cousin’s cigarettes got wet when one of the backpacks fell in the lake, we were two days away from any civilization, and my cousin sorted through the garbage to find all her old butts to rip them apart and collect any unburnt tobacco and then use toilet paper to roll a new cigarette. Seeing someone I knew to be a very refined, sophisticated, and intelligent person forced to claw through garbage to feed an addiction made me realize I must _never_ take up smoking)
I grew up knowing that my grandad had died years before I was born from smoking related issues. The details of that story, like my auntie finding him collapsed on the floor and him dying before the ambulance arrived, were more than enough to put me off ever even considering smoking!
Strangely, my auntie didn't give up smoking until many decades later and she was the only smoker in my immediate family. The smoke-scented parcels from her before she quit, also made the whole thing seem particularly unappealing.
When the idea of a book was brought up, I for sure thought it was going to be a Snape dies thing or one of the other Harry Potter characters.
Never expected to see a Hannah Witton/Tom Scott cross-over. That's so cool!
This actually isn't the first time. She was on at least one episode of his and Matt's Park Bench episodes.
Years ago tom Scott let people add sex toys on his amazon account and he went through them with matt on a park bench episode
I like this combination, they're very funny together! :D
You can tell that was some good paper from that sound
I know! I winced! 😂
smoking definitely changes your behaviour if you don't have access to nicotine
6:05 "Mischief managed"
Am I the only noticing that Tom pronounces mischief differently from the rest of them. “Mis-chief”
Tom likes to think he lives somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. Hannah’s “mis-chif” is closer to how I, someone whose accent is located about 10 minutes down the road from where Tom grew up, would say it.
Differently from everyone-I've never heard this pronunciation before.
I found this interesting too, and then coincidentally stumbled on a video about word pronunciations from the one linguistics youtuber I follow... ua-cam.com/video/pCmTKLhHyPc/v-deo.html
@@JoeBleasdaleReal He is probably being more aware that his audience skews international. Its so it is clearer for his audience, rather than how he might normally pronounce it.
I heard, "Harry is a horcrux" before it was stated explicitly, but I figured that one out when they first spoke about them. All that did was confirm something I already knew.
The wild thing for me to think about was, the prophecy could be applied equally to Harry and to Nevil Longbottom. *AND* if Voldemort had never heard the prophecy then none of it would ever have taken place.
I've heard it said that Voldemort went after the Potters because he considered them more worthy opponents. I'm not so sure.
Dumbledore would have placed both families into hiding, and would have hidden the Longbottoms and the Potters independently, so if Voldemort found one it would not automatically give him the location of the other.
Voldemort would very likely attack both families, but he attacked the Potters first because he learned their location first.
Yeah, all those old people someone knows who are all smokers? They're the ones who survived _despite_ smoking. The reason there are so many of them is simply that _so many people smoked_ back when they got hooked!
I found it strange when they were all trying to estimate what a 5 x 8 page would look like. Where I'm from, that size is known for being the standard for index cards.
So you immediately know it when you live in the USA and regularly use with index cards...
Most Non-Americans probably rather multiply everything with "about 2.5cm" (if they know what an inch is) - and then say "ok, so it's a little bit less than an A5 Page".
If you're in the US, the standard is 3x5. Not 5x8.
Index cards are 3x5. I’m not even in the US and I know that.
@@JasperJanssen both sizes are available in the U.S. 3x5 is more common
Maybe it's just because kid's school photos were sent out recently, but I found it odd that no one noted that 5x8 is a standard 8x10 photo, divided in half.
Just noticed Geoff's roundel, love it
The thumbnail spoils what’s worked out in 4 minutes, the title spoils what’s worked out in 4:47.
Takes a lot of the fun out of these when anything other than info found in the question is used for the title/thumbnail
When we were rotten teenagers my brother, friends, and I stood outside of a theater showing "Planet of the Apes" shouting "at the end they see the Statue of Liberty and realize they are on Earth."
Good for you. My father ruined the end of empire strikes back to a line of people once
I know the on-the-spot calculation would have been difficult for a random book, but I would have liked the paper to show up with 15% of the pages left to go.
I mean you could estimate a half (50%) plus a half of the remainder (75%) plus a half of the remainder, which gets you to 87.5%, which is a little less than 15% away from the end. You wouldn’t have to calculate, just guesstimate from the width of the book. I just tried with a couple of books I had to hand and got 249/281=88.6% (12.4% away from the end) and 329/384=85.6% (14.4% away from the end). With some practice and erring on the side of closer to the front you could get pretty accurate.
Well, "The End" wasn't quite as bad as my guess - which was that they snuck "Dumbledore dies" into the newly released Harry Potter book (forgot which one that was, stopped reading them after the fourth one) to somehow get people off smoking. Because I do remember that being a very popular (mean) spoiler back then.
Upon first hearing of Quit UK, I assumed it was either anti-Brexit or pro-Northern Ireland. Now I realize the United Kingdom isn't what they advocate quitting.
My first thought was not about Brexit, but I immediately assumed that something called Quit UK is an independence movement in, like, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Because the name kind of suggests that, doesn't it?
This is one of my favourite panels
I have to say ... when I used to smoke I really don't think seeing a note towards the end of a book I was reading saying "The End" would've remotely bothered me. I probably would've thrown it straight into the bin
Hi, at around 5:18 the subtitles say "hardest" but the word said is actually "Hannah's" -- as in she's the one who guessed the solution, not that the solution was hardest.
I thought it would have been Northern Ireland.
I am American and an Anglophile, my first thought was "quit smoking" and my second thought was Brexit.
I got no ads on this week's episode. Perhaps related to certain comments about smoking in its preceding episode.
Just noticed that Geoff Has a Lateral Roundle. Great
"Smoking doesn't change your behavior" !?!?!?
Too cruel to be mischief: Yelling "Snape kills Dumbledore!" at the release of the sixth book.
Actual mischief: Yelling "Snape kills Dumbledore!" at the release of the seventh book.
My first thought was that Quit UK was trying to save people from having to suffer through living in the UK.
A5 is exactly half of A4. That how the system works.
I love comparing passive smoking to breathing Covid indoors. The reduction is life expectancy - with all that we know as of 2023 - is tantamount to the same risk. There is one difference: You can’t smell Covid, mostly.
with the Geoff comment about the lung picture that is what happens here in Australia
"Smoking doesn't change your behaviour"
Well, nowadays it does, because smoking inside public spaces is actually against the law in many countries. So people who work in a corporate office building and are smokers are actually outside more than their coworkers who don't smoke. Not to mention that a lot of households are against smoking indoors (including ours, my mom smokes but due to me she smokes outside, if she doesn't I almost suffocate lol), so a lot smokers will take a quick walk to smoke when they're visiting such households, which not only makes them go outside more, but also exercise more!
So, smoking DOES change your behaviour, and actually makes you healthier if we don't take the smoking itself into account!
*Rolls a fat reefer* smoking is also quite socializing.......
Initial thoughts: maybe "Quit driving"/"Public transportation" found on their windshield after an event like a sport game or show.
0:40 I thought about a smoking thing, but the 5x8 inches size did not fit my non-smoker conception of a cigarette pack.
3:03 A fake cigarette pack to be found by adults, along the lines of "what if your child started because of you": "what if..."?
Tom needs to go to Iceland and stop that eruption! Stop lava first, smoking later lol
That's nothing compared to the anti meth ad campaign in Montana 20 years ago. Those billboards were gruesome.
my guess without watching: they are a charity to help with smoking addiction, and the papers were sneakily slipped into cigarette boxes
I feel like anti-smoking campaigns would be more effective if they focused on what it's effects are on your quality of life and just how long it takes to die to emphysema and COPD.
How could you leave that last bit in about smoking not being that bad and not changing behaviour. I know they're joking, but smoking definitely changes people's behaviour, itching for nicotine.
2:00 play the qi buzzer
Survivor bias? "All the really old people I know who haven't died of smoking are chain smokers?"
I recall reading an article many years ago that stated there was evidence that smoking cigarettes reduced the risk of developing, if I recall correctly, prostate cancer. The article complained that it was impossible to get research funding to study the potential positive effects of smoking. The author, whose name I forget, wrote that if smoking did reduce the risk of prostate cancer, because lung cancer takes 20 or more years to develop in smokers, it might be a good idea for non-smokers to start smoking in their mid to late 50s. To be clear, I am not suggesting anyone do this. I am a non-smoker who will be 56 in a couple of weeks, and I have no intention of starting to smoke. I am already spending thousands of dollars a year on prescription medications, and cigarettes are extremely expensive. I figure it is more important to pay for my insulin than to start a disgusting smoking habit. Unless, of course, smoking would make me look cooler... [Because this is the Internet, I want to make it clear that the last sentence was a joke: smoking does not make you cool.]
I thought it'd say "You're next" with a picture of a dead person and/or the effects on your lungs
"Dumbledore dies"
Ha she said it.
they should have put the paper 85% of the way through, to match the caption
English accents are … wow
“A Berk.””
“A book.”
“A Berk.”
4:20 Wait, the UK has book vending machines?
The older people you know who smoke are the few who made it that far.
It's a trade-off. Live fast and die young, or have a boring grey old drag that just keeps going on forever!
I’m guessing that the paper was placed at about one sixth from the end. Otherwise, having it at the actual end is not that striking a message…
Well, if 50% of currently alive old people were chain smokers all their life, but back when they were young 80% of the people smoked... that means they fared far worse than non-smokers (all those % are hypothetical btw)
My guess was wrong- I thought toilet paper.
Just to point out: apart from the fact that dying at 70 instead of 80 is noticeable, COPD and other pulmonary diseases are incredible frequent amongst smokers. And they kill very slowly (you can have it for 20+ years easily) but provide horrendous quality of life. Eventually, a permanent state of being breathless even while resting (or moving very little) and innumerable stays at the hospital.
It's bad. Life for smokers is very, very significantly worse on average, specially their last 20-40 years.
Also, cancer is a bitch and anyone who has done quimio or any cancer treatment knows it.
Smoking makes you take ”smoking break meetings” at work though so that the non-smokers are out of the loop and it’s infuriating!
3:45 this phrasing hits different as a trans woman lmao :DDD
WHAT?!? Dumbledore dies??😮
Also, do quit smoking, second best decision of my life so far.
Video's title is a bit of a spoiler, no? You shouldn't want to ruin the end.
They seem to be operating under the misapprehension that we've all listened to the episode already and just want to revisit it, but this time with video added...
Well the old people dying from Smoking obv arent gonna be walking around to be seen, so this is suvivorship bias
Hannah, hey 👀
WHY is Geoff's audio so bad?? He's a pro UA-camr!
He had a graphics card totally flake out on him literally as we were about to press record, so we had to use the iPad app for this recording. Afraid sometimes these things happen.
@@lateralcast Fair enough!
Lol I love Mike
There was a sitcom in the US called 'Third Rock From the Sun" where one of the main characters pointed out that although cigarettes cut years off your life, those are at the end and those years are crappy anyway.
"Cigarettes cut years off your life AND make sure that the last years of your life are miserable"
Don't smoke and drive??
Best ending ever.
RE: Mike's comment about all the old people smoking, that's a selection bias.
Almost everyone smoked 80 years ago including children.
It's not that the smokers survive longer, there's just a lot more of them so if 10% of smokers survive and 50% of non-smokers survive you'd still expect there to be more smokers if they outnumbered non-smokers 5:1, and the real figure is/was a lot higher.
Also smoking is terrible for your skin, every long term smoker I know looks way older than they are(my mother is 65 and smoker since she was 12, she gets mistaken for being in her 80s) which could mess with your metrics on this too. If you just go off how old you think someone is without knowing their real age you might also be considering evidence of smokings negatives as a positive.
5x8 is an index card
Hannah pointing at a 8 inch length and saying "this is 5 inch isn't it?" - sad times.
I was thinking "God, I hope not"
Suppose large objects attract other large objects
A sheet of A4 paper is 210x297mm. How much is that in inches? Don't know, an inch is not a valid unit of measurement.
An A4 sheet is 8.27x11.69 inches, comparable to the US's 8.5x11 letter-size.
And just because a few people had trouble counting on their fingers while remembering to skip their little thumbs, so they tried to sell everyone on some fancy "new" way of measuring, doesn't mean that standard measurements are now somehow invalid.
;)
Statistically drinking is orders of magnitude worse than smoking but it depends on how much you drink
That depends on how you measure "worse". Smell? Nope, smoking would be worse for that. Domestic violence? Then yea, alcohol would be worse.
"Worse" is subjective. Smoking is worse to me, because it bothers me more than drinkers. Someone raised by alcoholics would certainly have the opposite perspective.
I can't see why a cigarette company would allow people to advertise against them?
Outside of corrupt america, cigarette companies don't get a choice? Anti smoking organisations can pay for ad time too.