A hotel has a booking.com sticker in their window that is purposefully upside down.

Why? The answer to that at the end of the show. My name's Tom Scott, and this is Lateral.

Welcome to the show with questions that have a lot in common with bananas. They're both

bendy, slippery in places, and slightly radioactive. So if a guest seems to glow when they get

something right, it might just be the potassium isotopes. Hoping to prove that they are the

pick of the bunch. First, we have from his own YouTube channel and from Across the Atlantic.

Evan Eddinger, welcome back.

Hello, I'm now across the Atlantic.

Always a joy to have you here.

Look, you never give me a decent, like, you could list off multi-hyphenate stuff,

you could list off what you've been comparing recently.

This video is going to come out months ahead of when we record it.

Evan, how would you

like to be known to the world? I'm an American British man who likes too many things and has too

many niches and loves it all. So words and language and just interesting differences between

countries. Are you Thomas Jefferson? Yeah, actually, I am. How did you know? I'm on the nickel.

He spent some time in France, and then he came back and helped the revolution.

He actually wasn't the nicest guy, so I'd rather not be. No, no.

But thank you. All I know about Thomas Jefferson, but I think I'll help my own. Oh, is there, is there some bad history with Thomas Jefferson? Oh, yeah. I could send you a podcast after. He was not just an awful man with slavery, but... Well, Evan, I apologize to you. You are not Thomas Jefferson. I'm the one who asked, and it was mostly this a joke because, like, Thomas Jefferson, like, loved books and reading and was, like, super nerdy and, like, into all sorts of different things.

And I wasn't...

You wasn't implying that Evan owned people. That's probably for the best.

It was more just, like, what, 18th century nerd?

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