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Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron.

Evil genius.

He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it.

That's like hiding at your own funeral.

Yeah, a bit great gig.

I'm Russell Kane.

Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's out of ice cream. Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. Thanks for downloading this episode

of the Bottom Line podcast. I hope you enjoy it. Do subscribe, comment, like the podcast. We do appreciate

the feedback. Hello and welcome to the program. Now given how important productivity is in an economy,

we should really discuss it every week on the

bottom line. We don't, of course, because there probably isn't enough new to say about it to do that,

and often people's attention wonders when the subject comes up. But let us get into it today,

because it is a perennial issue for the UK, British productivity weakness, and we should

update ourselves on the thinking about that. And then we also have the buzz around AI, which is

perhaps seen as a solution to poor productivity. So we have to discuss an old problem and

the new possibilities for rectifying it. Before I introduce my three guests,

who think much harder about this than most, let me just make sure we're all clear about what

we mean by productivity. Now, you can slice it up in different ways, but the notion we should focus

on here is the amount of value created per hour of labour worked. It's labour productivity. So here

are some ways in which you can make society more productive. Everybody could work harder,

get more done each hour. Or two, workers could be better trained and more skilled and get more

...