0:00.0	Today's guest is The Economist Tim Harford.
0:09.0	Tim's a well-known media figure here in the UK.
0:13.0	He's a best-selling author, newspaper columnist, podcaster, you name it.
0:18.0	But for the longest time, he's been best known to me for his excellent BBC radio show,
0:23.1	more or less. And that's where our conversation started. What will people hear if they
0:30.7	stumble over an episode or more or less? It's going to be you talking to people about what?
0:34.7	Yeah, me talking to people about numbers. That's the, that's the thing, but particularly about statistics more often than pure maths, although we had features about
0:45.0	John Conway, for example, when he died. So we do talk about pure maths too. But your classic
0:51.1	episode of more or less, it's nearly half an hour long, and we'll go through
0:54.5	several numbers that have come up in recent days or recent weeks in the news, and we'll just
1:01.3	interrogate them and say, well, is that true? And if it's not true, then what is true? So we're,
1:06.9	we're sort of a current affairs program. We're trying to understand the news. We're trying to
1:09.8	understand the world. But we're trying to understand it through the lens of being rigorous
1:14.1	about statistics. Not super technical, but just asking smart questions about where these numbers
1:19.1	come from and what they mean. So sometimes you'll be like calling people out for sort of a misuse
1:24.0	of the numbers or hang on, that's not exactly the way it seems and trying to set the record
1:27.9	straight the thing that we did a great deal of earlier this year was simply to examine the
1:33.4	British government's record on testing because the British government was making a lot of promises
1:37.7	about scaling up testing for SARS-CoF 2 the virus that causes, and they said a lot of things that seemed a bit
1:46.2	implausible, and they measured their data in pretty odd ways. And so we were just chasing them down
1:51.9	and holding them to account, how many tests are they actually carrying out? And how many people
1:57.7	are they testing, which is not the same thing, because the same person could be tested many, many times.
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