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[Assistant] Um, you know, actually Hayden got really lucky from not getting landed on by, uh, if he would've come over harder to the right when he rolled over that, um, uh, Jeremy, yeah, J Mark could've easily landed on him. So there, there's a lot of chaos going in, going there. That's, that's back to the point of, uh, you know, the rookie and, and getting into that cat and mouse game. I always tried to avoid that. Uh, that's also.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You would have to think, you would have to think there's some, there's something internal going on there and maybe there's not nothing actual, actual real facts of internal, you know, beef. Maybe it's just that, hey, Jordan's been here in this class for so long and here comes this rookie kid into the deal and he's essentially


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hayden's gonna take his job, you know, like, I mean, that's what you've got to kind of look at here. Hayden's performing every single weekend. Jordan's kind of bounced around from some teams, showed some, some phenomenal speed over the years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as for the consistency, if you're a star, if you're, if you're any one of these teams out there, you're like, Hayden's the real deal. It's coming up consistent. So I feel like, uh, maybe that is some of the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of the internal, maybe it's just inside of, uh, Jordan himself. I mean, you'll have to do a little more reconnaissance there at the goat farm to figure out what's going on. Maybe get a little sniffing around.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hate what you did, but ultimately it made great TV. I mean, uhm, it kept everybody on the seat of their pants.


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[Assistant] Yeah, Ricky, back to that. I, uh, got my care package from Quadlock. So thank you guys. I mean, every mount they make showed up in the mail. So that's, that's, that's awesome to see. And, uh, I think also Boxo, I believe that United Motorsports has Boxo in stores.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so get in and check them out. It's, it's, it's cool to be able to go and actually touch and feel, um, you know, tools and things and boxes, you know, like that, that in case just buying them off online, they make great tools.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I gotta talk about it. We looked at the forecast. It's supposed to rain. Uhm, you know, as a racer, I mean, I know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I know for me, and I could probably speak for you too, is, uh, man, I hated mud races. Uhm, there's just so many things that can happen, uhm, from just a bad start, falling over, grips are dirty, running out of tear-offs, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, uh, it's going to be interesting. And like we said, 250 West is back, so we're going to get Jetson Donuts back out there. That's right. You know, and, and we'll see, you know, so it's, uh. Hey, Levi Kitchen. Levi Kitchen. What about the chef? That's right. That's right. Hometown. Hometown hero now took my position.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just about three hours south, right above Washougal, or yeaah, south right above Washougal is where he's from. So I'm sure he's going to have a ton of, ton of family, friends and, uh, people cheering him on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, Levi to me reminds me of watching Cabin Ride, uh, Windham.


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[Assistant] You know, very kind of similar style, long, lanky, skinny.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, I, I feel like your ride's very, very similar to, to Kevin, so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm trying to, uh, I'm probably going to skip Seattle this week, uh, this weekend. And I'm, like I said, we, we talked and trying to get my, get, get, get to Nashville to, uh, experience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, and so it's a lot of fun, but at, at India I was able just to go and like I said, I, man, I stood in the, I sat in an owner's suite at the stadium and my first time in my life for about four hours. So I never left.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So it was, it was a lot of fun. So maybe we'll get out to, to, uh, to Nashville.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah, we'll see. I'm looking forward to it, so uhm.


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[Assistant] Those are all things that I don't have the answers to and plays a huge role into this weekend.


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[Assistant] Hi folks, Lee Diffie from NBC Sports here. If you truly enjoyed what you just watched, you can get more news, interviews, and highlights by subscribing to the Motor Sports on NBC YouTube page. You can get it all, so go for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, uh, they've decided it's going to be a sciency type person and there are a few of us have been brought together. I'm hugely honored to be part of that committee and it's going to be fun and interesting. And I think we've had a record number of suggestions from the public.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's right. Um, but yeah, we've had, I think the people have nominated everyone from Margaret Thatcher.


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[Assistant] Who was a chemist and may or may not have invented the Mr. Whippy ice cream going back to, yeah, all sorts of incredible people. So it's going to be great fun. We sit down next month to go through the list and to come up with a shortlist and then we'll argue about that. And then I think ultimately Mark Carney.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The governor of the Bank of England will choose, but hopefully he'll go with whoever we think is the best person.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what? I've heard some of those names and they were on my list too. Or if I say to you, actually I've got completely different names. We can't really voice an opinion until we've come up with our final.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I've just found it wonderful that names have come up who I hadn't thought of. And there are other names that are obviously much more familiar and there are people like Newton has already been on the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, no, I've had a few suggestions. My own son came along with me to the, when it was all announced at the science museum. I took him along as well. So he's had a good think about it and he's got.


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[Assistant] A definite strong suggestion, which I will not reveal either. I've also encouraged teachers, you know, get the classrooms talking about this, get them to figure out who they think should be on the £50 note and run your own poll and let us know as well, because we'll take all of those into consideration.


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[Assistant] Yeah. Yeah. The West country. Yeah. You were born there? I was born in Wellington, which is a very small town, not very far from where Thomas Young was born. Thomas Young was born in Milverton.


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[Assistant] And for some very odd reason, back in the 1930s, they were among the very first wave of immigrants.


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[Assistant] So when I was growing up in the 60s and 70s, everybody west of Bristol who was brown was from my village. So if you go to places like South Malton and Tiverton and Barnstable and Taunton.


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[Assistant] When Idi Amin expelled the Asians from Uganda, uh, we had a family settle in our town, but yeah, so, you know, a very happy childhood, love being in the West country. It's still very, very fond of Somerset and always enjoy going back.


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[Assistant] Places like Gravesend or Southall or Birmingham or Wolverhampton like there is now. So there was no obvious place to go. And I think there had been some.


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[Assistant] People from our village who'd gone to the West country and who'd sold sort of door to door. And that's sort of what our family did as well. They would sell things to local farmhouses, you know, wellness and boots, overalls. I remember my grandfather passed away. I wrote a little story for the local newspaper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And got letters from people who'd remembered him, cause you know, you remember.


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[Assistant] Big brand guy turns up your door, your door in the 1940s by that stage, you'd remember him. And so, uh, so I remember a woman who said she just distinctly remembers getting a pair of socks when she was about five or six, because getting a new pair of socks was a big deal.


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[Assistant] And, uh, it was my grandfather who kind of knocked on their door and sold them. So, so yeah, there'd been sort of tinkers selling from door to door.


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[Assistant] Just prior to, to my family's arrival and they just said, well, okay.


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[Assistant] That's where we'll go. It was fairly random to be honest, I think.


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[Assistant] I love football. I used to collect all the cards and name all the players in the first division at the time. What was your team? Derby County. Very local to Somerset.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had cousins who lived in Derby. So that was the reason for that. And it was a good time to be a Derby fan because they won the league a couple of times and, and, uh, it was through the Brian Clough era and many other great things. So, so I loved football and I loved television. I used to watch television, you know, at any point TV was on.


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[Assistant] I'd be watching it. Like wholesome good TV or just like fluff. Just anything, you know, when I was a bit older, I used to love watching Tiswas. Do you remember Tiswas? Today is Saturday, watch and see. It was kind of an anarchic TV show where people like Chris Tarrant started off on Tiswas. And then when the video recorder came in, you know, I would just watch even more television.


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[Assistant] So I love TV. I love junk TV. I loved football. Were you good at football?


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[Assistant] Yeah, I was, I was pretty good. Yeah. I play football late into the evening until the sunset and then I get home eventually. Uh, but I also love science. So science was the thing I did at school and I love math and you know, people were landing on the moon. I can't quite remember the first man on the moon landing, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can remember a lot of what followed in the early seventies. And so, yeah, that was who I was.


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[Assistant] I kind of just knew that physics is what I loved. I grew up watching tomorrow's world and people like Patrick Moore and James Burke and Magnus Pike. One of my books, I sort of dedicated to all those heroes that I grew up watching on television.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Physics, the universe, Einstein, where did it all come from? It was just the thing that was always what I was going to do. It just seemed like the most fascinating thing in the world. I had fantastic math teachers, had a great physics teacher, and then I went to university and did physics and that was it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A little bit. Yeah. I mean, being at Somerset, Joel Garner, Viv Richards, you know, occasionally going out to Taunton and watch Somerset play. So enjoy cricket as well. But football was my real passion.


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[Assistant] I mean, I'm slightly different to some of the other people you've spoken to because I'm more of a journalist now than a mathematician or a scientist and never ever was a mathematician really. As a scientist I'm going to say, well, I may be not typical to your usual interviewee because I do something different to your usual interviewee. But actually what I'm going to say is that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I also interview mathematicians a lot and have worked with physicists and others and I tend to find that they're hugely well rounded.


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[Assistant] You know, physicists would run the local marathon, they go skiing, they do extreme sports, they'd be very accomplished musicians. So I tend to find that mathematicians


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Passion about many many things that curious about anything and everything that's my impression where is if i tend to be an artist.


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[Assistant] But they're nerdy surrounded by all the other nerds. So, so I don't think they've changed really. It's just that they've become part of a bigger community of concentrated nerdity.


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[Assistant] So my mother never went to school, so she can't read or write. And my dad can sort of read a newspaper, but that sort of, you know, he struggles as well. So when they came to this country, they're both very bright, but they're not educated. So they just worked incredibly hard to build.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Security for themselves and also obviously for their children. So, you know, when my mum left India, she never saw her parents again. She never even spoke to them again because even a phone call would be impossible. So I think for my siblings and myself, the goal was


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Went into business as well, as well as my parents. But because I was the youngest and I was the youngest by quite a long way, my sister's about eight, nine years older than me. I think I was cut a bit of slack.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they always thought, oh, eventually he'll come into the family business and he'll work and do something sensible. But I kind of just did what I did. And I still think my parents don't quite understand what a physicist is and probably don't even quite remember that that was the degree I did. So I kind of just did that. I just knew it was the right thing for me and I just knew it's what I loved.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I got a job on tomorrow's world and that was the point at which they think, Oh, okay. He makes programs about science for TV. Okay. We can understand what that's all about. So that was a point at which they could.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Explain to their relatives, our relatives, what I actually did for a living, which was to make science programs on television.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, exactly. So, so, and, and they, they could see that I was happy doing what I was doing and they could see that I was successful and they could see I had a secure future. I could pay my own way and so on. So at that point, there was no need to try and entice me back into the family business. When I was a kid, I used to work in the markets. Again, we used to sell place like Glastonbury market. I remember when.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My lasting memory of, of, of markets is getting up on freezing cold days and building these little stalls with.


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[Assistant] To run the business. I remember trying to program that and getting that working and doing stock takes. And so I did all of those things. And I even remember when we had decimalization, I could do the translations between shillings, pans and pence to new money. And I could help the customers do that and so on. So that was kind of one of the first times I actually found math useful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What was your PhD? It was in particle physics. So again, you know, that's the kind of physics I loved. It's what I wanted to do. We have the Large Hadron Collider today, which is a super massive ring that accelerates hadrons. Yeah. Beams of protons against beams of protons. That's what it does. One of its feeder.


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[Assistant] Rings, that one of the rings that accelerates stuff before it gets injected into the Large Hadron Collider is called a super proton synchrotron, the SPS. And that's what I worked on when I was doing my PhD. I had two experiments, UA1 and UA2, underground area one and underground area two.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And prior to my arrival, they'd won the Nobel prize for discovering the W and the Z boson, which are these large particles responsible for the weak nuclear force. And so when I joined the experiment, UA2, we were probing the W and the Z in more detail, but we were, the little group I was working on was trying to find the top quark. The five other quarks had been discovered.


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[Assistant] There wasn't a seventh and eighth one. There wasn't a fourth generation. So they say, so they said speak, but there was a third generation and the other half of that third generation, the top quark was missing. We looked for it. We couldn't find it. Ultimately our accelerator wasn't powerful enough to create that top quark. So my PhD was all about saying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The top quark must be heavier than a certain mass. Otherwise we'd have seen it. So you can put constraints on what the top.


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[Assistant] And that was sort of the bulk of my PhD was I built a bit of the detector as well. It's essentially that's kind of what you do. You build a bit of the detector, you do some physics and you write up what you've learned. And I loved it. I loved every minute of it. It's what I wanted to do. That's what I'd always dreamed of doing. It's an incredibly exhilarating, exciting place.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's fantastic and I loved every minute of it, but by the time I was writing up.


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[Assistant] I could just see other people who were better than me, much better than me, quicker, brighter, and that they were the people who would go on to make great discoveries. Yeah. Some of the people in my group have gone off to become director general of CERN and do other incredible things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so then I thought in those final six months, I'd actually applied for a couple of postdocs. So I was in the process of saying, well, from here, I go on and carry on and do more physics. But I just had this realization that what else could I do? What else should I do? What else am I good at? And then that's what took me back to television. I think I loved television when I was a kid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I love science. I love teaching and talking about science. Just before my PhD, before I started, I'd spent some time teaching in India. So teaching, talking about science, watching science on television. Why don't I try and become a TV producer or TV director? So that was the next step.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was lucky enough to get a traineeship at the BBC for just six months.


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[Assistant] And they said, uh, so tell us about what radio you've listened to this morning.


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[Assistant] And I hadn't listened to much radio because I didn't really love radio with the same passion that I love television. And so that was the end of that interview. But when it came to the TV interview with the science department.


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[Assistant] You know, I knew TV inside out. I knew the history of science television broadcasting. I could critique programs. I had a PhD in physics, which made me, I think that meant they said we've got to interview him at least because this is interesting and a bit different. It's either difference now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is if somebody applies for a job in television, they better have a portfolio. They better have edited stuff at home on their PC. They better have their own podcast. You know, they, they've got to, there is no reason today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anybody not to have done the groundwork themselves before they start going to their interviews and so on. Back then you couldn't really do that.


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[Assistant] So I had to kind of cook up as much as I possibly could in terms of anything media related I'd ever done at university. I'd edit it. I started a physics newsletter. I contributed to university magazines. I made a couple of videos for the student union.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'd done a bit of student radio at Cambridge, but I, in a way that was only done because I knew I wanted to apply to the BBC, try to make my CV look as good as possible. Had this PhD in my back pocket to say, look, you've at least got to interview me. Got on well with the people who were there at Tomorrow's World who interviewed me. And then it's a case of you've got six months to prove yourself and if you can do it, great. If not, goodbye.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the turnover is huge. Even when you get a job, it's only a one, it used to be only a one year contract.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if you didn't deliver, then you were out. So it was a pretty tough environment, but I could do it. I could make films. I could find, again, people say, how did I become a good filmmaker? But first you've got to find the stories and that's really tough. It's the same with writing a book. First, you've got to find what you're going to write about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then you've got to convince somebody else that this is worth writing about or making a film about. Then you've actually got to go away and make it. And that's only the final stage. And if you can find great stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hurning them into great films is pretty easy, especially if you just let people do their jobs. So I would just say to the cameraman, make this look good and say to the sound person, look, you know, just make sure I'm not doing anything stupid here. And if you work with good people and give them the opportunity to make you look good as a director.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then you end up making interesting films and I love my time at tomorrow's world. I made dozens and dozens of films about all sorts of subjects from, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Debunking miracles to the environment, to anti-snoring surgery, to going back to CERN and making films, making films about artificial intelligence. I got to interview Garry Kasparov, time travel, got to interview Stephen Hawking, just extraordinary opportunity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That sort of media side of science is where I've thrived, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It works two ways. So there are, there were some people in the BBC science department who have virtually no scientific background. They can quite rightly argue that when they go in to see a story, they're seeing it from the perspective of the non-scientist and that's fine. When I go into a story.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can build those relationships. I know about peer review. I know how research works. I know about frustrations of research. I can perhaps win people over. And I would say that's all the advantages of, of when I tell a story, but I think ultimately you just have to be a good storyteller. That's the main thing, whether you're a non-scientist or a scientist, you go into it and you just find those stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get on with people well and then, and then tell those stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, CERN's a pretty glamorous place. I was living in France, I was crossing the border, Lake Geneva was just down the road.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This huge facility with, you know, shiny metal stuff everywhere, famous physicists wandering around. It was brilliant. You know, incredible seminars by people visiting from all over the world, Nobel laureates speaking. You know, maybe I'm looking back at it and roasting two glasses, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I do remember the first three months being terrifying.


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[Assistant] Because it depends when you join the experiment, but I joined the experiment at a sort of critical phase where we needed to start building this detector and get on with it quickly. So I just got sent straight out to CERN.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I didn't know much particle physics that was going to be relevant. I didn't know much about the technology that I was going to be using to build this bit of the detector. And I felt really lonely. So those first three months were super, super tough. Getting through that was hard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I survived it and I think literally I just about survived it. You know, it was probably one of those phases where you probably throw the towel in or what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And then I got back to Cambridge after Christmas, managed to kind of take a bit of a breather.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] consolidate some of my understanding of particle physics, build on my knowledge of the technology we were trying to build, take a deep breath and begin to really enjoy my PhD, which is what I did for the rest of the two and a half years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so they've got to be professor of what's at University of Duda and to get from age 10 to professor at wherever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You've pretty flawlessly got to leap every hurdle. I would imagine. I'm, I'm trivializing here because it's clearly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A struggle all the way through and unless you really strive and work hard, you don't get to those places. And there will have been moments of self doubt for all of those people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But clearly they got to where they needed to be and where they deserve to be. So for me, it was just a case of thinking, you know, what else can I do? What else should I do? What else would make me happy? What else? When I talk to sixth formers, I also say, what makes you different and special? What can you do that other people can't do? I remember somebody once said, you know, when you're looking for a good job.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For the rest of your life, what can you do? What do you enjoy doing and what will somebody pay you to do? So you might be good at lying on the beach. You might like lying on the beach.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We might not get paid for it and there are various other combinations. So I just had to find something that I really would be good at and which, you know, some, if I could have taken a postdoc position at the university of Toronto, I think that's one of the places I was applying to and that would have been fine. I think I would have got the position maybe and carried on quite happily, but so could 10 other people have done that job.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So also what makes you different? What would you do that nobody else would do and find that maybe odd combination of skills that you have. So there were lots of other people who were good at physics and there were lots of people who were better at physics than me, but they didn't love junk TV.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they didn't necessarily enjoy teaching and they didn't necessarily enjoy talking about their work as much as I do. So all of those skills are what, what makes me a bit different from those people. And then I think it's, there's maybe a pattern here that when I was at the BBC and I was there for sort of six or seven years, and I think I did really well, I think I made some great films and then I just left. I just said, right, that's it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Made enough films. I could make more films, but I'm not sure how life would be different. So I'm going to go off and write a book. In fact, I actually said I'm going to leave. And then a few months later, I thought, oh, hang on, I should write a book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I haven't written a book now since 2013. So it's been five years and that's it. I can't imagine writing another book because I want to do something different. So there's a kind of a pattern there of, of leaving something behind and moving on, but then using all those skills that you've picked up from a previous. So the reason I write books in a certain way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is because of the way I used to make television. The way I make television has been hugely informed by the fact I've done a PhD in particle physics. So even though you abandon things and move on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're all science related and all those experiences and skills feed into whatever you do next.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, you know, I suppose I still have my postdoc application in the pipeline while I was applying to the BBC, but I definitely left the BBC before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I knew what I was going to do next. I just said, right, that's when this project's over, I'm off and had no idea really where I was going to go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think there are a lot of people who joined the BBC science department with that mentality and I was one of them as well. And I think, I think it's a great thing that you, you are passionate about science and you want other people to see that passion, that passionate side of science. You want to inspire that next generation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think that's true for whether you make political films or films about history, you want to bring on that next generation. You want to excite them. You want to tell those great stories. So I wouldn't say it's campaigning. I would say it's just, it's just trying to share the joy of science.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, in a very kind of obvious way that I think many people are going to television want to do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So Fermat's Last Theorem, I'd made a film about it for the BBC and the idea there was that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The film has been hugely successful and it's just, you know, as soon as you hear the story, you realize it's a terrific story. This is the story of course of Andrew Wiles. Professor Andrew Wiles and Pierre de Fermat and this 350 year old problem that it's just full of wonderful little stories along the way and sort of terrific beginning and an even better end.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. So I'd left the BBC and, or was in the process of leaving the BBC. And then you realize that a 50 minute documentary, which is what that Horizon documentary was, is about 6,000 words.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now a picture's worth a thousand words and all of those things, and I wouldn't change anything about that film. I'm hugely proud of it. But in six thousand words, you cannot go through all of the history of Fermat's Last Theorem.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The mathematicians in that film were so eloquent that all the history really went out the window because we wanted to hear about the mathematicians alive today. So why not write a book that's got all that history in it?


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[Assistant] Television is not a great medium for explaining maths. So we got some of the core concepts in, but not much beyond that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So let's explain more of the maths in the book as well. So that's where the book came from. Let's tell the full story of Fermat's Last Theorem.


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[Assistant] And then in that book, there was a little bit about Alan Turing and a little bit about Bletchley Park and.


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[Assistant] Colossus and computing, that's sort of where the code book came from.


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[Assistant] I probably had a much bigger section about Alan Turing and Enigma, which inevitably got squeezed right down. So it then got blown up again into a huge book called The Code Book. And when I was at Tomorrow's World,


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[Assistant] I had a whole file of stories about cryptography because it was a really fascinating area of technology, but not very televisual. So I never ever made a film about it with the BBC, but I had all these stories and I knew it was very relevant today. I knew there was a great history and I knew there was the story of Alan Turing and Enigma. So that's where the code book came from.


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[Assistant] Nobody had really written about cryptography since the late 1960s as a great book by David Khan, which is about 1500 pages long. It's huge, but it hadn't been updated. And it wasn't the book that I wanted to write, even though it is a great, great book. And then I was on a plane once talking to somebody about.


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[Assistant] I had no idea really what the Big Bang Theory was, or how much evidence we had for it, or where it came from.


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[Assistant] And I thought this is extraordinary. We're part of a unique generation. We're the first generation really to have a theory of the universe and its evolution and its origins. So everybody should know this story. And that's where Big Bang came from. I think I wrote the proposal for that book on the plane.


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[Assistant] And faxed it back to my agent and said, look, this is it. And it's, I've got the scrap somewhere, barely 50 words.


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[Assistant] By the time I got back to England about a week later, that was it. The contract was signed and that was Big Bang ready to write.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got annoyed and angry about alternative medicine and I thought that was a more important book to write.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think this is where the campaigning side I think maybe starts, is the Simpsons book was set to one side and I wrote a book with Professor Edzard Ernst, all about alternative medicine called Trick or Treatment. Our book is very critical of alternative medicine.


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[Assistant] But I think it's also very, very fair. It's based entirely on the facts and the evidence. Where an alternative therapy works, we say it works. And then I got sued for libel, and that's where more campaigning stuff happens.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then eventually when that case ended, I got back to writing the Simpsons book. Yeah, that's where those five book ideas have come from.


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[Assistant] No, no, so when you write a book, you write articles to promote the book. And I'd written an article for The Guardian about chiropractic. When I started writing the book with Edzard, I didn't know much about chiropractic. I thought they were just sort of physios that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Perhaps good things, but it's all a little bit questionable and some of it's very, very questionable. Manipulating babies that are just a day or two old, giving very dodgy advice about vaccines, just really


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[Assistant] Some disturbing things happening in chiropractic in general around the world. And so I'd written this article saying, if you want to see a chiropractor about your back, yeah, fair enough. Not for me, but you may want to do it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When it comes to other conditions, don't go near a chiropractor was my advice. Cause you'd already written a book.


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[Assistant] I'd written it. I'd probably said to Edzard, Edzard, do you want to have a look at this? Any thoughts before I submit it?


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[Assistant] The editor at the Guardian would have read it. They may have run it past their legal team. I don't think they did because there was nothing really contentious there as far as anybody could see. But a month later, a letter arrives through the door and I still remember being sat there on the steps reading this letter, feeling nauseous immediately.


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[Assistant] Because it's a letter from a form of solicitor saying that the British Chiropractic Association is threatening to sue me for defamation.


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[Assistant] Just me. You'd think they'd go for the paper with all their money. You would think so. Never really thought about that before.


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[Assistant] Why would they just go for me? There are a couple of sentences in the article where I talk about they happily promote bogus therapies. And there is a reading of that. There is an interpretation of that, which says, you know, my interpretation was they're promoting stuff that just doesn't work.


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[Assistant] Kind of blithely doing it. Their interpretation was that they are deliberate fraudsters who know their therapies don't work and yet they do it anyway in order to get money out of the public.


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[Assistant] Now there are things in my article that I think make it clear that's not the case. I call them fundamentalists. If you're a fundamentalist, you're not defrauding anybody. You have a deeply, honestly held belief.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you may be wrong. So I thought there was a very different spin on it. They disagreed.


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[Assistant] They threatened to sue me, the guardian just said, look, we can't be involved because English library is so expensive.


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[Assistant] And it's so one-sided. English libel law used to be horrendously anti-free speech, anti-journalist. And the Guardian said, we're going to lose this case. You know, people just lose libel cases all the time.


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[Assistant] Because the law is stacked against the writer and I quite accept that the Guardian couldn't stand by me because if they'd have lost it would have cost them say a quarter of a million pounds and they would probably have had to lose two journalists.


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[Assistant] So it's not right for them to put the journalist necks on the line.


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[Assistant] How on earth can anybody in the future, you know, if they look at my Wiki page, how could they ever trust my writing again? You know, Simon saying he was found guilty of libel and sort of. So.


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[Assistant] That wasn't going to happen. And so I just said, look, we'll just rebuttal the claims, you know, and we'll see what they do. And I just assumed they would back down, but they didn't. It became a right old mess, didn't it? Yeah. And then we, then you have something called, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Preliminary hearing where you say like, before we go to court, let's agree what these words mean. Do they really mean that I'm calling you a fraud or do they just mean I don't think that what you do works? And the judge at the time, Justice Edie sided with the chiropractors and said it was plain as a pike stuff that I was defaming them, that I was calling them fraudulent.


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[Assistant] And at that point, it looked like we'd lost, you know, there was no point carrying on. And what I did at every stage was I just kind of did a cost benefit analysis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, my wife is a journalist as well, so she was standing right by me. I had her support. I had a bit of a financial cushion that I could rely on. And when I looked at the cost benefit analysis, it was a case of if I spend another 20,000, let's take this to appeal. I could lose another 20,000 pounds.


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[Assistant] Eventually they allowed us to go to the court of appeal, which was a really big deal because by this stage, and this was two years later, the court of appeal had the master of the roles and the law chief justice on it. So they brought out some of their really big guns to sit on this. Because by this stage, lots of people were writing about.


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[Assistant] I was getting support from Norway and America and Australia because there was this other problem that our libel laws were so one-sided.


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[Assistant] That it, it encouraged libel tourism. People would come to London to sue because this is where you'd win. Russian oligarchs would sue in London. Ukrainian newspapers would end up getting sued in London. And so that's why I think the court of appeal was so powerful in its members. And luckily, luckily, whatever it was, they could see the sense of it. And they said, look.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When discussing scientific, medical, health issues, issues that are seriously in the public interest, we must allow journalists to be able to speak up reasonably and fairly. Not maliciously and not recklessly, but we have to allow people to speak their minds and not to have them treading on eggshells in fear of libel threats. Uh, there was this thing called the libel chill, which is that you didn't even write certain things.


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[Assistant] Because you were scared of what the repercussions might be. So they had to remove that. So that was the end of my case.


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[Assistant] But then lots of other people, as I say, not just in the UK, but also from around the world, uh, human rights groups, uh, charities, all banded together, a lot of skeptics, a lot of rationalists, a lot of scientists, a lot of bloggers, a huge community on the internet who've been threatened with libel. They all came forward and we worked together on trying to change the libel law.


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[Assistant] That resulted in the Defamation Act 2013, which now means we have a much fairer libel law in this country and the experience over the last five years


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[Assistant] Suggests that we've not had those high profile.


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[Assistant] Scary cases where people say, how ridiculous is that? How could that possibly happen? Academic journals have a huge amount of protection now. Scientists have much more protection. The law is still there. If somebody says something nasty about you, then you should be able to defend your reputation as an individual. That's really important. Nobody wants to get rid of libel.


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[Assistant] But the big powerful body should not be able to use libel to bully journalists. That's, that's where that change has happened. And uh, there are people like David Alan Green, who now, uh, uh, quite a well-known blogger on legal issues. And he was one of those people right there at the very beginning.


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[Assistant] Absolutely at the heart of this campaign. Index on censorship, English pen, global witness, large numbers of people worked on this. And yeah, so now we're in a much better position.


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[Assistant] The day when we lost the preliminary hearing was disastrous. We just, I remember my Robert Dugans from Brian Cave was my solicitor and we just sat across.


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[Assistant] The table from each other and just said, well, what do we do? There's nowhere to go here. The judges just told me that I've accused them of fraud. That's not what I meant. And that's not a statement I can defend. How do we go, where do we go from here? So, so there was, there was a point there where it was a case of how do we write the apology letters? How do we get out of this as quickly as possible?


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[Assistant] No, no, no, it's just, it's a great number of, you know, the libel reform.


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[Assistant] Came out of that article, also Ben Goldacre was sued at the same time. David Cohoon was being sued. It was a great thing. And again, it probably, you know, the first time I'd ever gone to see my MP.


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[Assistant] I'd never done that before, and I think other people who were involved in the campaign went to see their MP.


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[Assistant] And so I learned about how you can begin to change things, how parliament works. One of the things we wanted to do early on, we wanted to get this on the parliamentary agenda.


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[Assistant] So we had to, one of the ways to do that is to have an early day motion. So I think any MP can put something down in a book and if other MPs support it and it gets enough support, then the government has to consider it as something that they need to take on board. And so we said, great, we'll get an early, we'll get an early day motion. Who's our MP? Who's going to put this forward?


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[Assistant] And then we said, why don't we can't do that? Because what will happen is it will encourage everybody to write to their MPs. Their MPs will look at this early day motion. They won't know what to do. They'll go and see their party officer.


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[Assistant] The party office will say, we don't know anything about this, don't bother signing it. And once an MP said they're not going to sign it, they're reluctant to change their mind. Instead of doing it that way around, first, we need to spend three months lobbying all the MPs first, informing them, bringing them up to speed. Then we put down the early day motion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then we get people to write their MPs, then the MPs know what to do and they will back it. And it was the biggest early day motion of that parliamentary session.


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[Assistant] So learning about the levers of government and how you make change, how, how you work with the party conferences to bring the parties on board, how you sometimes play one party off against another. All of those things work for a kid who was doing a PhD at CERN and there was only interested in quarks and so on. This was a whole new world and I'm very happy to publish that article and happy to have survived it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The costs in the end, my costs, I'm thinking about 200,000 pounds. So I was presented with a legal bill at the end of 200,000 pounds.


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[Assistant] Probably the back, let's call it 200,000 pounds as well, possibly the other side, the other side as well. Yeah. So had I lost, I would have had to pay the whole lot.


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[Assistant] So that's why it was, it was terrifying amounts of money.


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[Assistant] Now, because they lost, they have to pay their own bills. That's the end of that.


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[Assistant] But they will argue every single line. So they will say, hang on, you had a meeting here with your senior barrister. Why didn't you only have a meeting with the junior barrister? Look, you had two meetings here in three days. Why couldn't that have been consolidated into one meeting? They will argue about every single point. And so you only get back about two thirds of your money.


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[Assistant] So I was still £70,000 out of pocket and the guardian.


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[Assistant] These numbers are not quite right, but at the end of the day, whatever the shortfall was, the Guardian was very, very helpful in bridging that.


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[Assistant] You know, I absolutely understand why they weren't there at the beginning, but I'm very grateful that they were there at the end. And also, I mean, the other cost was that during those two years, I wasn't writing a book. I wasn't really traveling or lecturing. So you're not doing any work either.


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[Assistant] Yeah, maybe, maybe. It'd be interesting listening back to this because I know one of the things I don't like doing is talking about how I feel.


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[Assistant] And so I can tell you facts. I can tell you there was this libel case and there was that libel case and there was David Allen Green and there was facts I can tell you. And I can probably even do quite a good job of this is how they felt and this is how they felt and so on.


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[Assistant] In terms of how I feel about things, I tend not to be very good at. So I think if you're going to write that, that sort of book, you need to be very open with how you felt.


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[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, it was, but you know, we, we, so my first son was born, my wife was pregnant actually during the final court of appeal.


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[Assistant] And I think he was trying to catch the judge's eyes, trying to get some sympathy. Um, but, but I was in the bulk of it happened when it was, you know, we didn't, we didn't have children and this sort of dominated our lives. And as I said, my wife's a journalist, so she was absolutely there, you know, every step of the way.


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[Assistant] And every, and all those people out there, you know, all the people that are listening to this and who followed that campaign and who wrote to their MPs or who tweeted about it or who blogged about it or who mentioned it to their mates in the pub. You know, all of those people saying that I wasn't the crazy one, that the law was crazy.


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[Assistant] Made a huge difference, absolutely. Had I just been left high and dry, I would have then just thrown in the towel. But had I been high and dry, I wouldn't have needed a towel. So there we go.


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[Assistant] Occasionally, yeaah, it does, it's, it's, it's, I met somebody in the cafe the other day and said, oh, I'm teaching you today in our journalism class. And it was very odd to think that your case has been discussed with journalists to help them understand the pitfalls of libel.


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[Assistant] So that's, that's great. Absolutely. So exciting to know that that, that legacy is still there and that many others, you know.


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[Assistant] Ben Goldacre in particular and many others fought for that change, but it also just goes back to, you know, my PhD.


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[Assistant] Utterly forgettable. You know, whatever was in there has been superseded.


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[Assistant] Within six months by, by many other people. So had I gone on and stayed in physics, I don't think I'd have done a great deal that would have been very memorable, but the libel law, you know, I'm very proud of that. I'm very proud that people still remember it and still teach it in lecture theaters.


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[Assistant] Yeah, so when you, when I was on Tomorrow's World, you just look for any story. You look for any good story. I couldn't have had a career at the BBC just doing physics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, Fermat's Last Theorem was there from the get-go. So that was the first story. So you have a maths head start when your first book is Fermat's Last Theorem. And then the code book is a maths book, I agree, but it's also a book about history and technology and many other things and linguistics and so on.


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[Assistant] It's not a physics book, I agree, but it's only a little bit of a maths book.


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[Assistant] A big bang is physics through and through trickle treatments completely outside of my area of expertise and could only have written that book if I haven't coauthored it with Edzard Ernst.


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[Assistant] And then the Simpsons book, I was absolutely probably deliberately avoiding writing any maths books. So the Riemann hypothesis, uhm, the Poincare conjecture, people send you ideas for maths books all the time. It was just deliberately not going to write about any of those things, but the Simpsons maths book was just, you know, just irresistible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wrote it in a different way. I had six big chapters because all of my books kind of have six or seven big chapters.


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[Assistant] And when I was flying over to meet the writers for the first time, for the first time, I rewrote the whole book between London and Los Angeles.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I smashed it up into 17 little chapters. So each little chapter is just, you kind of come in, you learn a bit of math, you learn about that symptoms episode. The math begins to get a bit difficult and bang, we're out into a new chapter, a new idea, new writer and so on. So it's a, it's a much more bite-sized book. You know, I think the flow of it and the pace of it and the lightness of it.


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[Assistant] Uncountable infinity and different scales of infinity. So there is some, there's pretty heavy maths in there as well. It's not a trivial maths book, but it's, it's a little bit lighter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So the Simpsons is the most recent book, but I had the idea a long, long time ago. The last book I had was for Trick or Treatment. That came out in 2008. So I would have had that idea in 2006, 2007. So I haven't had an idea, a new idea for a book for 10, 11, 12 years. So if I had an idea, I might write a book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I probably wouldn't because I'm not sure that I'm ready at the moment to spend two or three years working on a book.


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[Assistant] That people may not necessarily read. You know, I think, I think the book market is receding. There are amazing things on the internet. There are amazing long form articles, clever blogs, short blogs, podcasts, funny videos, interesting videos, challenging videos. I have no problem with people reading fewer maths books.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As long as they're getting their maths in many, many other ways. And I think that's just as enriching. The Numberphile videos you make are every bit as informative and entertaining as any other chapter from any other book. So I have no problem with the book market declining, but it just means it's not what I'm then going to do next, especially if I don't have any ideas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So instead, what I'm really, really interested in is, is education. Maths education in particular. Because I think if you don't get the maths right, you can't do the physics, you can't do the engineering, you can't do any of those other great things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think physics A level is not really a good preparation for doing physics at university. And that's because they've taken the maths out of it. That's why I'm interested in maths.


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[Assistant] There are many areas that people could look at in terms of math education. You've got kids who are struggling with their basic numeracy. You've got other kids who are okay, but who could do much better. There are many, many different areas and age groups and people you could work, you could focus on.


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[Assistant] The one that I think gets ignored and the one that I'm really passionate about are kids who are good at maths but who never become excellent. I think in the non-selective state school system it's almost impossible to become excellent at maths because


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] GCSE maths is kind of a walk in the park. If you're great at maths, if you're not good, it's a bit of a struggle. And if you've got your grade nine, you've really earned it. But if you're good at maths, grade nine is not so hard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so we need to get these kids, preferably when they're quite young and if they've mastered everything at primary, we need to stretch them and stretch them and show them interesting, fascinating maths and prepare them for, for what they could do later in life. So I've been interested in how do you do that? How do you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a non-selective state school environment how do you encourage good students to become excellent?


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[Assistant] And I'm only interested in ideas that are cost effective and scalable. There's no point taking, I don't think there's much point taking kids away for a week long gifted and talented summer school when in September they'll go back to their old classroom and the mundanity of their classroom math is there for the rest of the year. So I'm interested in something that happens day after day after day within a school environment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so the idea that I've developed is something called Top Top Set Maths. Okay. Horrible name, but just bear with it. Top Top Set Maths.


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[Assistant] If you take 25% of the population, they are not all good, good mathematicians. Some of them are a bit better than average. Some of them are brilliant. And you tend to have to go at the pace of the weaker students in that top set. So the good top set students just twiddle their thumbs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And schools often have two top sets. The schools are very large, so you'll have two top sets. So I'm saying.


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[Assistant] Refocus it so you've got one top top set and then a second top set below it. And then with that cohort of students that are quite narrowly ranged in their ability,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But all confident and who they've mastered primary school maths in year seven, when they're 11 or 12 years old, start pushing them up, start pushing them along in this top, top set environment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And keep that top, top set going right through to GCSE. So those kids don't just get a grade nine, they go beyond grade nine. Their maths is so, so strong at that stage.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we're running it now in 13 schools. We've only got data from the previous two years when we only had about four schools, but the results I think are quite staggering. Um, there's something called the junior math challenge, which kids do when they're in year seven, year eight.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our four schools doubled the number of certificates they're getting in the Junior Math Challenge.


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[Assistant] So they're getting twice as many kids being excellent at maths. And so I think we're making a step change and this year we'll have a lot more data. And then the next stage is to say, right, let's not just have it in 13 schools. Let's have it in a hundred schools or 500 schools or a thousand schools. So that wherever you are in the country, if maths is your thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can get into a top top set and you can continue to build on those skills.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's quite an old fashioned idea. It's not a new curriculum. It's not a new way of teaching maths. It's not maths mastery. It's just saying, if kids are good, let's progress them really, really as far as they can go. Let's stretch them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh yeah, you do need an extra class because you know, this is an additional set effectively. And so you do need an extra person to be teaching it as well. I still think pound for pound.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is the best way to teach excellence. I've seen lots of other ideas over the years.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've spoken to 500, 600 school groups over the years. I've been to hundreds of schools. I've heard lots of ideas. This is the one where I'm seeing concrete results and financially, if you, if you want to make this change, this seems to be the best way to do it. But in a year from now, I'll have more data. Maybe I'll be wrong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At the moment it seems to be more effective. The other thing I would say is that it kind of maybe sounds elitist, you know, you're focusing on the good kids and so on. But what I'm seeing is that at the moment, if you want to be excellent at maths, mum needs to be an engineer or dad's a math teacher or there's somebody there who kind of mentors you along because the schools struggle to do it. So what I'm hoping is that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This will allow far more children from a far wider range of backgrounds to become excellent at math. You don't have to have had to go to a private school or had to go to a grammar school. It's less divisive than a grammar school. It's, it's, it's, you know, everyone's in the same school. Kids can move in into the top top set or out of the top top set.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So one of our schools is Plashet school in Newham, all girls school from a huge variety of backgrounds, large Muslim community there. And I remember sitting in the back of the class when the project started and these girls are all very bright, you know, they're in the top, top set already. So if we did nothing at all, they would all go on and probably do maths A level. But in our set, I think they are going to go on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And do further maths and go beyond further maths and become computer scientists or they're going to become aeronautical engineers or they're going to do something incredible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To become brilliant at math, which is otherwise very hard to achieve.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, so I, so for the first year I said I'll pay for it because I don't want anybody else interfering with it. So for example, somebody might say, well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're going to fund this project, but only if it's developed in such a way that more girls do maths A level. Now we're not going to get more girls doing maths A level. As I was saying earlier, the girls that I was talking about are already going to do maths A level.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they will do much, much better. They will become incredible role models. So it's not about getting more girls to do maths A level. It's about getting those that are doing it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I didn't want that tinkering or tweaking from other people. So the first year I funded it, the second year I funded it, but as you can imagine, the year seven has become year eight and there's a new year seven cohort. I didn't have any money for that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But all four schools said, we don't care, we're going to carry on doing it because we see the benefits. In the third year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm still putting in some money, but I'm also getting funding from John Lyons charity, which is kind of the philanthropic arm of Harrow school. They've been tremendously supportive. Emmanuel college, Cambridge have put in some money. The London mathematical society have been fantastic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, the Winton foundation as well, Winton philanthropy have also been very supportive. So we're beginning to having shown the proof of concept. I can then go out and say, we need some money to support this and people have come forward and that's been great. The next step is to get the data, show that it works or not. If it does work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get bigger money in and expand it across the country.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The cost would be about 5 million a year. 5 to 10 million a year. What for the whole country?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because you've got a top top set in year 7, year 8, year 9, year 10 and 11. That's five classes. One teacher could teach all those classes. In practice you wouldn't, you'd share it around a bit. But you need one extra math teacher per school. Now math teachers are like gold dust. So that could be a limiting factor on how it grows.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If I was retiring as a math teacher, I'd be quite happy to come in part-time and teach one of these groups.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Very strong mathematically minded people coming through the system every year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The weird things are things like, there, there are problems with it, which, which you don't see until, until you actually get to the coal face, like timetabling. Right. In schools, this is really boring. This is the most tedious thing in the world.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it takes up a lot of effort. Some schools are so big, they have a band one and a band two.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For anybody who can't see this, I'm doing jazz hands at the moment. And it's purely so that we don't have enough science labs. So when this band is doing physics, the other band's doing history. When they do physics, the other band's doing history.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So that means that your top top set has got to sit in one of these two bands.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And how do you allow for migration between bands and how do you, so those things are the nitty gritty of how do you actually make it work. Now in some schools they do maths across both bands. It's not a problem. In some schools they only have one band, so they make it work that way. They're more logistical problems than this project is fundamentally flawed or is ethically wrong.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Every school I've come across has said we want to do the best for all of our students. If this student's musically gifted, we want that student to excel. If this student's struggling with their science, we want them to become scientifically more confident. But if this kid's got a maths bug.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We want to stretch it as far as it'll go. So they want to do the best for every student and they very much see this as being one of those ways of succeeding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just maths, yeaah. I can explain that. The reason is, my feeling is that if you're interested in history, I think a lot of families can support that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of fans can, you know, they'll go to Warwick Castle or the Tower of London. You can watch horrible histories. You can watch more serious documentaries. History is very accessible. If English is your thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I remember our English teachers used to say, oh, you know, look, you know, you're, you're good at English. Here's a Dickens book. I want you to read this one over the Easter because I know you'll, you'll cope with it. And you can just be stretched while you're at school. Maths is different. Maths needs mentoring. It needs that guidance. And you and I can read the same Shakespeare book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then that's not going to work. You know, for some people it just means absolutely nothing at all. For others it's, it's, it's a meat and drink to them and they'll speed through it. So I think maths needs that mentoring and that careful approach. The data suggests, the international data suggests that our students


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our average students are pretty average compared to the rest of the world. And we've got a lot of average students. What we don't have, thankfully, is very much at the bottom tail.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But we certainly don't have very much at the top tail either. So that's where we're failing as far as I can see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I think about maths, I think maths is really just about developing thinking skills and it's just developing problem solving skills.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So those skills can be applied to anything and everything. So if you wanted to say, let's throw out this load of maths and instead put in this coding bit in the maths curriculum, very happy with that. If that coding skill is all about maths is about problem solving and so on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's about giving children problems that they can't necessarily do and showing them how to tackle their problems, approach those problems, develop tenacity. This whole thing about growth mindset, if you come across all these things. Oh, you want to come across growth mindset? Oh, right. Okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hadn't come across it either, but it's very big in education at the moment. And some people say it's a little bit of twaddle and other people say it's, it's revolutionary. But the idea is that in the past, I think when I was at school, oh, Simon, he's good at maths. That's it. And Fred's rubbish. And Fred's always going to be rubbish and Simon's always going to be quite good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, because he's just somebody who's got the maths gene or whatever. And that's a really unhealthy approach because it means it frets.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just going to give up because he just hasn't got that maths thing and Simon's it's not good for him either. Cause if he's just good at maths, he's not going to try that hard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it just destroys kind of your view of who you are and that that's fixed mindset. Growth mindset is the opposite. Growth mindset says that whether you're good or bad, by working harder, you can always get better. And in fact, people who are good have typically been working quite hard previously to get to be good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so it's not about you failed. It's about you haven't succeeded yet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so you always praise the effort and the work rather than the achievement. And regardless of the achievement, you know, you can always do better. And so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's it, you know, when kids in our top top set should be struggling.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because struggling is part of becoming a good mathematician. Whereas if they're in a normal top set, they're just good at maths. Gosh, look, it's just so easy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it makes them complacent and lazy and it just doesn't develop the skills they need.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's an experiment done a few years ago, which I think illustrates some of these points, which was that same kids put their hands up to answer certain questions. So you have lollipop sticks with all the names on and you pick them out at random. So you have a much broader array of kids answering questions being picked on to answer a question and everybody has to be alert because they may get picked on next.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When they moved to this model, some kids started playing truant and not just, just not turning up. And the kids who were not turning up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then they'd be shown up as not being as bright as everyone thought they were. And that just destroyed their vision of who they were. So, so that's part of the top top set is about developing those skills to apply in engineering or coding or anywhere else. And physics in particular.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Our experience is that it's elite from primary, and I think when they move from primary to secondary, kids kind of are open to anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's one of the advantages. I know some schools do this sort of top, top set approach in the year before GCSE. You know, these kids are going to do A level. We'll be better start working them a bit harder because they're going to be the A level math. That's too late.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You've got to start the 11 or 12 when their attitudes can change and their ambitions can change and they realize they can solve maths problems that look apparently impossible to them.


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[Assistant] I think some schools don't make a big deal of it. They just say, look, we have, we've always had a top set and now we've also got a top set.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the old top sets now just gone down, you know, so it's just the same system as before. Top, top sets tend to be a little bit smaller. They tend to be more like 20 rather than 30.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I think, I think in general, the students know that math is now their thing. They're like being in the school football team or the school orchestra.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're sort of in the school math team and so it's more prestigious. I think it's a bit more precision and they take it a bit more seriously and they do extra work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Again, you know, one argument would be said, well they're good at maths, why do they need to do extra work?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And my argument is well, if they're going to build their future on maths, then they do need to do it. If they're going to compete with the grammar school kids, if they're going to compete with the kids in the private schools, they're actually still catching up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so one of the things we've done in addition to just having the top, top set project is something called parallel. So parallel is a weekly math sheet comes out on a Thursday at three o'clock.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's all free. Anyone can sign up. It's like an email list, isn't it? You can sign up. Yeah, that's it. And then you just go onto the parallel website with design though for our top, top set of students.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So they had an extra 20 minutes of maths to do over the weekend. But as I say, anybody can sign up. We've got a year seven sheet, a year eight sheet, a year nine sheet. Teachers can sign up their classes. Parents can sign up their kids.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The maths is interesting. Some of times there's even a numberphile video there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, they're, they're brilliant because they're, you know, some of them are pitched at just that age group and they're challenging and interesting. And then there are film clips, TV clips, sometimes a video about philosophy, sometimes something about physics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've got about, uh, about three or 4,000 people do them every week, largely in Britain, but also around the world. And, and if, you know, if you teach in a school that doesn't have a top top set.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You've obviously got kids who are strong and you want to stretch them, then this is a really easy way to do it. They can just sign up, they can do it. They get a solution sheet when they complete it. And I think it's, it's, it's challenging, but it's also fun. If you're a teacher or a parent or just a kid, and you want to sign up to this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just, just, yeah, parallel.org.uk and I'll put a link in the notes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There to teach you math, but you can learn a huge amount of math from them. People do learn a huge amount of math from them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'll watch it and I'll pause it and I'll go back and I'll watch it again. Hang on, I didn't quite follow that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I might pause it again, do some calculations. Oh yeah, now I see what they mean.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can't really do that with television. You know, television really is just a flow and, and, and yeah, it's, it's in a book. Again, you can read a book and you can stop and you can pause and reread it and do some calculations and stuff. So books and YouTube are far better at teaching maths than, than television.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, uh, I think when I was quite young I sort of picked up music quickly, so that was quite a big thing. And then at school I was one of the good ones, but not sort of far and away the best person at school, including in maths. But in general I was sort of reasonably good all rounder and maths was always going to be in the mix somewhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, I think maybe some, I may have been an ancestor, my mother's father was part of a long line of doctors, uhm, in Marlborough actually, so that may have had something to do with it, I'm not quite sure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anyway, my father was a composer and I think I had some aspirations in that direction at a certain age, but maths was not by, not just by a very long way, but certainly I think I would say it was usually my favourite subject at school and I think that was partly because there was less learning to do, you just, once you understood something


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Of course I realised later that that was only up to a certain point, and then after that point there's a lot of learning to do in maths.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I very much like music and music was a big part of my childhood and I sang for example as a chorister in the King's College Choir here in Cambridge which was a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Left its mark somehow and I learnt the violin and the piano and, uh. You're still musical now?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes, I don't, not very actively, but not completely inactively.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Basically, at each stage of my childhood and early adulthood, there would be, I'd be doing something, I'd be doing A levels or a degree or a PhD, and there would be something just over the horizon, which would be the next stage. And at each stage, I wanted to get to the next stage, so by, when I was doing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Said, I mean, actually I think I could have enjoyed English, but, uh, I think maybe it wasn't just the fact that in maths you didn't have to do much learning.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, it was also that, and maybe this is a, the tasks were sort of more well defined. So at school, nowadays I really enjoy writing, effectively essay writing in the form of blog posts and things like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If we take something like a history essay that we were told, you know, we'd given a title and had to write it, but writing a history essay meant looking at one source, which would be a textbook and sort of rewriting a small chunk of it in our own words and not trying not to stick too closely to the textbook, but not deviating too ridiculously from it. And it was a silly exercise. Nobody really stopped to say,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A good essay was, and one didn't have something, I mean I find writing


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[Assistant] Whereas if you're churning out an essay as part of your schoolwork, you've been told what to say and so it's not something that's coming from within that you're keen to explain to people. Uh, so I didn't enjoy the humanities in a way that, uh, if I went back now as an adult perhaps I would. So that was another reason for


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Genuine intellectual excitement of, uhm, things like learning calculus. I remember when I first did that and a whole lot of problems that would have seemed


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Completely impossible, uh, suddenly became possible and when I saw a car accelerate, somehow my whole perception of that would be completely different once I knew about derivatives and integrals and I remember, I really remember feeling that the world had become a clearer place after I learned calculus and that was very exciting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Various extremely enlightened and interesting teachers. And in particular, when I was a teenager, I had a teacher, it was called Norman Routledge, who didn't just teach us the tools and the, so to speak, the boring stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Even if some of the boring stuff is very interesting, but also, uhm, gave us problems that had twists and required creativity and things. And also towards the end of my school days, the maths olympiad became quite an important thing and those were definitely problems where you needed a bit of creativity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How'd you do? I got a gold medal. Gold medal? It was an interesting one actually. I actually got, uh, full marks but that sounds better than it was because they were introducing a whole lot of new countries and I think they made the questions a bit easier.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so rather a lot of people, I think about 25 people got full marks, so it wasn't, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Programmable calculator, uhm, which was quite a nice thing to get. Which I had for a while until it eventually died. Right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not something I would have thrown away. I have a sort of thing that's intermediate between keeping and not keeping, which is putting it in a place, a storage place in the house that's full of... So I think it must be there somewhere, but I've no idea where exactly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] At some point my father said to me that uhm, one thing that you can do, he'd been interested because he saw that I was interested in maths, he'd talked to one or two people he'd met who, and said what kind of careers are there in maths and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, yes, he was quite well known in certain circles, so to speak.


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[Assistant] Not at all, no, I think he took the attitude that many musicians would take, which was that if someone has a real calling, they can't not be a musician then, but they better be a musician.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In a way I was, uh, by doing maths I was following a path that he would, in another life, perhaps have liked to follow himself. So I think I was, in a way, doing something that he was, I'm not saying I felt pressure in that direction either, but I think I was, it pleased him that I went in that direction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, not so much academia. In fact, he himself could have been an academic musician, because he did very well academically when he was at university. And it was fairly clear that he could have taken that path, but he decided to take the riskier path of leaving and trying to make it as a composer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually it was almost the opposite, so he was saying that from the people he'd talked to, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You got the impression that it was very good to do mathematics because it's always much easier to turn away from mathematics at some point than it is to go back into mathematics. And so however much of an applied type thing you want to do is sort of, if you stay pure for a long time, then at some point you can, you can move out from that. So it was a good, it was keeping one's options open.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But he just mentioned at that point that one option, if you carry on with maths, so to speak, forever, is going into academia, but that that's an extremely hard thing and you have to be, so to speak, right at the top.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I assumed at that stage when I was at school that I had no chance of that or that was very unlikely. But when the Olympiad thing happened, that was a sort of semi-objective measure and I sort of realised that at least it was something that might be a possibility.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I would say even at that point, I didn't really have much conception of what it was to be a mathematician as a job. What research was like. If somebody had said to me at that stage, what is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Research in maths. There's a question that people often ask, how can you do research in maths? Surely it's all been worked out a hundred years ago.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uhm, once one is a mathematician, one realizes that


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[Assistant] That's just so far from being the right way of looking at things and that every time you solve a problem you accidentally create five more problems and the subject is just completely inexhaustible.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm at Cambridge. Right. So, and, uh, but even as a beginning undergraduate, I didn't really have much of an idea of what mathematical research could be like. Possibly not even starting a PhD. Because starting a PhD one has this


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because I could sort of see empirically that people did go into PhDs and did solve problems and get their PhDs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I have a chance of being able to do it. It's just that I couldn't really see how it might be possible, and I suppose the things, the two things that I didn't appreciate, uhm, as much as I, you know, at the time, were one, just how much the subject expands, and so there are, all the time it expands, and so there are always problems that,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They may be quite hard, but just because they're open problems, it doesn't mean that all sorts of top mathematicians have worked on them. Sometimes they're just having people haven't got round to those problems or


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They're questions that arise naturally out of a paper, but uhm, it doesn't, you know, maybe one or two people have thought about it, but uhm, and then the second thing I suppose I'd appreciate now, particularly when I get to my stage is, my career stage is just how much


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Experienced mathematicians, how much, how many demands there are on their time, which maybe stops them doing a certain amount, a certain kind of thought. There's a certain sort of thought that you can do as a young mathematician with lots of time, which is just really worrying away at something for ages and ages and being completely focused on that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So at that point I sort of got it made in a certain way, in the sense that my career prospects were looking good.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I started out in a, in an area known as, uhm, the geometry of Banach spaces. So a Banach space is, it's a bit like a generalization of three dimensional space to infinite dimensions. It doesn't, it actually, they don't have to be infinite dimensional, but large, finite, or, or infinite dimensional.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but there's also a twist, which is that, uhm, in three dimensions, if you want to work out the distance between two points, the most common way of doing it is to look at the, just add up the squares of the differences of their coordinates and take the square root, so it's using Pythagoras' theorem. But that's only one form of distance, maybe


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And in general, uh, there turn out to be many different sensible ways of


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Putting a distance onto a high dimensional space. If you then look at the, uhm, set of points that are of distance one from the origin, it turns out that you get a convex body, a shape that is convex. So that means any two points, if you look at the line segment, any two points in the body, the line segment must lie entirely within the body, so there are no


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anyway, it's not convex. So because of this correspondence between notions of distance on space and convex bodies,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You get, that's why the word geometry comes in, so the geometry, there's a study of uhm, of these Banach spaces, these notions of distance on high dimensional space, has a geometrical aspect, it's called the geometry of Banach spaces. So I worked in that, it's also


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Branch of a wider part of mathematics called functional analysis. So I was a, an analyst but of a somewhat combinatorial kind and then over the years I moved more into that, that combinatorial side became accentuated and I, the analysis became lessened. I've, I've sort of gone from a,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Describe my research interests. So combinatorics I've always liked because maybe you'd say it's the branch of maths that's closest to maths olympiads, you have sort of problems that can be, where the questions can be understood very quickly and easily, but finding the solution is hard and requires a lot of ingenuity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A continuation of the instinct that drove me into maths in the first place. Well, it's two things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you asked briefly whether it was an inspiring person and the answer was yes, there was a person called Bela Bolabash who became my research supervisor and had been my director of studies as an undergraduate who was a very charismatic and brilliant


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm not a particularly influential person, but another reason was that there are some branches of mathematics where you have to learn a whole lot of machinery and really get


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Bits of machinery and useful tools, definitely like in any branch of maths, but yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A certain amount of, um, fame and admiration, or as somebody once put it, the grudging admiration of a handful of peers or something. Right. Anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Aspect of the subject that has its problematic side, so I've often felt that the most efficient way of doing mathematics might well be to be far more cooperative and to share one's ideas as soon as one has them and so on. But then you have to balance that against taking away one of the powerful drivers, I mean,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You gotta have something that's gonna make people prepared to put in the effort to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes it does, I mean I feel that though, I feel uneasy about that story being, I think it's fantastic that it happened, but it's just some romantic stories in mathematics, there's a danger that they can be a little bit harmful because that really is very very untypical and I would never, any research student of mine, I would say don't whatever


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go into an attic for seven years without telling anyone what you're working on. It's just, uh, it was a massive risk that, uh, paid off for Andrew Wiles. He must have, I suppose, sensed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had a reasonable chance of success, but uhm, I think for every one of those you can find... A wasted life. There are examples, I won't mention any names, but there are examples of people who just decided they wanted to do something a bit like that and it didn't end well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't remember the precise moment but the thing that I did was just a little tweak to an existing argument that, uh, improved the answer at the end, improved the band.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But not to the best band you could possibly get and, uh, I remember presenting that at a seminar where one of the experts in the area was present who didn't seem, you know, sort of okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but in a way that, uh, spurred me on a little bit. And, um, so I worried away at, I mean, I did what I was talking about, worried away at that particular problem and eventually did get by a much more complicated argument, uh, an almost best possible answer for that particular problem. Did that person then get impressed?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, I think he certainly would have been likely to be more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More interested, but, uh, I don't know. But somebody, there was another mathematician who was very supportive to me at that stage of my career who, who definitely liked this result. So that was helpful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But there's another thing that I regard, I mean the first, the thing that I really think of as the important first was not so much the first serious piece of work that I did, that was the first time I solved a problem that was something that I'd kind of seen


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Big problems in the area that were mentioned as open problems in a, one of the basic textbooks in the area.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right. Lovely problems. And uhm, I suddenly at some point realised that I had an idea that gave me a serious chance of solving that and I worked on it absolutely flat out over one summer. What was it called? It was called the unconditional basic sequence problem. So I solved that with a complicated counter example.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a solution to a problem. The problem said, is such and such always the case? Does every banach space have such and such a property? And the answer was no, here's a horrible banach space that does not have that property.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yes you have, yes. It's just not maybe, sometimes country examples slightly sort of close off an area and it had a little bit of that, although there were some positive outcomes as well. But anyway, the story was complicated because not long after I did it, I heard


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That another mathematician has also done it, actually very slightly after me, but definitely independently of me. And I was so shocked when I first heard that, that I realised I just couldn't do anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well in retrospect it shouldn't have been, but just at the time


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought it felt like losing half the, uh, half the credit for this thing and, uh, not being the person, but it was also, actually what happened was we then wrote up a paper together and then there was a follow up paper that was, had some other results and, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I now realise that when this happens, which happens quite often, when somebody solves a problem and somebody else solves it independently, you don't actually, uh, people sort of say, wow, you solved the problem. Even if it's not independent, even if two people solve it jointly, I feel that they get individually about as much credit as if they had solved it individually. But at the time I was just sort of too inexperienced.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But the shock and disappointment passed reasonably quickly.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe a problem that you've been working on for a long time gets solved by someone else and, uh, or, yeah, well, there are various different ways, but, uhm, you sort of get used to that as being part of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Mathematical life. And just the solution to it is to pick yourself up and keep going and do something else instead.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not really, that's not referred to in that way, but there is something related to it called the Gower's dichotomy, which was part of the proof. Okay.