The Weekly Listen: What AI will be capable of in 2030, a new way to search by filming video, and more

On today's podcast episode, we discuss the different futures AI could usher in, what Amazon’s store strategy should be, if searching with video will catch on, the impact of instant AI video generators, how many Americans drive an electric car, and more. Tune in to the discussion with host Marcus Johnson, vice president of content Suzy Davidkhanian and analysts Blake Droesch and Carina Perkins.

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Episode Transcript:

Marcus Johnson:

This episode is brought to you by TikTok for Business. Brat Summer is over, but TikTok for Business is just getting started. Whether your marketing goals are brand performance or full funnel related, leverage TikTok for business insights to drive business growth. Learn more at TikTok.com/business. Hello, everyone, and thanks for hanging out with us for the Behind the Numbers: an EMARKETER Podcast made possible by TikTok. This is the Friday show. That is feeling professional. God knows why, and apparently it's calling the four, five, and six lines of the New York subway the green ones.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Everybody calls them that.

Marcus Johnson:

No people-

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Everybody.

Marcus Johnson:

... Refer to them as that.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Everybody.

Marcus Johnson:

This is also the show that has mixed feelings about Ryan Reynolds. We won't get into it. Already got spicy. I'm your host, Marcus Johnson. I think he's cool.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I'm Canadian.

Marcus Johnson:

So you know where Suzy stands. In today's show, in the year 2030, what will AI look like? What direction should Amazon's store strategy go in? How much will searching with video catch on? What will creating video look like in a year? And some interesting facts about electric vehicles. Join me for this episode. We have three people. Let's meet them. They all cover retail and E-commerce. One of them is our vice president of content as well, in her spare time. As well as heading up our retail and E-Commerce desk, she's based in New York City where the green ones live. It's Suzy Davidkhanian.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson:

Do you just refer to all of them as like the colors?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

By the color, yeah. That's very international of me.

Marcus Johnson:

How do you make it in life, really?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I don't take the subway very often.

Marcus Johnson:

Particularly, in New York. That checks. We're also joined by Blake Droesch. He's one of our senior analysts on that very retail and E-commerce team, also based in the city.

Blake Droesch:

Hey, Marcus. Good to be back.

Marcus Johnson:

Hey, fellow. Yes, indeed. Good to have you. And finally, we are joined by Carina Perkins.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

[inaudible 00:02:18] his win already.

Marcus Johnson:

Carina Perkins, who is based across the pond on the south coast of England. She is one of our senior analysts on that same team.

Carina Perkins:

Hi, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson:

Hello there. All right, folks. What do we have in store for you today? We will start with the story of the week. We move to the game this week, and we end with some random trivia, but we start, of course, with the story of the week. "It's the Year 2030. What Will Artificial Intelligence Look Like?" was the title of an article by Bart Ziegler of the Journal. He was questioning whether AI will live up to the hype, boosting and simplifying everyday life, or will it fizzle out, or change the world for the worst, perhaps, replacing human relationships and spewing fake media everywhere? His article asks a selection of experts to weigh in on what AI will be doing in 2030. A couple of folks he spoke to, Gary Marcus, founder and chief executive of a machine learning company that was sold to Uber, thinks that the rampant tendency for AI to hallucinate will be its albatross.

Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, thinks over half of the Fortune 500 companies could vanish, replaced by a wave of new titans and an unprecedented number of trillion-dollar companies. And finally, Ethan Mollick, there's lots of other people, but finally for me, Ethan Mollick, professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School notes that some experts suggest we may achieve artificial general intelligence machines that can outperform humans in virtually every task as soon as 2033. The gang have agreed to represent the different positions on the future of AI, the bear case, the medium case, and the bull case. I don't know if it's called the medium case, but it is now. Carina is taking the bear case here, so by 2030, AI will only moderately improve our lives. Carina, why do you see this reality transpiring?

Carina Perkins:

Well, I think this is less about how rapidly the technology is going to develop, which I imagine is fairly rapidly, given the advancements that we've already seen, and it's more just about the adoption challenges. I think, as it was pointed out in that journal article, changing human behavior can take a very long time. So even if the technology is there for us to use, it doesn't mean necessarily that we're all going to use it in the right way, so I think we're going to see incremental improvements to our lives, perhaps some incremental worsening of circumstances in some cases, but I don't think it's going to be this kind of huge, immediate impact. We are talking five years now, so I just think that, by 2030, it's probably going to be moderate. I do think that it is going to have a very transformative impact eventually, but I just don't think it's going to be super quick.

Marcus Johnson:

Is there one part of life you think it will have a moderate impact on more so than others?

Carina Perkins:

Not really, because I'm very much in the kind of incremental camp, so I think that you can have all of these really exciting bells and whistles that's going to transform the shopping journey and things like that, but I think actually the biggest impact is going to be incremental efficiency improvements, incremental operational improvements. So I think it's going to have quite a big impact across a lot of different spheres, but I don't think it's going to be a sudden silver bullet, complete transformation. I think it's going to be more of a gradual thing.

Marcus Johnson:

Do you think that that incremental impact could be kicked off, generated by Apple Intelligence and their introduction of AI into a lot of people's lives, and kind of almost like a Trojan horse effect of people who are just Apple iPhone people, and they're buying the latest iPhone and, "Oh. It has AI and oh, this is how it helps you with your everyday life"? I think, I mean, it's rolling out this month, Apple intelligence, to people who have the latest iPhones, but I think in a year's time there could be a lot more people who are familiar and using AI today because of that.

Carina Perkins:

Yeah, sure. And it's not just Apple, right? I mean, Google's doing it. Samsung's doing it. There's a lot of this.

Marcus Johnson:

Yes.

Carina Perkins:

I think that putting it into phones is definitely going to drive wider adoption, but I still don't think it's going to fundamentally transform our lives in the next five years. We've seen things like augmented reality, technology trends. The technology can be there, but it takes a while for the humans to catch up in their behavior.

Marcus Johnson:

Blake is going to take us a step further. He's got the medium case, so he's arguing that there will be one or two significant use cases that will emerge within the world of AI that will latch onto. Blake. Why would this come to fruition?

Blake Droesch:

Yeah. I think, because we are sort of on the precipice of Apple introducing AI into the iPhone as you mentioned, and then also Google implementing AI search into the top of its search experience, which I think within five years time, it's very realistic that it's going to fundamentally change how everyone accesses information. That is a very, very large component of the way that we all live our lives. If you think how often we turn to search engines, how often everyone turns to the internet to find all types of information on a daily basis, if AI is inserted into that experience of the tools that we are already using, I think it's really just a matter of time before it completely changes the way that we are accessing all of the information that we do today on Google searches and referring to our phones.

To me, when you think about, one of the writers of this piece equated AI to sort of how the internet evolved, the internet obviously evolved and became a fundamental part of everyday life over a period of, I think you could say about 15 years, but that really a lot of hardware implementation. AI is not going to need that. All it's really going to need is sort of the Apples and the Googles to introduce the software, introduce the AI into the experience and the technology that everyone already has access to, so that leads me to believe that it's obviously going to be implemented and become a common use at a much faster pace that the internet did.

Marcus Johnson:

I forced Suzy to take the last case, the last position here, which is that it will change the world. It's the ball case, Suzy arguing that human level intelligence is all but a certainty by 2030. Suzy, what's the argument here?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

So I think my colleagues sort of led into this, which is it's going to be, and it currently is pretty much embedded in everything we do, and it'll just be at your fingertips. You won't even be thinking about it, and it'll just be there for you to use. That's different than some of the other technology like ARVR or Web3, that didn't take off, because yes, all of these things need a different habit, but the habit creation, we all know that book; how to create a habit, it takes about a month. They're removing friction, all of these platforms, by just embedding in it. I think they have shown so many different successes. Yes, there's hallucination.

Yes, there's lots of things. In five years, they will have figured all of that stuff out, but every industry and every function is impacted by some formulation of Gen AI. Just the other day, I heard on a podcast that there is in farming in Africa where they don't all have the same tools that we do here in North America. There are some sort of platforms that help sort of triangulate weather patterns, the quality of your soil, helping you better understand what to plant, where, which is going to help them be better, more fruitful farmers, pun intended, so I think just that. Plus, if you think about, I mean, I could keep going on and on. Just think about healthcare, everything from better treatments, to better personalized treatments, to better drug care.

If that all did not convince you, what I would say is that the Nobel Prizes are being awarded right now, and the one in physics was to an artificial neural network, and they have enabled machine learning with that ANA. ANA is said to be a type of machine learning. I, obviously, had to Google it, model that uses a network of interconnected nodes to mimic the human brain's neurons. So if today that's what's winning the Nobel Prize, as sort of groundbreaking, it's guaranteed that in five years it'll be part of everything we do. Will it still need some supervision? Most likely, but will it be as powerful and think like a human? Yeah. Based on the newest Nobel Prize winners, I think so.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah. So there was this lioness piece, talking about where we will likely end up. Scientists and futurist, Roy Amara, famously saying we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. Well, chances are we will probably live where Blake suggested, the kind of medium case. However, Suzy, I mean, five years time is quite a long. I mean, TikTok, no one really knew what TikTok was five years ago. It had less than about 30 million users, and now like 115 million, 120 million people in America use the thing. And so, you can see how quickly something goes from no one really knows what it is, to a household name. ChatGPT, which kind of kicked off this wave of generative AI and talking about it, it's not even two years old yet.

Since then, from the first model, it's gone from passing the bar exam in law, passing in the bottom 10%, to reaching the top 10% of all scores, to becoming multimodal. So it can digest images, videos, and text. It can interact with people by voice in real time, offering more conversational rhythm. It can detect a person's emotions in their tone of voice or facial expression. It can remember things, and now OpenAI's latest version, 1.0, has reasoning abilities, meaning they can think first and then answer going, through a chain of thought as it takes its time to respond. That's in less than two years, so in five years it does seem like, I mean, human level is maybe a little farfetched, but it does seem like AGI, artificial general intelligence, AI that can reason is well within sight. All right, folks. That's all we've got time for the story of the week. Let's move now to our game of the week. Today's game, super-duper game. How does it work? Three rounds. Today we have pretend CEO move the needle in the random scale. The best of the answers, the more points you get.

Blake Droesch:

Okay.

Marcus Johnson:

Round one.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Factitious points.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay. It may or not be true. Round one. Pretend CEO, where our contestants pretend to be a CEO, and for this round we're talking about Amazon store strategy. The online retail giant has closed three more Amazon Go convenience store locations in New York, and it's our senior retail analyst, Zak Stambor. It now has just two left in the city, 17 across the US. According to the information, the company pulled the just walkout technology out of its Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods stores. Zach writes that the closures are the latest sign of the E-Commerce giant struggles to find the right formula for physical retail. So, pretend CEO, or as the pretend CEO. Let's go Blake first. What direction would you take Amazon's store strategy in?

Blake Droesch:

I don't really think that the closure of the Amazon Go stores is necessarily a failure. It's largely been a way for them to test the technology. They've realized that it doesn't really work well in the grocery store format. It's better used for smaller formats, things like concessions. So I think that's just a learning that's ultimately going to bring them more success in delivering that technology and selling that technology over time. As far as what they should do, I think they should lean into the grocery angle, open up as many Amazon Fresh stores as possible, and just have a place to connect the online grocery experience with the offline experience, because that's the only way that they can really get into grocery, which is the most profitable way that they can expand into physical retail.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay. Suzy.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

So I agree with Blake. I don't think it was a failure at all. I think Amazon is known to test, learn, fail, move on. It's just a little bit longer cycle and a little bit more expensive when it's physical versus online. They're just trying to figure out how to sort of thread all of the data across all their different platforms and all their different gimmicky sort of, but not failed approaches to figure out what would be next. So I think, for me, what I would say as the one-day president or CEO is-

Marcus Johnson:

One day president? That's not a segment.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Or CEO of Amazon. Come on. So you know what I would recommend that they do? They already have a partnership with Kohl's.

Marcus Johnson:

It's off the rails.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

They already have a partnership with Kohl's. I think what they should do is take all their private label brands and do pop-ups in strip malls or other places where there's already a lot of traffic, where the rent is not expensive, and get a better sense of what that would feel like. So whether it's pop-ups in a Kohl's, or whether it's standalone stores, or maybe a mix of both to see what works, what doesn't work. You're going to a store because they're offering you a product that is different or the product that you want, and not because there's technology. That's not the draw. That's not going to get traffic.

Marcus Johnson:

Carina?

Carina Perkins:

Yeah, so I think people shop with Amazon online because it's cheap, it's competitive. You can compare the prices. You can pretty much find a good price, especially if you're a Prime member, and it's convenient. So I think they need to think, when they're rolling out their store format, of what's cheap and convenient, so I think that they should adopt a Argos style, click and collect format. Does anyone know Argos? Do you guys know Argos in the US? So Argos was like the original click and collect, but it used to be you go in a store, there's nothing in the store, there's a few cupboards with random things in it.

You get a big book that you look through with loads of products in it, and then you get a little bit of paper, and you write the numbers of the products you want. You give it to them, and they've got a big warehouse behind with loads of stuff, and they go and they get it and they bring it to you. So super cheap, cheerful, and pretty convenient. So they could leverage their existing fulfillment network so that you could click and collect, go and pick up from a little point that you wanted. They could work with. Well, Argos is now owned by Sainsbury's, but you could work with other stores to have concessions within other stores. Essentially, it's Amazon, but you can click and collect, which you can kind of do already, but they could own it.

Marcus Johnson:

So there was a comedian who was talking about Argos, and they basically described it as a store where they decided to do retail differently and change up the format, and every other retailer was like, "No, we're fine," so it is quite a unique style, but it was a very, very, very popular store.

Carina Perkins:

I love Argos.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, particularly in the 90s and early 2000s, so it did work.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

But it was a catalog store, basically, like consumer distributors in Canada.

Carina Perkins:

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

Mm-hmm.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Very expensive.

Carina Perkins:

But I think, rather than going super high, no, but it's not expensive. That's the thing.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Oh, it wasn't?

Carina Perkins:

Not expensive at all, no. It's cheap and cheerful. They put absolutely zero money into the shops. They're just like a-

Suzy Davidkhanian:

But I mean, the Canadian equivalent was that they had to have all the merchandise. I mean, this is before click and collect, but they had to have all the merchandise in the store. The storefront was just like, imagine a jewelry case, and that was it. You went and talked to someone, and you were like, "These are the three things I want." They went to the back and brought you the VCR and whatever it was that you wanted.

Carina Perkins:

Yeah, exactly that.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Yeah.

Carina Perkins:

But my point is a modern version of that now is that you don't have to have it all in there.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

That's true.

Carina Perkins:

Because people can go in and order it to collect the next day, or go in and order it online and go in and pick it up.

Marcus Johnson:

It's some interesting ideas. Physical stores, they've become an afterthought on the balance sheet for Amazon. In Q2, Amazon's physical store sales grew at their slowest quarterly rate in three years, less than 4% growth. In addition to that, the line item has accounted for less than 4% of Amazon's total revenue since 2020, so they've got to do something, need some really good ideas. Let's move to our second round today. We've got Move the Needle. Folks, tell me how much this story will move the needle out of 10.

Talking about Google introducing a new way to search by filming video. It's a story from Tom Gerken of the BBC. He explains that folks point their cameras at something and ask a question about it, and then get gen AI search results as long as they enable AI overviews in their Google app. The example that Google gave was a person at an aquarium, who might want to find out why a group of fish are swimming in unison. Industry analyst, Paolo Pescatore says that this is a big thing for Google. The question is how much will searching with video catch on or move the needle, out of 10? Let's go Suzy first.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

So I would give this a four, because I don't know that there's that big of a difference between video and still images when it comes to searching, but I do love that Google is trying all these different things with GenAI to make my experience easier and to offer what I want, where I want, how I want, in terms of gathering information.

Marcus Johnson:

Carina?

Carina Perkins:

Yeah. I was also going to say a four, and not because it's not a really interesting and potentially transformative technology, but as I said previously, changing consumer behavior can be really, really slow, so you'll get some people who'll adopt it and be really excited about it. But the majority of us will be like, "Eh," and we'll just naturally go and search, as we always have. So if you look at this chart, you look at visual search, so according to our EMARKETER survey with bids rate in August 2024, just 9 per cent of US adults use visual search regularly. 17 per cent have used it before, but not regularly. In terms of the people who use it regularly, that's up from 4 per cent of people who used it regularly in April 2020 so adoption has doubled over the last four years, but it's still pretty low.

Marcus Johnson:

Blake?

Blake Droesch:

I would go slightly higher. I'm going to say this is going to be about a seven.

Marcus Johnson:

Oh.

Blake Droesch:

Because regular usage for search, I think be it should be sort of ranked differently from a use case that is potentially going to be really helpful, even if you don't use it very frequently, and I think that's where a product like visual search, like Google's visual search is really, really impactful with consumers. I mean, I was staying in an Airbnb in Greece over the summer, and I didn't know how to work the washing machine because it was all in Greek, and you just opened up my phone, used the Google lens, and it translated it in real time. That's only one time that I've used it. I don't use it regularly, but I remember that time, and it's highly effective, and I think the video search can operate in the same way. As Google keeps adding these different features, it's only going to make it more effective as a search engine in totality.

Marcus Johnson:

Very nice. All right, folks. Let's move to round three. Final round. We have the random scale, where folks tell me about where they land using the random scale. "Meta unveils an instant AI video generator that adds sound," writes Emma Roth of The Verge. The social giant says it can create 16-second video snippets from a single prompt, and can also personalism them using a single photo notes, notes [inaudible 00:23:35]. They explain that Meta's movie gen tool offers more precise editing than other models, like the ability to replace an object with another inside of a video.

Meta said movie gen will not be turned into a consumer product this year, but this isn't a first. Cade Metz and Mike Isaac of the New York Times note that earlier this year, OpenAI announced a technology called Sora, S-O-R-A, that lets folks generate photorealistic videos simply by typing a sentence into a box on a computer screen. The random scale for today, the question is, "What will creating video look like in a year?" Your possible choices: creating video with prompts won't catch on, or by next year, half of video creation will be using AI, or AI created video will take over the whole entire world. Carina?

Carina Perkins:

Okay. I don't actually agree with any of these points on this scale, so I've made up my own, which is by next year, some video creation will be using AI, so I guess if you were going to force me to choose one-

Marcus Johnson:

Yes.

Carina Perkins:

... It would be half of video creation, but I don't think it'll be half, but some of it will. So I think that the AI is already being integrated into video production workflows. I know that I know some people that work in video production, and they're using it for various different parts of that. I don't think necessarily we're going to see entirely AI produced videos suddenly becoming dominant, but I think we're certainly going to be used to the technology being used for some of that video production process. I think if you look at the entirely AI produced videos, they're still kind of creepy. There's something about them. They lack that human touch. I don't know what it is. They're still a little bit creepy, so I think we've got a way to go before they take over the entire world, but I think it is going to play a fairly significant role in video production processes over the next year.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay. Blake?

Blake Droesch:

Yeah. I'm going to say won't catch on. I find it a little bit suspicious that the Sora, and as well as this Meta product, the tutorials come out, and they look super polished, and they talk about all these things you can do, and then there's no information as to when the general public is going to be able to test these tools. I think a lot of even just the image creation AI that is available to the general public right now is a little bit underwhelming, and I think that leads me to believe that video is going to be even further off. I mean, I agree with Carina that, at the hands of professionals, AI to enhance video production, that's one case, but text-based generative AI videos in its pure form, like these products are advertising, I am not buying that they're anywhere close to actually being able to launch this technology successfully.

Marcus Johnson:

Suzy?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

So me too. I was at about one third next year and, like Carina said, partly it's because, like Blake has just said-

Marcus Johnson:

[inaudible 00:26:43].

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Well, I mean, because half is a lot, but I think one third, now hear me out, part of the problem is that it is not out in public consumption, like Blake said, so that's going to take some time before it's out with everybody, so that reduces the half. But the other thing is, it is not going to be part of every video you see, because we already know, "Yes, it's faster and cheaper, but it's super clunky and maybe creepy, and it's going to take a ways away to get to that point, where it feels good and it feels like it's created a human creation process."

But I do think, if you think about videos, they're everything from 10 seconds. Even ads, right? 10 seconds to 60 seconds, so will creatives create a 62nd cut, and then use GenAI, these sorts of tools to reduce that to meet the time length of a platform, find the right component of that, and sort of use it as a tool to make what they have better so that they can use it more widely, that one video that was 60 seconds? Probably, right? And if you think about it, everybody's making videos, from how do you do X, like creators? There are so many different use cases, so will it take over the movies? No, never. But will it be able to help us with some incrementality on video? Probably.

Marcus Johnson:

To circle back, I mean, Carina, you're probably right, to be honest. I mean, these are pretty restrictive choices, and it probably will be somewhere in between these. There was one chart that suggested that it currently is somewhere in between this. So a fair share of people were already using the technology for creative purposes, so this chart here is showing that 17% of American adults use generative AI to generate or edit images, videos, and audio content, according to KPMG. That's a lot of different types of inputs there, but 17% are already using technology for creative purposes; however, something about it doesn't feel right quite yet, and people are definitely noticing that.

How do Americans and Brits feel about the use of AI generated video? This chart is showing that over half, between 50 to 60% of people, said two things. One, they have a lack of trust in it, and two, are concerned about the risk of inaccurate content. That was according to [inaudible 00:29:00]. Then, watermarks, that is one way that they're trying to get around this. Meta is saying they're going to add watermarks to video that's been produced by generative AI to try and alleviate some concerns; however, this data, 64% of Americans saying, "Yes, AI generated video and audio content should be labeled," according to a 2024 civic science survey." However, these tanks can be removed, so I don't know how useful that is to watermark something that can just be taken off.

Blake Droesch:

Oh, so that's 17%. I mean, that seems really high. Does 17% of the population even edit, do all of those media editing things? I don't think, and let alone using AI along with them? That doesn't make any sense to me. Unless they're qualifying that it is putting a filter on an Instagram picture, I don't think 17% of the population's even engaged in that type of behavior with creating media, in general.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah. It's probably the youngest, youngest people using it for one specific use case on a social platform. So yeah, that number did seem high to me, so it depends on what exactly those creative purposes are and who's doing that.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I think, yeah, it's the definition, right?

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Yeah.

Carina Perkins:

It's the definition of video as well, right? Because if we are saying it is half of all video created, well, probably not, because we all film videos on our mobile phones all the time, but if we are talking about-

Blake Droesch:

Professional.

Carina Perkins:

... Production by professional video companies, then probably much higher.

Marcus Johnson:

Good point. The next step here, this version of Meta's tool doesn't include spoken words, but other companies, like OpenAI, are developing AI that can instantly recreate human voices. All right. That's what we've got Time for the game of the week. Today's winner, Carina, is this week's winner of the game of the week. Seven points. Blake had six. Suzy had less than that. Congratulations to Carina. You get the championship belt.

Carina Perkins:

Yes.

Marcus Johnson:

And the last word?

Carina Perkins:

I did not use any AI in the preparation for this podcast.

Marcus Johnson:

That's a lie. All right, moving on. Last segment of the day. It's in a party data. This is part of the show where we tell about messaging thing we've learned this week. Carina?

Carina Perkins:

This one is good. It's really good.

Marcus Johnson:

Okay.

Carina Perkins:

Okay.

Marcus Johnson:

Set it up.

Carina Perkins:

It is though.

Marcus Johnson:

All right.

Carina Perkins:

I'll admit, I didn't put a lot of thought into this final section.

Marcus Johnson:

Shocker.

Carina Perkins:

And so, I was scrabbling for a fact, and this came up, and I was like, "That's brilliant," so right? You ready?

Marcus Johnson:

I will sit down.

Carina Perkins:

How many times more likely do you think it is that a giraffe will be hit by lightning than a human?

Marcus Johnson:

Oh. It's a lot more. Is it 17 times? It's a lot more. Is it 17 times?

Carina Perkins:

30. 30 times more likely to be hit-

Marcus Johnson:

30 times, yeah.

Carina Perkins:

... By lightning than people.

Blake Droesch:

Per capita?

Carina Perkins:

So 30 times more likely. I'm going to do the math now, Blake, if you give me a second. So there's only five well-documented fatal lightning strikes on giraffes between 1996 and 2010. It's a bit old, the data. I'm not going to lie, but due to the population of giraffes being just 140,000 at that time, it makes for [inaudible 00:32:23] three lightning deaths per 1000 giraffes each year, which is 30 times the equivalent fatality rate for humans. This is according to BBC science focus.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

But you know what? Giraffes are outdoors all day, every day.

Carina Perkins:

They're also really big, hey?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I've never seen one.

Blake Droesch:

That might be the single best piece of dinner party data I've ever heard.

Carina Perkins:

Thank you.

Blake Droesch:

Congratulations, Carina.

Carina Perkins:

Thank you.

Blake Droesch:

That was amazing.

Marcus Johnson:

2010. That was a million years ago.

Carina Perkins:

Come on.

Blake Droesch:

I don't see how those stats would've drastically changed.

Carina Perkins:

No, exactly.

Blake Droesch:

Yeah. They don't have AI.

Marcus Johnson:

We'll never know.

Carina Perkins:

Yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

All right.

Carina Perkins:

Thank you.

Marcus Johnson:

That was below average. Blake, you're up.

Blake Droesch:

This is some data from my favorite source, YouGov. It's asked about how often Americans eat salad. There are some interesting stats in here, because it's a pretty wide spectrum. So 6% of US adult citizens say they eat a salad daily. 34% say they eat a salad a few times a week. That's kind of where I sit. I'm eating a few salads a week, but 18% say they seldom eat salads, and then a whole additional 25% say they only eat salads a few times a month. So there's a pretty wide gap, the salad gap as I'm coining it, in American diets. If you look at the type of greens that Americans prefer, 18%, the top-ranking choice for-

Marcus Johnson:

Spring mix.

Blake Droesch:

... That tastes best is iceberg lettuce, which I think is a total misconception.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Oh, man.

Blake Droesch:

Iceberg lettuce is-

Suzy Davidkhanian:

It tastes like nothing.

Blake Droesch:

The most flavorless. Yeah, exactly. 20%, they say that kale tastes the worst. I understand that. People don't really like kale. I like kale, but I get it. Then, best for a base of a salad, most popular, again, iceberg lettuce, but also interesting enough, 38% also think that iceberg lettuce is the least nutritious, which is the top answer, so people like iceberg lettuce the best, but also realize that you're not getting as many nutrients as you are with kale and other types of greens.

Marcus Johnson:

The hipster leaf. Suzie, you're up.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Okay. I'm very excited about mine also. It is a Nobel Prize time of the year, in that the winners are starting to get announced in October. Do you guys know when it first started, the Nobel Prize? From Alfred Nobel, who wanted to give money. It was part of his will. He wanted to reward outstanding efforts in the field that he was involved with, and there were five original fields: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, 1902, in 1969, another category was added. It was economics, which is very exciting. Do you guys know what university has the most economic laureates on faculty? University of Chicago, obviously. Do you know that they get awarded a real gold medal? They get a cash prize, which can be split up to three people, and a certificate. The youngest winner was, do you guys know who the youngest winner was? She was 17.

Marcus Johnson:

Wow.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

On the cover of National Geographic, Malala.

Marcus Johnson:

Oh, yeah. Malala Yousafzai. Yeah.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Peace Prize 2014, and the reason why they have the word laureate in their winning title is because that crown of Bay Laurel leaves, in Ancient Greece, was awarded to competition winners, and it was a sign of honor, and so that's why they've kept that in the Nobel Prize winner name, Nobel Laureates.

Marcus Johnson:

It's not a huge sum of money, especially if you have to share it.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

I thought it was a million dollars.

Marcus Johnson:

Yeah, but if you have to share that, it's like saying, "Congratulations on this huge breakthrough in science or economics or whatever. Here's $200 grand. Go split it with five of your mates who you did this with." It just doesn't seem like enough money for some of the most important work being done of our time.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Or it's extra money you weren't expecting, because you were going to do it, anyway.

Marcus Johnson:

True. We say to people, "Okay. You are quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys is $60 million a year."

Carina Perkins:

That's my problem, yeah.

Marcus Johnson:

That's for throwing the football around.

Carina Perkins:

You're a footballer. You get-

Marcus Johnson:

No offense, football.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Yeah, but guys, come on. They get a salary and oh, this is incremental like, "Wow."

Marcus Johnson:

It's an imbalance in society.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Oh, that's different, just like how teachers and police officers and firefighters.

Marcus Johnson:

They're paid too much, if I'm honest.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Yeah, okay. I think you firefighters are underpaid.

Blake Droesch:

If you do it in literature, then you're most likely operating alone, and you don't have to split it with anyone. It's the scientist's fault move for taking on these new projects.

Marcus Johnson:

It's their own doing. All right, folks. We've got one for you real quick. Electric cars, three facts. One is about EV sales. In 2016 to 2020, they kind of hovered, this in the US, they kind of hovered around 200,000 to 300,000, and then have doubled every year since reaching 1.6 million last year, according to the National Renewable Energy Lab and information solutions. That means 9% of new vehicles bought in the US are electric; however, that's ones that are bought of those that are registered, so the total pool, 1% of all cars in America are electric. Evs, by state, this is the second fact, guess which state has the most?

Suzy Davidkhanian:

California.

Marcus Johnson:

It does. 3000 per every 100,000 people. Second place, Washington. Third place, Hawaii, around half that number, so a lot less. Huge reason for this is that California has the highest number of EV charging stations, counting for nearly 30% of all charging stations in America. As of 2022, California had nearly double the number of chargers of the next three states combined: New York, Florida, and Texas, Notes: Bruno Venditti of Visual Capitalist. Three electric car owners, so these are our numbers, we have these figures, our wonderful forecasting team has put these together. 8 million Americans will be electric car owners this year, or 3.5% of licensed drivers. 4 million more will join them next year, bringing the total to 12 million. We estimate that by the next Olympics, more than 1 in 10 drivers will be rolling around in an electric car.

One of the coolest things about electric cars, which I recently discovered, is that they can be used as ginormous batteries. So if there's a power outage you can use them to keep, I think was it Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal who tried using one for a few weeks? And can run your fridge and your, what is this? Fridge, freezer, and there are a few other electric appliances for two weeks, or you can charge your devices or do whatever you want, or you can keep your whole house powered for a day or two as well. So I think this is a fantastic use case, where you can basically take the energy that's been stored into the car and throw it back into a house, which is very, very clever. Anyway, that's all we've got time for this episode. Thank you so much to my guests. Thank you to Carina.

Carina Perkins:

Thanks, Marcus.

Marcus Johnson:

This week's champion. Thank you to Blake.

Blake Droesch:

Always a pleasure.

Marcus Johnson:

Thank you, Suzy.

Suzy Davidkhanian:

Thanks for having me.

Marcus Johnson:

Thank you to Victoria, who edits the show, Stuart, who runs the team. Sophie does our social media, and Lance who runs our video podcast. Thanks to everyone else for hanging out with us today. We hope to see you on Monday for the Behind the Numbers Daily. That's an EMARKETER podcast, made possible by TikTok. Happiest of weekends.