The Indicator from Planet Money - The multimillion dollar Saturday Night Live UK gamble

Live from London, it’s Saturday Night? Saturday Night Live made its UK debut over the weekend after a well-hyped promotional campaign. Will this all-American sketch show translate to British audiences? We examine SNL’s multi-million dollar gamble. 

Come see Planet Money live on stage in April! 12 cities. Details and tix here: https://tix.to/pm-book-tour

Related episodes: 
Why Paramount went looney tunes for Warner Bros.  

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the memory palace - Episode 242: The Handwriter

Order The Memory Palace book now, dear listener. On Bookshop.org, on Amazon.com, on Barnes & Noble, or directly from Random House. Or order the audiobook at places like Libro.fm.

The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate. 

Music

  • Drywall from Johann Johannson's score to Sicario.
  • Castle Song by Green-House
  • Tea by Resevoir
  • La Valse du Progres by Delphine Dora
  • Arrival by Domenique Dumont
  • Sarah in Bath from Kryzystof Komeda's score to Fearless Vampire Killers
  • Thread of Light by Golden Retriever
  • In Some Spirit World by Geotic

Notes

  • This one was pulled together with tiny threads of information, much provided by the NCRA's website itself. 
  • You can find links to three fascinating (really!) studies on the brains of transcribers here, here, & here
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Pod Save America - Trump’s Wartime Messaging Disaster (feat. Jen Psaki)

Jen Psaki, Joe Biden's former White House Press Secretary and host of MS NOW's The Briefing with Jen Psaki, talks to Dan about the ways the Trump administration is trying — and failing — to sell its war with Iran to the American people. The two discuss the White House's meme-forward messaging campaign, MAGA media's break with the president over the war, and how Trump's cell phone interview habit is shaping media coverage. Then, Dan and Jen discuss how a series of contentious Senate primaries are reshaping the Democratic Party and whether "fuck Trump" is a strong enough message heading into the midterms.

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.

More or Less - Paul Ehrlich: The man who bet England wouldn’t exist by the year 2000

Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling book The Population Bomb opens with an apocalyptic paragraph.

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” it states. “In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”

Professor Ehrlich, who died last week, made a simple argument. The global population was outrunning our capacity to produce enough food to feed everyone. Famine, disease and nuclear Armageddon would follow if the population was not controlled.

The book made him a celebrity, and he regularly spoke in public, warning of the imminent threat to humanity.

Sometimes his warnings were quite vague in terms of the timescale, but other times not - he was reported as saying in 1968 that if current trends continued, by the year 2000, the UK would be a “small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people". "If I were a gambler," he was quoted as saying, "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000".

But the UK did not collapse, the global death rate did not increase, and we have more food per person now than when he wrote the book.

So, what went wrong with Paul Ehrlich's predictions of a population apocalypse?

If you’ve seen a number or claim that you think More or Less should look at, email moreorless@bbc.co.uk CONTRIBUTORS

Vincent Geloso, Assistant Professor of economics at George Mason University

Darrell Bricker, global CEO of Ipsos Public Affairs and co-author of Empty Planet, the Shock of Global Population Decline

Peter Alexander, Professor of Global Food Systems at the University of Edinburgh

CREDITS:

Presenter: Charlotte McDonald Series producer: Tom Colls Production co-ordinator: Brenda Brown Sound mix: Dave O’Neil Editor: Richard Vadon