Grey Rhinos
Many of our listeners will be familiar with Black Swan events - rare occurrences that have significant, often unforeseen consequences - yet fewer will be aware of Grey Rhinos. Like a large, lumbering rhino charging towards us, these are highly probable threats that we can see coming, but choose to ignore. So how can we communicate risk more accurately? Are there ways to improve our powers of predictability to mitigate the associated risks?
In this week’s podcast, we discuss Grey Rhinos with our special guest Jerry Smith from CHC Global. We discuss the UK inquiry into Covid-19, pandemics, insurance, the psychology of risk, short-termism, probabilistic thinking, black jellyfish events and the climate crisis. Finally, we nominate some of our own Grey Rhino events.
A few things we mentioned in this podcast:
- Healthcare Capacity, Health Expenditure, and Civil Society as Predictors of COVID-19 Case Fatalities: A Global Analysis
- The Animals in the Jungle of Risk
For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email podcast@alephinsights.com
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast, produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights, and our special guest, Gerry Smith of CHC Global. And this week we're discussing grey rhinos. Nick, what's a grey rhino? Well, as you know, the COVID inquiry is up and running. People giving evidence about, you know, the government's preparedness, or dare we say lack thereof. And Dominic Cummings, always an entertaining witness, quoted Tolstoy from War and Peace, Napoleon's army is approaching Moscow. And Tolstoy writes, nothing was ready for the war that everyone expected, which is a brilliant line. He quoted that as an as a sort of example of what's going on, what was going on with the pre-COVID, you know, that we all saw it coming and nobody acted, nobody did anything about it. Well, it turns out this thing has a name, grey rhino. And who better to come and discuss that than Gerry Smith, a man who lives and breathes catastrophic risk. He is, there's no one I trust more.
Speaker B:Well, that's very kind. So grey rhinos, it was a phrase that we at CHC, we thought we'd coined several years ago when we were writing a paper just after COVID, all the first sets of lockdown with COVID. And lo and behold, when I googled it, it found out that actually an American academic, a lady called Michelle Walker, had actually coined the phrase several years earlier and written a book about it. Awesome. So do you think this was entirely coincidental? Or had you perhaps read it and then it had buried itself away? No, I certainly hadn't. I hadn't. I was entirely coincidental, which is sort of slightly amusing and a bit weird, really. But her definition of a grey rhino risk is it's obvious, it's probable, and it's impactful. So it's that high probability, high consequence, and nobody actually wants to do anything about it. And there we might get into sort of some of the reasoning of why people don't consider these or don't consider, even though it's very high on the risk register and something that you would want to think you would be all over. But actually, then you're actually not doing anything about it.
Speaker A:Yeah, it feels and this feels like a thing. Yeah, it really does feel like a thing.
Speaker C:I added a slight modification on that definition as well, that it's also well defined. You can see it. And you can draw a line around it, you know how big it's gonna be to with quite good accuracy, unlike a black swan, which you don't know what a black swan is until it happens.
Speaker A:Well, I mean, yes, we probably ought to say, for anyone who's wondering that the reason it's called a grey rhino is almost as the opposite of a black swan. Jerry, what are you, what's the, what do we all, do you, I mean, I know all of our listeners are going to know what a black swan is. I know what a black swan is, don't you worry about that. But I still, why are you sitting around thinking about grey rhinos and black swans? I still, I just need a bit of background.
Speaker B: y of California. And since BC: Speaker A:probably about the same as what's been happening, you know, in the last. And how many of those are
Speaker B: , but also the Spanish flu of: Speaker A:an awful impact. That is a good point. In fact, I heard a, I'm afraid I can't remember who it was, but it was a someone I think, oh, no, I think it might have been Chris. Who's the chap who was the COVID? He was head of SAGE. Chris Whitty. I think I heard him interviewed the other day. I think it was him. And he said, so, you know, I was sitting there going, look, 100,000 people are going to die of this thing. And the reaction was more or less, oh, well, it sucks to be them then. Whereas if he'd have said, he said, well, if I if I said, look, there's going to be a terrorist attack, and 100,000 people are going to die, they'd be an absolute, you know, complete reversal of that, they'd have shut everything down. You know, and if you look at how many people died of COVID in the US, it's getting on for a million, I think it's not far off. And you know, you think, well, that's more, that's certainly more than 9-11. It's, it's, you know, it's a, it's more than it died in Vietnam. It's more, significantly more, I think the number of US personally died in World War Two. You know, it's like more than all the wars put together in about three or four years. And is it treated like that? No. Why? Is it because, because we see it coming? Is it? What is the going on there? I don't know. So Jerry question, the COVID pandemic, was that a grey
Speaker B: UK National Risk Register for: Speaker A:Oh, we didn't mean that kind of pandemic. So yeah, I mean, Well, they've got to put, that's their job, they've got to push it. I know, I know, we do want to move to theory. But just sticking with pandemic, I think there's something about the nature of the grain rhino is a kind of risk, which everyone can see and sees coming. I think the interesting thing is when we don't do something about it. But I do want to, I'm not sure, it's not clear to me that there was a great deal we could do, the COVID inquiry will give us the answer. But if you look at, for example, you know, healthcare spending, that is not really correlated with deaths from COVID. It's actually quite weird how different the death rate from COVID is. And it's not that easily explained by stuff. A lot of it is demographic, it's like, you know, cities and openness and that kind of thing. I'm not sure, because you remember when they built the, was it the Florence Nightingale Centre with all the ventilators and stuff? You know, the thing, the point was, you know, actually the nature of the virus's effects was such that ventilation turned out to be positively harmful. So if we'd have spent even more on loads of ventilators before the thing turned up, then we might not have, it might all have been totally wasted money. And so I mean, that I suppose touches on something about the response, like it's not always the case that you should do something. And I guess, I don't know, Gerry could probably shed more light on this, but insurance is more or less saying, well, we can't really do anything
Speaker B:about it. Well, I just wanted to cover off something you said there. And again, it's back to this sort of the wrong, rather flippantly, it's me saying it's the wrong time of pandemic. And it plays a bit to your point around, Peter, around the kind of bounded problem. And really, the issue is that the treatment of influenza virus, as opposed to coronaviruses, that you place a kind of different priority on it. And the expectation was that actually the influenza virus were going to be the far more likely. And therefore, your focus was on that. So actually, it's quite trite to say that, well, wrong sort of pandemic, there are some critical differences between the different types of viruses, how they behave, however, the treatment, and particularly around, and this, I think this is the psychological element into it, which we haven't really touched on is the fact that how, for example, I think it's started to come out and inquire already that the government was terrified about telling people to lock down. I mean, this is a fundamental freedom of movement. Now, if you look at that from, say, for example, the rules that went into Southeast Asia, and I mean, beyond China, into some of the democracies in Southeast Asia, they'd experienced some pandemic, some SARS, several, you know, in living memory, and their self-policing and behaviour around isolation was far superior to ours. So they just, it was like, oh, this again.
Speaker A: bly was where we were in late: Speaker B:this is probably more fundamentally into psychology and sort of human behaviour and the perceptions of risk. Now, part of that is knowledge. So if you were to speak to somebody pre-pandemic and talk about the waves that you have in a pandemic, the infection waves, I think most people quite reasonably would not really have an idea of what you meant. But now, of course, after, here we sit a few years after a pandemic, and we've watched the television and we've watched those graphs and those waves up and down of infection rates rising and then falling and rising and falling. That is an example of something that we wouldn't have known about, most of us wouldn't have known about before. So I think it's actually almost beheld to the specialists that we rely on, whether that's the government and their advisors, to have this knowledge and understanding and awareness. And I mean, communicating risk is such a challenge, and communicating challenging risks is even more difficult. And I think when life is bounded by 200 and whatever character tweets, complexities are challenged.
Speaker C:I think at a national government level, and a big corporation level, generally risk is pretty well managed and well understood in the sense that what pandemic was top of the risk register, national risk register before the pandemic. What where it breaks down is, is the willingness of the policymakers to do something about it. Because that is driven by the short termism, the money, which is in turn, in politics is in turn driven by the public perception, which is driven by things like media, because media is driven by profit. What's selling this week, and if we're still selling newspapers about pandemic, cock ups, or what we're doing about the next one, we're going to miss the nuclear war that's going to happen next week. Because we're concentrating on the last battle. So that's really, I think, fundamentally what it is this sort of short termism, this normalcy bias that's at an organisational level.
Speaker A: at we perhaps all had in late: Speaker B:Being on this podcast? Yeah, thank you. Thank you for placing that national, perhaps international responsibility on my shoulder. If only my salary reflected that. Well, I, it is, it is down to communication. But I think there's two elements to that. It's the, it's the, I used to work at a government research place, defence research place at Porton. And I used to jokingly say that I could speak scientist, which is a language. And I, because I'm not a scientist myself. And so I would, I would sort of say that the challenges that the technical and nuanced issues of how you manage these complex risks, whatever they might be, biological or otherwise, and it's how you then communicate that to both decision makers and communicators. And of course, decision makers, particularly politicians, have a whole communication issue and support anyway. But actually, the sort of the professional communicators, and that sort of value chain of what that deep scientific understanding is, all the way to what a government website might put out or a tweet. I mean, that difference is huge. And it has to be interpreted. And there are so many permutations. So I'm afraid I can't quite
Speaker A: rience, e.g. where we were in: Speaker C:Yeah, but you could make a, you could, you could, you could expose your audit trail, your analysis, which led you to that decision. The voters don't care. I know, but this, the Illuminati would, and that's what matters.
Speaker A:You're gonna go, hang on, you're telling me that, you know, my granny died because you didn't have a bed for her, but you've got an entire warehouse full of masks. Like, why didn't you just buy another bed for my granny?
Speaker C:But doesn't this go back to- Yeah, and that's what the media will pick up on. Yeah.
Speaker A:So doesn't this go back to an accurate analysis of priorities, right? Versus, coupled with the communications people and making sure that they're communicating it correctly, which is to answer your point a little bit, Peter, about making sure people understand. That's quite a big thing. But three, because isn't it connected to, isn't it similar? What's the difference between you've got your house insurance in place, your building insurance, let's say, and then, you know, 10 years from now, you move house and your house didn't fall down and you don't sort of hopefully go away and go, well, that was a bloody waste of money, that insurance that I spent on my house, on the buildings thing. That's just, that's the deal, right? And you don't actually want to use it. And is this the same? I think it is the same. Yeah, and it's just a question of scale and perception.
Speaker C:Probability and sort of probabilistic thinking is hard. It takes a lot of practice. And we're not, and we don't sort of, we do it naturally, intuitively to an extent, but we do it, we're very bored doing it kind of deliberately. And then we're not sort of, we're not really taught it as a sort of natural, as a sort of basic fundamental skill in our kind of Western education. You kind of learn it when you're doing, you know, probabilistic analysis, like we do very deliberately, or you do lots of betting and gambling, you get a sense, you probably develop your heuristics for it. Or if you're in business and you're trading off lots of things, you're understanding risk and how different types of risk and how they apply to your decisions, and you're getting direct feedback. You probably develop heuristics for it. But I think by and large, people don't.
Speaker A:Exactly. So left alone, we're really bad at it. Well, we need analysts. There are a large number of gamblers in the insurance industry.
Speaker B:If this podcast was just amongst the four of us, I might have a different answer on what it is. I mean, that essentially is whether you're a bookie at the racetrack, or you're an insurance specialist, that is it. It's about frequency and severity. And that's what you'll just, or frequency and success, if in the case of your bookie. Where do we want, which direction do we want to go in this? We're giving it a good working over, but Gerry, can you lead us? Tell me. Well, there's, so I think one thing that might be interesting is that the, I'm a big two by two fan, you know, the old quad, the quad thing. So are we. Yeah, you're in the right place.
Speaker A:In fact, if you were to do like fans of two by two on this side of the room, and then we've got, you know, people who trust diagrams on this side of the room. So yeah, you're in that quadrant. Yeah, yeah. Being four of us, that's ideal. That fits well. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:So it's all around, and it's back to, and I think we said this in a previous podcast, it's back to the Rumsfeld stuff of the known knowns and the known unknowns and the unknown knowns and the unknown unknowns. And if you look at that kind of quartering by, the, it's the sort of known unknowns of the, of the, of the, is the grey rhino one. So we know it's going to happen. And, but we, we, for some reason, don't, it's, we don't quite know why we're not going to respond to that, or we're going to, we're going to manage it in a challenging way. We don't know exactly when it's going to happen. No, no, yeah. But that's the grey rhino. I'm so sorry. Can I just... Yeah, go for it, sorry. So the, so the known knowns, sometimes perhaps the elephant in the room. Yeah. And we could throw that with the white elephant. That's pushing it a bit in colours, but run with it. And then you've got, if you've got the grey rhino then, as your known unknown, and then there's another one that I've come across as well called the black jellyfish. Have we heard of this one? No, but I know I want one. The black jellyfish. Well, they, firstly, they are a thing, they are an animal, but they've been characterised as an unknown known. So what we're talking about there is that black jellyfish do exist, I don't quite know where, and they are, but what's interesting is that there's been a number of swarms of these. So you get these swarms, which is an unusual phenomenon. So individually, black jellyfish are known of, but when you get the swarm of them, so this is around essentially a risk where people know it's going to happen, but what they don't know is actually what it's going, what the consequence or what the scale of the effect might be. I think when it's jellyfish it's called a bloom. Oh, there we go. Not a swarm. Not a swarm. No, okay. Fair enough. And then, and then the last one would be the, with the black swan, which is the one we talked about.
Speaker A:Have, I actually wonder if what we, what we're talking about with the grey rhino would be better thought of actually as an unknown known. And I know that seems like an odd, or let's say a kind of, you've got the thing you're going to respond to and the thing you're not going to respond to, and the thing you should respond to and the thing you shouldn't respond to. I feel like there we've got a kind of, it's a bit less philosophically demanding, but like the, it feels to me that there is something like when someone goes, hey, look, have you seen that rhino? You go, oh yeah, fuck me. And it was there all along, but you just weren't attending to it, you know? And I, I feel like that's it. So it sort of does feel like that is kind of like an unknown known to me. It's like, okay, when someone says, hang on a minute. And, and, and I think it's an interesting difference in the kinds of, so I was thinking about the institutional side of this. And I think we've all worked in, well, we, us three have certainly worked in large organisations, in our case, the MOD, in your case, the military. And, and, you know, we've seen how decision-making works up close there or doesn't work. And, you know, there's this kind of, this idea, it's completely incorrect idea that the way that, you know, decisions work is senior people make decisions and then the lower down people carry them out. But that isn't really what happens. I mean, the, the Secretary of State for Defence doesn't know about 99% of the things that happen in the Ministry of Defence. They all just happen themselves. And it feels to me like-
Speaker C:That might have been true of the previous one, but the current one doesn't know about 99.99%
Speaker A:of what goes on. And, but, so I, but, but it is, it's also true that organisations have this kind of inertia. And if they're looking at certain things, then they, you know, then they, they just keep looking at those things. It's very hard for them to start looking at other things and to, and to sort of, you know, move around and, and be flexible. And it just sort of, the problem with a black swan is that it's no one's job to look at it. Is the problem with a grey rhino is that it's kind of everyone's job to look at it. So it's no, it's not your job. We're all kind of looking at it. And I just wondered if there's a sort of feature of this sort of diffusion of responsibility. Can you talk to some of what Nick's brought up there?
Speaker B:No, I, I'm just going to violently agree with him. I think actually that idea that, that might be, I mean, I talked about the psychological almost block of, of why you don't deal with a grey rhino that you can see right in front of you. And it may well be, firstly, I don't quite see it because I've got lots of other things I'm dealing with. And, and that's always the, that's always the, the kind of the human factors thing. I mean, going through a company risk register, believe it or not, my company, we have pandemic in there. We had it beforehand. And actually we were reasonably well resilient to the pandemic. Well you'd hope so. Yes. Well, that's true. Yeah. If we can't do it, then I don't, we flog our services to others. But the, but the second thing is, is it's well, it's always, it's sort of, it's someone else's job. Or it, there's no ownership of responsibility. And so you could talk a lot about the issue, the rhino that we're going to have to deal with, and we can talk conceptually, and then there's sort of a certain amount of, of implicit understanding. But the other piece is, is it may just fall into the all too difficult box. And if company, with a company risk register, you sort of say, well, yeah, pandemic's out there, but that's never going to happen. Well, yeah. It's priorities now. We've
Speaker C:got what, yeah, what do we, okay, what's, yeah, Peter? So I think that brings us on nicely a little bit to what can we do to improve the way that policy is set up to respond to and deal with gray rhinos? So the, yeah, you mentioned sort of coordination and cooperation around, when I looked up at a list of black swans and gray rhinos, a lot of the gray rhinos that seem to be obvious problems that we're going to have to do, get grips with are bigger than a single state, certainly bigger than any one company, much bigger than Europe and global things, the things like climate change and phosphorus shortages and ageing global population and all this sort of stuff. And, and there's just no one's kind of immediate, selfish interest to get, get a grip of it. There's too many vested interests in a lot of things which take higher, low, higher sort of approximate, higher priority. Well, they're more salient. More salient. Yeah,
Speaker A:there you go. It's a bit of a tragedy of commoners about this. I mean, is this, we're
Speaker C:sort of talking about that a bit, right? Yeah, I think that, yeah, something a bit like that.
Speaker B:It always runs onto the thing of, well, why, why should I bother to change to an electric vehicle when there's every X number of months and a new coal-fired power station is happening in, in China? My little bit is not going to, is to affect anything. So I know it's a really big thing. And I'm glad you brought the climate change thing up. I was going to bring it up at the end. It's this sort of, there is, there is a grey rhino that is lumbering towards us and it's possibly the largest one. Well, it is the largest one. Well, actually that sort of preempts, I was going
Speaker A:to, you know, have a question at the end, which is, well, what are the, these great big grey rhinos that, you know, none of us are thinking about? And, and again, as Peter was talking about climate change, because it's a difficult one because you've got climate change, the thing itself, and then you've got all the different risks that can stem from that. So how would you start going
Speaker C:investigating and talking about that? Well, I mean, I thought that I was going to leave it to the end. I've got a list of black swans and grey rhinos, about eight of each. But is it
Speaker A:possible, isn't the nature of black swans that you can't have a list of them? Well, the previous
Speaker C:one. Oh, sorry, sorry. Yeah. So, so the list of black swan events, this is a typical list of, give me, give me black swan events, Google, or chat GBT. Yeah. Are they really black swan events? Or are they things that somebody somewhere, or probably quite a lot of people were saying, this is quite likely and increasingly likely, and they just weren't being listened to, or the head didn't have enough resources to do anything about it. So 9-11 terrorist attack, I'd say there are lots of analysts saying that the Islamic threat is growing, and our borders are
Speaker A:pretty porous, and it's all a bit worrying. There was an attack on the World Trade Center in
Speaker C:1993, for crying out loud. Yeah. Chernobyl, nuclear disaster. You know, we'd had them before. And the Soviets certainly had a fairly good grip on nuclear technology. And they were just doing
Speaker A:things on the cheap. I don't think we can say that a nuclear, big nuclear disaster was
Speaker C: ese. Global financial crisis,: Speaker B:probably the speed that, of everything about the fall of the Soviet Union. Yeah. And then,
Speaker C: , but the Carrington event of: Speaker A:But when it happens, we'll say it was a black swan, so, you know.
Speaker C:I don't think, so I don't think there are such things as black swans is what I'm getting.
Speaker A:Oh, okay. No, but it sounds like you're saying they don't exist at all, or actually either your research method is flawed or your source is flawed. But you're saying no, they just don't
Speaker C:exist. I'm saying no on these kind of global scale black swans.
Speaker A: make an argument that in late: Speaker B:Yes, there are. There are a couple of things. I think covering off, firstly, Peter, your idea of black swans, I don't disagree, actually. I think the issue is, is almost the complexity of it. You have an infinite number of big risks. And something like 9-11, you're absolutely right that there was information coming in that the US were being targeted. And there was other information from another agency that was coming in saying people had arrived. There was information about the fact that they'd gone to flight school. I think there was even information that told them that they were interested in how to take off planes, but not necessarily how to land them. So all of those, but it's putting all those pieces together. So perhaps the black swan is not those individual factors. It's the fact when you put it all together. Yeah. So like coordination, yeah, or lack of imagination.
Speaker A:But I mean, look at what they, OK, so what did they do about it? OK, you couldn't get into cockpits, for example, total cockpit lockdown. You wouldn't have been able to do that on the strength of any amount of intelligence that this was a prospect. It has to happen so that we go, oh, we better have locked cockpits. Yeah. Then the next thing you know, German wings, suicidal pilot, oh, we better do something about the locked cockpits. You know, to some extent, we just have to respond after the event. These things have to happen for us to have the, you know, the wherewithal and the understanding and the political will to deal with them. But it's also only once that has happened is that you can start to, this problem we've come across so many times of information versus processing, right? Which sort of you were talking about it just there, Jerry, but just immediately reminds one of the library, you know, Borges's thing. It feels to me very similar. All the information's there, but you haven't read it yet. And how could, yeah. So that being the case, right. I think we've given that a good sort of worrying, is to a question we were talking a little bit before about climate crisis. What are the big grey rhinos out there? So this is the question, right? What's the scariest grey rhino?
Speaker B:Yeah. Well, no, I mean, what are the grey rhinos that we should be thinking about? Well, I think they're the sort of second order elements around the climate crisis is the grey rhino for everything. I think the secondary ones around that are things like particularly water, too much of it in the wrong place and not enough of it in other places. And I think that's going to be a real challenge. That's going to drive mass migration at the risk of sounding political. But I mean, there are some horrendous things. There are countries that are planning to be underwater and what they're going to do about it, going to other countries and asking to buy pieces of land or occupy pieces of land. That's happening in certainly in the in the Pacific. There are islanders now looking at places that they're going to have to move the whole of their, albeit small population. That is utterly terrifying.
Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, it's a depressingly simple answer, isn't it? Right. It's that's a big old rhino. Yeah.
Speaker C:It's a very well detailed rhino. Yeah.
Speaker A:Are we going to nominate our own rhino? So let's do that. OK. So, yeah.
Speaker C:Peter, have you got a rhino? I have got a rhino. My rhino is quite a baby rhino at the moment. OK. But it's quite well understood. So we've got a good picture of it. So the birth of AI and the transformation it's going to have on literally everything we do is going to breed a new kind of technological dependence that we've never really had before. So up until we've been in the computer age and we're dependent on computers. But I think that's going to be ten, a hundred thousand fold worse kind of dependence with AI. So, you know, until three years ago, say, so chap GPT coming online, if all the computers disappeared, it would be pretty terrible. But we would probably survive. We'd get away with it and we'd piece it back together because a lot of what we did was still done in a very old fashioned papery, manual, analogue way. It just happened to be done on computers. Give it 10, 20, 50 years time when we can't do anything for ourselves without an AI being involved, we're stuffed. The whole economy will just disappear overnight and we won't even have basic provisions if computers disappear at that point.
Speaker A:Well, that's Peter's baby rhino. I'm worried a bit more about its dad, which is about to hit us like a train. Go on. Well, like the versions of AI, I think AI has really just gone over a line where it is now so easy to use and so obviously of everyday utility that it is going to really smash up the economy. I don't mean necessarily in the long run for the worse, but so much of what we do in the service economy is essentially sort of those little knowledge tasks. It's just because a human's a bit better at knowing, well, okay, I want this dress to look like that, right? And so someone makes that for you. The next generation of GPT, which is a year or two away, is going to be so astonishingly capable at those kinds of knowledge tasks. I just don't think it's too much to think about, but so much of what we do. I mean, I'm talking about things like generate me a podcast, which is about grey rhinos, where it's like four middle-aged blokes talking about grey rhinos, make it 40 minutes long include some nice music at the beginning. It'll just be there. Right? I mean, that's, yeah. It's lucky we don't monetise this. And I just think you get ready, guys. Yeah, get them once that one's been trampled by that one, it'll be time for Peter's baby rhino who will come along. Everything will disappear. Well, this is really scary because it makes me worried in a similar fashion, we're not even going to get, I'm not even going to get to my grey rhinos. So, I mean, my one is connected to demographics and climate change as well. So sometimes if I'm sitting watching the news and it's talking about, you know, healthcare crisis in the UK and I sort of think about, you know, to myself how difficult it is for me to see a GP at the moment. Well, that's not bad because I'm 50, I'm vaguely all right. But I'm sitting there going, oh, this isn't very good. And then I do start to go, hmm, but I'm getting older at the moment and soon I will need to be seeing a doctor. Grey head rhino. Yeah, grey head rhino, yeah. And then every summer when you read about X number of people died in European heat wave this year, I look at that and go, well, that's not good. And then I go, hold on, that might be me soon. So that's the two things. It sucks to be an old person in Europe. Yeah, but maybe I need to chill out about that because I'm going to be, you know, in economic spiral from having lost my sort of, you know, my content production to AI anyway. What about for you personally? I know we talked maybe more generally, but Jerry, so what's your personal grey rhino?
Speaker B:I think I've covered mine off, actually. I can do a fairly lightweight one if you want, which is the demise of the internal combustion engine for motor vehicles. I think when we get to electric vehicles, whilst they are, their acceleration is pretty fine. I used to be a fairly keen motorcyclist and I think the roar of a highly accelerating motorcycle and going around the corner with a sort of slightly squeaky bum moment is amazing. And I'm not quite sure even electric vehicles are going to replicate that in the future. So I need to, I need to face that risk, which I think is going to be around preserving the motorbike I have and perhaps storing petrol in some underground bunker before they ban it.
Speaker A:Yeah. What's a known known risk? What's a known, what are those ones called?
Speaker B:Well, that was a grey rhino, I think. That is, no, no, no, the known known. That's the elephant in the room. Oh, yeah.
Speaker A:I think what you've got there is an elephant in the room going off against a grey rhino. Yeah. Because there's a very much a known risk with going around that corner. Yeah. And it's the battle of the rhino and the elephant. Well, who would win out of an elephant and a rhino? Do we got any data on that?
Speaker B:I don't know. But I also, I've also got a, I've absolutely got a black swan I can tell you about as well. Oh, go on. Yeah. So it's a.
Speaker A:There we go. Nice. Right. So thank you, as always, for listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph. But of course, a special thank you to Gerry Smith of CHC Global. Thanks for joining us. Until next time. Goodbye.
