YouSaid · the spoken record

Simon Rogers

lines on the record: 38
first: 2026-05-09
most recent: 2026-05-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You can see that there is a shift where take care of parents overtook take care of kids. There's like a real kind of social thing that's going on and you can see that in the data. I also think I would say there's a very kind of visceral thing about wanting to help. Wanting to help people sometimes it's wanting to help people you know and sometimes it's wanting to help people you don't know there are others in the world who are going through something and I think I would love to see people exploring those trends around how to help because I think we're just at the cusp of that and it gives you such a sense of how we see ourselves as being part of like society as a whole and it really gives us a sense of who we are”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I would say it's the world's biggest publicly available data set. It's totally transparent. You can go onto trends.google.com and explore. You can search for anything. Anything that's interesting to you, I would say even the most general of things are fascinating, even searched around the weather, or how to tell the time or why we search for why am I so tired in spring when the clocks change as a universal thing. I think there are also a ton of social changes which are really interesting. So one of the things that I think I'm just like for the same problem is I've worked with this data for 10 years, so it's kind of nothing is surprising to me, but there was a trend which I thought was really interesting because it's rep center for a real thing. So we've heard this phrase sandwich generation, which basically our generation where you're kind of like looking after your parents and your kids.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As in jumping from thing to thing. In Canada, it's boxing and etiquette will crochet in the US, none of which I would have expected. So there you go. So it's like there are things there that are kind of mysterious, but even like either one of the things I looked at was Liverpool FC. They're the top place search for Liverpool C is not Liverpool. It's like it's Kasungati, which is in Uganda. So seeing these kind of variations around the globe, it just gives us a real picture of who we are, I would say.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who we are, I think Daphne, even in things like looking for kind of kids classes Classes for children basically, so in the UK it's parkour. In Canada is boxing.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Variations in places, even in whatever phrase there is, we'll have variations in different places. Searches for, you know, why is life so slow will show up like in the Midwest somewhere, but why are things going so fast will show up in New York? Those variations definitely show us who we are and these differences by region, even things like what people search to repair in their homes, like how to fix their variations between the US for how to fix a broken door, France and South Korea might search for how to fix a broken window. I don't think that's a cultural thing. They're just like reflects different countries have different things going on. But it's that weird mix of kind of unity and difference all showing up in one dataset, variation. And those variations are kind of what makes us.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a bit of both, actually. I think there are certain things which are uniting that we all search for, like whether it's the weather or how to tell the time or health questions or love and friendship, those sort of things. And those actually sharpen lots of places. But they're also kind of big variations.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And to me, you're in a situation where your house might not be there tomorrow, but you're looking for how to calm a dog in a storm. And that kind of points to an essential humanity there, I think. So the data is often like that. It's often kind of poignant or actually kind of like encouraging about who we are. I know there's a lot of feelings about humanity and where we are and how we feel about each other. But seeing again and again how people strive to be generous or strive to do the right thing or strive to help. I mean, we could talk about that spike in searches for how to help. We just hire now than ever before.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, how often we're going through these things and how not to be learned, but also how to know what a friend is or a friendship or how to know if you're in love. These are things that actually nobody tells you or teaches you really how to know those things, but they're really important to our lives. So seeing those show up again and again. And then there were other searches as well that to me... Point to a humanity, one of which is around hurricanes. Obviously, in the US there are lots of hurricanes. And what you see again, whenever there's a hurricane, there is a spike inserted for how to calm a dog in a storm.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And this definitely tracks with how people feel. And one of the things that occurred to me while I was doing the book is that actually we might feel lonely, but we're not necessarily alone in that moment in the sense that we're all struggling with these things and going through them together. And it made me feel weirdly part of this kind of community. And then maybe it's an unintentional community of people say who are bereaved or who are suffering. And I think a lot of the book for me is about kind of uncovering that. We're all part of these communities, whether it's those kind of communities or like, you know, people who can't boil an egg and looking for an egg. I think there are a lot of things that kind of pull us together much more than you might think. And that to me was one of the standout findings of the data because I wasn't intending to write that book at all. It wasn't something that I was looking for in the data, but it just really showed up again.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that situation, this club that unfortunately a lot of us join, you feel very lonely, you feel like you're the only person searching for this stuff, which is obviously not true. Obviously, you're not. But seeing in the day how wasn't the only person searching for these things was really empowering. And then also seeing how a lot of the searches were around how to help people in my situation, whether it's finding the right thing to say or that line of poetry or whatever it is. Those two things were really interesting to me and they kind of, and I think they tie into this idea, I mean, the former surgeon general did a report in there about how there was a epidemic of loneliness, called it.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, definitely. And I think when I first had the idea of doing the book, the first chapter I wrote was the one about grief. And I did that. My mum had died a couple of months earlier. I thought, well, this will be the hardest one to write. And this will also show me if the book can be more than just lists. It can be something that says something about us.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do I make a face mask or how do I protect my family, that sort of thing? And you can see that around lots of ways that we search for the kind of big moments in life”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And just so seeing that that data and what it can tell us is amazingly kind of powerful, but it's a totally new science. We're just now getting to understand it. And what's interesting to me is that a lot of the interesting research work around trend stator is happening outside. It's academics and people who are playing with the API and using it to try and create indicators around where we are as society and stuff. It's interesting because it's like now casting is an economic theory around indicators that can predict things down the line. But it comes back to the thing I mentioned earlier about it being a database of intentions. Like a lot of trends around action, around doing something. You could see that during something like COVID where searches were went from the informational around what is happening into the kind of empowering of like how do I”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Delayed. And we've seen that with the OECD used Google Trends to predict GDP because obviously GDP comes out quarterly and they create an index using Google Trends to basically show weekly GDP. Look at a number of kind of indicators around shopping and purchasing and that sort of thing. And I think like, I mean, this is the weird thing about the data often. I feel like an archaeologist in real time because you're discovering stuff about us as humans that we just didn't know in the past. We didn't, and we're always learning really how to use the data. So I feel like even though there's been incredible work, Google has an amazing economics team that work with financial institutions to help them with Google Trends data.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, yeah. I mean, this is based off of work by Halvarian, who was Google's first chief economist. And he was actually one of the founders with Yossi Matthias of Google Trends. So basically, Hal's written papers about this, but it's this idea that Google Trends can be a kind of, can be a predictor of the future. And I would say this is like this data is all new. We've only had Google Trends, data go about 2004. It's only been real time data back to 2015, which means you can see this on the website. You can go to it and you can see data from a few minutes ago. But what House papers were saying basically you could use trends to see things like if people are searching for jobless benefits, it's probably a head of like joblessness showing up on official statistics because official statistics, as we know, are always.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Green Pooh is like one of those things which shows up in search Amazingly frequently so often that there is actually a topic or in Google. So basically when you search for something, Google's really trying to work out what you're searching for And Green Pooh is a topic. So it's a real thing. I think top place searching for it was Jamaica. And apparently it can be caused by excess leafy green vegetables, which are also good for you. It's not a bad thing necessarily. But there you go. It's like one of those things that, again, is incredibly honest. We're probably not going to post on social media about Green Poop. But you might search for it.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can searches for why do my eyes hurt along the line of the solar eclipse that we had a couple years across the US, even though we all know you should not look at the other Sun or a solar eclipse, but the fact that this spike in such showed literally it tracks the line of the eclipse was lovely to me. So I think that chapter for me is like, it's about people feeling empowered, I guess. They want to understand what's happening to them or what's happening to friends also. I think I'll talk about things like the spike inserts around anxiety and people wanting to help somebody who has anxiety. But it's also about just trying to kind of get a grip of understanding the world around us and our health and our bodies are kind of mysteries to us. We don't understand how things happen or where bugs come from, where”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For that was incredibly important for me. So I think there's a bit of that. I'll say also it shows a lot of the data really is about how things are changing or changing in the way that we search. And even from its things like there are searches around something called Dead Butt, which is also known as glutal amnesia, which is basically, you know, I guess because we have more sedentary lifestyles now, a lot of us. And you see those kind of things showing up. But also there is kind of like, you can get a sense. I tried to get into this of how we prioritize health. I mean, there are a lot of places which are more likely to search for how to get over a breakup than how to get over a cold. You know, there is a bit of that. And there's also, I can't remember if this was in a health chapter, but there was a spot.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And suddenly he started getting this kind of shower of floaters, I guess, on my eyes. And I didn't know where to start. I was away from home. Do I need to go to hospital right now? Is it that important? Is it just like something that's going to go? And that kind of like starting place of.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I would say, yo, health is one of those areas where I really thought hard about, well, due because it's a big part, you know, 15% of, I think search I put in the book around, yeah, health is like a big deal for people, but it's also something where, you know, it's really important that you get proper medical advice, obviously. And that's something I was really aware of. I don't want to kind of spread conspiracy theories or anything like that. And I think, but the data is really interesting to me because a lot of it is curiosity, like the spike in search for green poo is a real thing. People say, why is my poo green? And some of it I think is about being empowered. Like, I want to start the chapter I talked about a medical episode I had where I had a retinal tear.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the great things about having worked in the newsroom is that you stop being embarrassed, about asking people dumb questions.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But this is something that I saw spiking. Can you explain why that might be? And she came back to me with a whole story about how it's a thing in Niger that you can't turn up at somebody's house without some kind of gift. It's very important, even if you have nothing, you would turn up with a gift even if it's like an egg or something. And so to me, that was incredibly powerful because he showed this weird little trend, this like a kind of ghost in the machine. And one of the things about trends is they're always changing. It's a sample of the data. So these kind of things emerge. And then exploring it kind of taught me something about a place that I knew nothing about. And that was really powerful for me.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I started looking at it, I think, that's interesting. And it was spiking in Niger in Africa, which is not a country I know anything about, particularly apart from the stuff that I've read and the papers about the unrest and so on. And all is this aid workers who are searching for it, or what is it? And I kind of went down this whole thing where I contacted the Nigerian embassy in the US. Didn't get a response from them. I contacted the US consulate in Niger, didn't get a response from them. And then I started looking for famous Nigerians or people I could contact. And I found a NASA hydrologist called Dr. Faju Minor, who is like an incredibly impressive person. And a very kind of like sheepish email to her saying, I know this is not about hydrology.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wonder if this thing is true. And some of the trends you see, I kind of went down a few rabbit hole. So for instance, I was looking at searches for how to say different things in different languages. And I kind of got into a rabbit hole around how to say thank you because thank you is just one of these things and people want to say thank you in different places. And there was a spike in searches for how to say thank you for an unexpected gift.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For can you keep dot dot dot as a pet? And I thought, well, that's going to be things like can I keep like a snake or something as a pet? And there's panda in there. And I'm going to tell you, people, you cannot keep a panda as a pet. I think we can all agree on that. But I love that that's in there. But I think it shows that there's a mixture with trend searches. I think where some of it is what Halvarian calls kind of now casting, you know, it's basically a database of intentions, as John Battel called it. Essentially, that we...”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anna deliberately left these trends of the book partly because I want to obviously I want to be true to the data but also if you look at the whole list it includes things like words like beautiful or love you know and it's kind of I think it represents the human experience in that way because it is this mixture of the everyday and the ephemeral with the things that matter matter in our hearts I guess as a nice way to say it so actually the fact that you know beautiful is one of the top translated words across different languages is interesting to me i think some of it might reflect just the kind of variances in language or how some words just don't really exist in the same way in different in different languages some of the data is like is perplexing or bewildering i guess and some of it is just really enlightening i mean the fact that you know i looked at searches for um”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, exactly. No, I mean, food searches are just a fascinating thing that really kind of, they defy kind of like our concept of what national identities are, I think.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think the top searched in England is less surprising, which is Indian food. But to seeing in Paris the top, in the culinary capital of the world, it's pizza. But then that's like, it's interesting because I thought, I wonder if this shows up in Italy and the top selled food in Italy is Italian food, which kind of...”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very much with my grandmother, but who was a massive cook and loved cooking food. But for everybody has their own kind of personal story to tell. And there's some really interesting trends there around, say, food from countries where there are refugee crises going on like Somalian food is not most searched in Somalia, it's searched in other countries, particularly where Somalian refugees are. So with Ukrainian food is searched kind of across Europe in countries where Ukrainian refugees are. So seeing that is really interesting to me and you kind of you get this sense of food as much more of a kind of cultural phenomenon than just about diets and calories. Meanwhile, the great thing about data is you can also see how diets have changed over time. You can see which diets are trendy now compared to a few years ago because that's obviously the stuff that people are looking for. So it really represents a lot about who we are.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? It's one of those foods that exists in so many different cultures, there is something with flour and eggs and milk or water everywhere. It's like even something that I'm British. I live in America. I've lived here for 13 years. And my idea of pancakes are thin things kind of, I like savory pancakes, galette, you know, that sort of thing. We live in America and I remember the first time one of my kids' friends was having sleepover. I was like, oh, shall I make you pancakes for you guys? And I made European pancakes. I was terribly disappointed. They weren't the thick stack of American pancakes. And it is one of those things which is searched in so many places. And it shows both the fact that we searched a lot of things similarly in different places, but also the variety that can show up everywhere. And I love that. Food searchers as a whole are incredibly resonant for people. And I think it's partly because food is not just about fuel. It's about memory and culture. And all of these other things. So for me, food is something I so...”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or eagles are quite common. And even I get into one point, I get into there's a chapter around grief, and I get into that a little bit, and people dreaming around somebody who's passed away, which is something that I have done, a very good friend of mine died a few years ago and dream about him all the time. Often I'm asking for advice because his advice is much better than mine would have been. I thought it was unusual in that, but I'm really not. Half of Americans say they've dreamt of somebody who's passed away and searches around people who died coming to people in their dreams are incredibly common. It's something you see a lot. So it's one of those areas where we all have to sleep, right? And it's one of those areas where you kind of see such a wide variety in the way that people search both kind of nationally and internationally.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a wide variety of responses, and a lot of the data kind of shows you how similar we are, like globally. But this is also one of the things where there's a lot of variety. I think Azerbaijan, I think I said, was the top place looking for sleep, which is I did a bit of research and it seems that there is people have famously long lions there. Definitely it's something that people that really matters to people. There's also a ton of research going on right now about what is the right amount of sleep. If you have six hours every night, that's bad for you, but seven hours kind of tips it over the limit. It's something that I care about a lot as well. And I'd also looked at searches around dreams. We did a big project around this too. And you can see there's a kind of a wide variety of dreams that people search for, the meanings of in different countries where it's different. And things around dreams, around snakes.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would say, I mean, you know, a lot of the trends that are in the book, and there's part of the reason why I don't often get into the answers, because actually it's so personal to people. The reason that one person might have trouble sleeping might be different to somebody else's. But I know there is like, this is one of those areas where there...”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That interests you. And that is the big difference. And I think they're not equivalent data sets. That way because one is incredibly honest and it's more powerful for that, and one is just literally people presenting themselves in a certain way.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's one of the things that we love about the data. I would just say for everybody, Google Trends is what this book's based on. It's a website. Anybody can look at and explore. And it's basically a sample of searches. They're all kind of anonymized and aggregated. And they're aggregated to city level that is lowest than you can go. And there's also all these kind of privacy restrictions, so it can't show data unless there's a reasonable amount of searches around it. But I would say the thing about it as well is that when you are posting on social media, it's like a presentation. You're kind of presenting yourself. And yeah, I used to work at Twitter. When it was called Twitter and I've worked with social media data, the thing about search data is it's much more, it's also much more genuine, I think, because it shows the stuff we really care about. You're not presenting yourself. You're just genuinely looking for something.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a concurrent trend, which is not on that list, which is how to get slime out of the carpet, which spikes around the same time. And it just shows kind of like... Kind of wide nature of things that matter to us from moment to moment.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, the data is a data, firstly, I can't tell what to say. And the great thing about that list to me is how varied it is. That is a very informational. It's a mixture of the kind of informational and the curious. So that's an incredibly informational question. People don't know what their IP is. But there's also how to know if I'm in love or how to kiss or how to make pancakes or even where is Chuck Norris. Yeah, we're eclectic and ephemeral as humans. We care about one thing, one second and something completely different than next. And that list to me really kind of illustrates the wide variety of things that we care about from one moment to the next. Also, because it's like from the whole history of Google Trends data, which goes back to 2004, some of it is like older things that you don't remember were big things like how to make slime. There was a craze for making slime a few years ago.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is just for anybody listening or watching, this is because one of the, we looked at the names that people were searching for and one of the names that people searched for is OK to call your child Lucifer. And this actually apparently is not totally legal all around the world to do, but it's the kind of trend that is, I guess the book is full of these because really what I was looking at were the questions that people asked about everyday things from parenting to pets to food to health. And we ask weird stuff. We all do. And it's kind of one of the lovely things about the data for me is that it just really shines a light into this kind of collective humanity that shows through the way that we search and through this incredible kind of very public data set.”
2026-05-09 · Intelligence Squared · What Do We Ask Google, and What Does It Tell Us About Human Nature? With Simon Rogers · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT