Ben Ainslie and his wife Georgia Thompson are probably not known to many Murkins, although in the yachting world he’s very well known as the most successful Olympic sailor of all time, not to mention the head of Britain’s America’s Cup team.
So during the Covid Lockdown Silliness they created a podcast / TV show called Performance People in which they talk to various successful people such as F1 Mercedes AMG team principal Toto Wolff and his equally-accomplished wife Susie — surely the absolute exemplars of the “power couple”.
The show that got me, however, was their interview with The Greatest Living Englishman and his man Kaleb, on the Diddly Squat Farm. Funny as always, the pair are wonderfully entertaining, right up until the discussion moves to farming, and what farmers have to deal with.
I have no idea whether our farmers have to put up with the same degree of red tape as the Brits do, but when Jeremy Clarkson points out that the suicide rate for British farmers is the highest of any profession in the U.K., things get really serious.
If you do nothing else today, watch this show.
Ben Ainslie’s Olympic medals were in the extremely competitive Laser and Finn Class of boats. They are small one person “one design ” sail boats which can only be sailed fast on the razor’s edge of control. Basily the ” Formula Fords” of sailboats. Inexpensive with massive fleets of boats of identical at every race all of which need to get to the starting line at the same time and in the same spot.
His America’s Cup Boat is a Hydrofoil Catamaran Sailboat that routinely does insane speeds ( ~ 50 Knots ) while the 50 ft boat is balanced on a couple of square feet of carbon fiber foil. Think F1 cars on crack.
American Farmers don’t need to deal with quite as much stupid regulation, instead they need to farm on an industrial scale. Typical Nebraska operation is a thousand acres ( 10 times Diddly Squat) with Millions at risk each harvest.
watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwsJMUeIz3c
Darn foreigners talk weird.
I slowed the video to .75x ‘playback’ with captions.
Apparently, the discussion concerned going sailing with sheep?
I think you got it.