Fixing Restaurants, Churchill & Nazi Propaganda, Nassim Taleb, & Wingstop - Rory Sutherland

Is the idea there's a there's a whole thing called bottleneck theory, sometimes called the theory of constraints? Right, which is that if you're intervening in any system, there is a point in the system. If you imagine the flow of water, okay? Yeah. If you want to increase the flow of water through a system, the place to intervene is the narrowest point, which is where the flow of water is ultimately being constrained. Everything you do somewhere else won't won't really have much effect because, until you open that part, until you open up that constraint.

Okay. And so the idea is there's a guy called Eli Goldrat who wrote a book called The Goal, which is all about the theory of constraints. The Goal, all about the theory of constraints. And the idea is, I think it's highly intelligent because I think it's quite applicable to marketing. That actually, uh, you know, if you're not selling as much [ __ ] as you think. Okay. Um, the question to ask is, what is the constraint? And it could be distribution, or it could be mental distribution, which is nobody's heard of you. So even though you're everywhere, nobody knows who you are or what you do. Yeah. Uh, and so, um, yeah, that's interesting. Who is it? The physical availability and mental availability. They're two.

That's a Byron Sharp thing. Yeah. Yeah. That was, yeah. So Coke is very, very mentally available in the sense that if you're sitting at any, okay. So sitting here, or sitting in a cafe, or sitting in a [ __ ] cafe, or sitting in a Michelin five-star restaurant, okay? You know that if you ask for Coke, they basically have to bring you one. Otherwise, they've got to explain why they don't stock Coke. Now, that doesn't really apply to Dr. Pepper. You know, if you were sitting at a Michelin three-star restaurant, you said, "Can I have a Dr. Pepper Cherry Zero?" Then they would say, "I'm afraid we don't have that." And you'd feel like a [ __ ] for asking. Whereas if they don't have Diet Coke, they feel like a [ __ ] for not having it. Okay.

Does that apply to like ketchup, mayonnaise? That's an interesting one because you could be a snobby restaurant and refuse to serve mayonnaise. You probably have to serve. That's a very interesting one. So what, what are the con? That's a great question. What are the condiments? Now, mustard, I would argue you have to have if you, if you're a steak restaurant. Okay. You have to have mustard. You probably have to have mayonnaise. Ketchup. Now, brown sauce and ketchup are interesting. Yeah. Because to be honest, a lot of people like them. And I would argue if you're serving breakfast and you don't offer brown sauce or ketchup, if you're serving bacon, okay, you're being a bit of an ass.

Um, and actually, it's strange how, how you do have to ask, don't you? You would think, wouldn't you, that when you ordered a full English breakfast, there'd be a little pot of, I mean, at least on the table, there'd be a little pot of mayonnaise or a little pot of not mayonnaise, little pot of ketchup, little pot of HP sauce, because I would argue that actually, obviously HP sauce isn't a given in say the US, but in the UK it would be for certain meals. And then it's interesting in the US, I was in Texas and I met the guy who's the chairman of the Texas Department of Transportation. Met him for breakfast. First thing he does when he sits down and his food arrives is, "Okay, can I have a bottle of Tabasco?" And if you're in the American Southwest, chili or some sort of hot sauce is basically a mandatory. Whereas in New York, it probably, you probably get Tabasco in New York, but in Texas, you wouldn't consider not having some sort of chili-based condiment.

My mom's Mexican. Everything she has is with chili. By the, by the way, great thing. I always argue the, we probably should get this down. The Mexicans, the Brits, and the Americans, and the Turks, I think, are the only people who've cracked breakfast. I mean, the Mexican huevos rancheros and those kind of Mexican breakfasts are absolutely fantastic, cuz, you know, it's savory, it's beans, it's eggs, you know, etc. That's what you want from that business. Where you go to countries in Europe, they, Europe, European breakfast is [ __ ] atrocious. Well, when I mean it's bad in France, but then when they get into donuts or Danish pastries, that's just ridiculous. Stale bread. Stale bread, ham and cheese. Yeah. Go back, go back to the, um, the Mexican breakfast foods are fantastic. So, Texas is fantastic place to have breakfast cuz you basically get both. Yeah. Yeah. Next breakfast. We're good. We're good to start. We'll jump in. Yeah.

Um, yeah, quickly go back to that bottleneck theory then Rory, because that seems really interesting and that can apply to probably loads. The reason we're doing the bottleneck podcast is because I think, look, I think the problem we've had in business, in government, in politics, is not that the toolkits are wrong, because all toolkits are wrong, economics is wrong, all models are wrong, some of them are useful. Guy called George Box said that it's that we have this kind of, um, I would argue we have this kind of Abilene effect. And I'll explain what that is in a moment, where if everybody uses the same model to solve problems, it's all very convenient for them administratively because they're all on the same page. But ultimately, you get a complete deficiency in terms of imagination. You're not allowed to use intuition anymore. You're not allowed to use creativity anymore. Everything is considered successful to the extent that it conforms to the model you're using. And I think we need far more models. We just need to accept, just as a good cop, okay, would say, "Yes, you know, uh, we'll, you know, we'll swap for DNA, we'll look for fingerprints, we'll make doorto-door inquiries, okay?" A good cop in the search for an insight or a breakthrough, we'll deploy tons of different, um, and complimentary methodologies. You know, yeah. You'll go and talk to your, you know, you go and talk to a couple of informants who may have heard in the street who is responsible for the, you know, the Burner Street bank raid. You know, you employ everything you can in pursuit of an insight. What you don't do, you're not allowed as a cop to become like a DNA fundamentalist. Now, that's not to say that DNA is unimportant or, uh, uh, or, far from useful. It's incredibly useful, but you wouldn't make it your only mechanism for problem solving. And what we've done is we've had either lawyers or economists who are overwhelmingly given the responsibility, or finance in an organization who are overwhelmingly given the responsibility to sanction or prevent areas of human activity. And it's simply too narrow a model to cover, uh, the complexity of modern life.

And so where we get to bottleneck theory, the theory of constraints, Eli Goldrat, The Goal. He was a physicist who actually became effectively a, a kind of business consultant and business guru, but his background was in physics. And his argument is that in many complex systems, what you got to do is look for the bottleneck. Look for the point at which, um, the entire system is being constrained by this one variable far more than it's constrained by anything else. And then that's the place in which you intervene.

How do you find the bottleneck? Well, interestingly, it could be, okay. Um, it could be an entirely logistical bottleneck. Okay. You don't, you don't have enough distribution, you know. Um, it could be a psychological one, which is not enough people are aware of your existence. Yeah. And you might argue if you look at online food, the current, and by the way, bottlenecks will move because as you solve one bottleneck, one another bottleneck tends to be created somewhere else. Yeah. So the way to think about it analogously is if you have a traffic jam caused by, let's say, a road that narrows from two lanes into one. Okay. Your natural instinct might be to widen that road. But if 500 yards down the road, there's a really badly phased set of traffic lights, what you might be doing is simply moving the traffic jam from one place to another. Yeah. And actually, until you've hacked the traffic lights, which is a cheap operation, Mhm. It may be that when you hack the traffic lights, the other problem disappears. Okay. But until you've actually done the cheap bottleneck intervention, there's no point in having debates about what you do elsewhere because however good you are upstream, you're still constrained by this one particular area of constraint, which I think explains why a lot of marketing activity and a lot of business activity is kind of fat-tailed. You know, 20% of what you do makes 80% of the difference.

And so you might argue, you know, I had a wonderful conversation with Timo who founded Gusto. Mhm. And an interesting question there is, what's the limitation there? And you might argue that not enough of the population have experienced it four times. Now, by the way, I'm admitting kind of a failure here because in a perfect world where I was possessed of, you know, greater creative ability, there may be a way in which you can describe Gusto to people in a way that makes them immediately appreciate what they've been missing. Mhm. My own experience is there are certain goods and services and products which are what economists call experienced goods. Think of 18-year-olds drinking lager. Okay. You start off drinking lager and let's be honest about it, most people when they start drinking beer think, this doesn't taste very nice.

This is why, um, alcohol-free beer brands. I, I had a really interesting conversation with my mate who's got a beer brand called Local, as in L-O-C-A-L, play on words. Local as in going to your local boozer, but local as in local. Very neat name. Yeah, very, very neat name. And he was basically saying the issue with, um, alcohol-free, and I don't know whether I agree with it, but it was an interesting point, was that the market's kind of capped with people who are over 30 or 25, who who have done the, the sort of binge drinking, who actually like the taste of beer, because if you're a 16-year-old drinking beer, beer is pretty putrid, to be honest. You might also argue, which is possible, that if you've been drinking alcoholic beer for 15, 20 years, the power of suggestion means that non-alcoholic beer arouses in you something of the same relaxation and conviviality that's achieved by alcohol. Now, we know this from an old barman's trick, which is that if you have, it only works with heavy drinkers, typically found in golf clubs, right? You take a glass, okay, you, um, dip the rim in gin to give it the smell, and then you basically give people a tonic water. Okay.

Yeah. With a bit of ice and lemon. Yeah. What's interesting about it is that regular gin drinkers often don't notice. Weirder still, they manifest drunkenness because they think they've had four double gin and tonics and they behave as though they have, even though the alcohol in their blood alcohol level is zero. Or possibly you might do this only after they've had the first legitimate gin and tonic, but you can continue as a barman serving them tonic water effectively and charging them for G&Ts. A famous story, which I have to be very careful about because it needs to maintain confidentiality, is of a high court judge somewhere, and I won't say where, who is breathalyzed leaving a golf club. The breathalyzer went green, saving his career and reputation, and he immediately went back and demanded the bar and was fired for watering down the drinks. Okay. Somewhat ungratefully, I would argue.

Now, what I noticed as someone who's drunk beer, alcoholic beer, quite a lot. Yeah. Is that I don't know if you've had this. Do you drink low? No. And no alcohol? So this, I do this thing called zebra stripes, which is basically where you go in and you, cuz I, if I'm doing, I will go for eight, nine pints and that will just send me off and I'll be [ __ ]. Got it. So you actually alternate. If I mean, it's something, it's like, I mean, it's probably once the blooming actually happens, but I've either done the full, full time off it, or I do this zebra stripe thing, whereas I've had two or three pints, feeling a bit squiffy, parachute in alcohol-free, and then go back on. It is actually probably the nicest way to drink. It also, by the way, enables people to escape the worst effects of the round system, which is you're often forced to drink at the pace of the booziest person there. Because the round system undoubtedly imposes kind of, uh, you know, my mates are big city boys and they, they can drink like parched trouts, you know what I mean? They can just get it, put it back like it's no end.

I don't know. One of the interesting things I experience as someone who's drunk alcoholic beer is that I will go and have two, say, two or three pints of non-alcoholic beer, or half a pint or one pint of alcoholic beer followed by two non-alcoholic beers. Driving home from the station an hour later, I suddenly experience a panic attack because I think I shouldn't be driving, and then I remember it was non-alcoholic. Yeah. Which is kind of weird. The power of suggestion is this what you're talking about? What's what's that? Yeah. I mean, you could argue it's placebo drunkenness. There is even a theory that regular drinkers drink that actually regular drinkers will exhibit drunken behavior before the alcohol's had a chance to hit home. And the argument is that we partly drink to make ourselves drunk, but we partly drink because the act of drinking gives us internal permission to act in a slightly drunken way. Yes. And so then it's the whole thing of cause and effect that in psychology, cause and effect sometimes run backwards.

Now, I had a bit of a, not a row, but a bit of a debate with people who said the Nespresso brand doesn't chime very well with Gen Z. And I said, "We got," "Why are they saying that?" Well, you might argue that, you know, the imagery was what you might call the George Clooney ad, middle-aged, middle-aged person's idea of luxury or or indulgence, rather than the younger person's idea of indulgence. You could have, you could make that case. I mean, you know, it to some extent it makes economic sense in a, in a continent Europe where, you know, the old are quite a lot richer than the young. Sure. But one of the points I made is that actually the Nespresso brand may not re, may not, it may be that that young people don't buy Nespresso machines because the Nespresso brand doesn't resonate. Or it might be the reverse, which is that because young people don't buy Nespresso machines, they have no reason to like Nespresso as a brand. And that actually, if you found a clever promotional mechanic that said, "Let's have an Nespresso student program," where a student house could share an Nespresso machine, because notably at the moment, you, you, one person has to pay. If you had a system where everybody divvies up £10 a month and you get your machine, you might change that problem. Okay. So, so the question is, does attitude, attitudinal change precede behavioral change? Well, yes, but also behavioral change occasions attitudinal.

Would that be an example of a, a bottleneck as well? I mean, it could be if say they're trying to open, young people hate cars cuz they can't [ __ ] drive. Yeah. Okay. Gen Z Londoners. You, you go to Devon. You don't find 18-year-olds who hate cars in Devon because your entire social life, indeed sexual life, is probably predicated on having access to a set of wheels. But young people who are floating around their Ubers and their tubes and their, you know, and their Boris bikes or whatever, they're not called that anymore, are they? Um, but young people who are floating around on their Lime bikes and their whatever don't drive. So consequently, they don't like cars. Yeah. Okay. It's not everything proceeds. That's what we were talking about with OSH when we were at that had that lunch about the how the bicycle in Ireland, you know, that how that changed everything with before like people could actually start having sex with someone else in the other village. Yeah. Yeah. Probably the effect on genetics. I think Steve Jones, the genetics professor, said the same thing that the invention of the bicycle, in Ireland, well, actually everywhere is surprisingly important because your, your sphere of operations. We forget this because we think of a bicycle as a slow car. But compared to walking or riding normal speed on a horse, the bike was insanely fast. Your horny, just which probably gives you an additional impetus, extra horsepower.

And interestingly, um, one reason why we ought to be slightly more differential as car drivers towards cyclists is that it was cyclists, not car drivers, who created the pressure to actually surface roads properly. So the pressure to actually tarmac roads, if you think about it, there was a cycling craze in the 19th century long before the car had become a developed or mass form of transit. And so the initial pressure for mechanization, and of course it was more important because you can drive a Ford Model T over gravel fairly pleasantly. Okay. But cycling in rutted or badly or really rough terrain is, you know, unpleasant at, particularly with bone shakers, unpleasant at best and really dangerous at worst. So actually car drivers should we actually defer a little bit to the cycling community because it's thanks to them we have roads in the first place.

One thing in, and I suppose tying the thread through all of this is, I believe that smart answers lie in dumb questions. Absolutely. You've got to ask the dumb question. And I listen to this. I need to send it to you. Actually, it's a big advantage to being 60 or 59 as I am, which is that if you're 28 and you ask a dumb question, people think you're dumb. If you're, if you're 59 and you ask a dumb question, people think you're being profound. So one benefit I have found of just getting older is when you know you sound, you know, it's a bit like if you're a Buddhist monk, okay, and you ask something, you know, really, really sounding, you know, "Why do people buy dishwashers?" Okay? It's perceived in a very, very different way to if you're a 23-year-old who asks the question. Okay. Where the 23-year-old will be answered with the most, with "to wash their dishes, you dump," okay? Whereas actually, you know, you, you asking the question genuinely. And actually business philosophy, which is a, a concept sort of coined by, uh, particularly, um, uh, Stafford Beer, the, um, uh, uh, and actually design thinking actually involves asking some quite infantile sounding questions. You know, "Why do people enjoy this?" "Do people really care about this or do they just say they care about it?" Um, uh, you know, "People, you're spending a lot of money on X, but do people even notice?" You know? And so asking actually, if you want to, if you want to come up with a psychological explanation for things, you often have to go slightly off-piste conversationally. And a lot of people feel very uncomfortable.

That's that's why I think the dumb, because when this is what I think what Seth Godin talks about. Have you read his book? This on strategy books. One of the best books. It's basically he, I own it, but I've read it. Don't need. We don't need a better set of answers. We all think in business we need answers. Actually, we need a better set of questions, because the questions are the pathway, the compass to off-piste, to all the sort of. And actually, you could, a brilliant answer to the wrong question. Yes. So I was going to say, terrible, terrible consequence.

So I did this. So I, in, because I'm, I love asking questions. I mean, it's what I basically do for a living is asking questions, right? And I think in questions, and how, and I think in terms of this sort of, um, if we're looking at specifically in terms of bottlenecks or how to get off the sort of the tram lines of logic, questions, good questions, or weird questions are the way to find that. And so I interviewed Michelle Rue last week. By the way, there's a problem that bottlenecks always come across, which is it requires generally in an organization, it might require that a lot of people do nothing and a small group of people do a lot. Okay. And it's our inclination in organization. Now, I would argue if your bottleneck is in, for example, the volume of customer returns, that's your problem fundamentally, okay? Then actually for a period of six months to a year, marketing and advertising maybe ought to actually get off the pot and focus on that and and and concentrate your organization's focus on that. I have a very strong belief that a lot of online retailers create a a sort of behavioral bottleneck for two reasons. One, it isn't made clear before you've bought the product how or, you know, or at least before you've overcommitted with a basket, uh, when the thing will be delivered. And secondly, I think there's a psychological bottleneck in giving people no choice over who delivers it, because we all have strong preferences. And by the way, it varies. My local, every delivery driver, I know they're often disparaged, but when I have my regular driver, they're actually excellent. Okay. Now, there are other people who probably hate DHL and love every, they're people who, you know, love Royal Mail. There are people who hate Royal Mail. It all depends really on who your postman is, to be honest, and whether your neighbors nick your stuff. Okay. There are all kinds of. Well, that's actually a third variable, which is people who live remotely in the countryside, uh, on their own, really hate having random delivery people turning up because they don't want some stranger basically going, a lot of antiques in the house, lives alone. Okay. They accept the fact that their postman knows where they live because that's inevitable. Okay? You're not going to keep that secret. And your postman is part of the local community. In any case, I'm sure there are one or two postmen who are basically scouting for crime gangs, but, you know, not too many. Yeah. Now, consequently, by by procurement demanding that all delivery is channeled through a single operator and through logistics, I would argue a lot of people go, well, if it means it's going to, if I think there's a 10% chance it's going to be delivered by X, I'm not going to order. And consequently, if you advertised upfront, you can choose who delivers, I think online retailers would sell a hell of a lot more.

Okay. But they don't because fundamentally that would require marketing people to take control over something which, inverting the question, because I was going to say, we'll get to the question. Well, those people assume it's a logistical problem, whereas actually it's or a procurement problem. It's actually a psychological problem. Yeah. It's, yeah, because that's what I was going. So I interviewed Michelle Rue last week, and I, the one of, I tried to invert one of the questions when I was prepping, and obviously Marco Pierre White, um, Marcus Wearing, Gordon Ramsay, all went through Lavro kitchens. And so I said, the question I asked him, I sort of reversed it was like, because everyone says, oh, who's the most naturally gifted? I said, who was the least naturally gifted? And he was like, "Oh, [ __ ]!" Then it opened up a whole new, whole new different, um, sort of delta of exploration, cuz it's, "Oh, who had to work the hardest?" And I'd love to know because I think, by the way, that's an interesting one because there are a lot of fields where there are kind of advertising creativity being one of them, and I would argue that I'm, well, as in terms of inverting the question, I, I, I, well, there are actually two kinds of chef, I would suspect, in the way that there are two kinds of art director or copywriter, which is roughly speaking, there's the Mozart or there's the Beethoven.

What's the difference between Mozart makes? Because funny enough, Albert Roux is, you know, who basically created, he was like of food. Him and Albert, and Michel Roux Senior were like Lennon McCartney of food, like everything came from the gavos. But yeah, in in the book he gets called Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mo, Mozart and Beethoven. But what was the difference? Uh, so the general view was that Mozart was just an insane natural talent who could effectively do things on the fly, whereas Mo, whereas Beethoven, I did say Mozart, didn't I? Mozart was a natural talent who could effectively compose almost on the fly. Right. Okay. Uh, Beethoven, uh, it was more considered and laborious. Okay. It wasn't, in other words, he, you know, he had, uh, deep wells, but they required slightly more drilling. Okay. Now, you know, I mean, you could make, I mean, it, no one knows whether this is true. I mean, I have no idea where it comes from, even, but it's said of Shakespeare that he wrote without blotting a word. Now, if that is true, blotting a word as, so in other words, no, no, immenation, you just sat down and you wrote, you basically wrote immortal prose line after line, uh, without without going back, crossing out, going, you know, "Lettuce crossed out cauliflower." Okay. Right. Okay. Whatever. Okay. Um, "Shall I compare thee to a, you know, summer holiday?" No. Okay. Right. Now, if you know, if that's true, that's genuinely remarkable. I think there are people like that. Um, I think, uh, there are equally valuable people for whom it's just going to be a bit more work. I don't think it's actually, you could say that one person is more talented than the other. Well, it's only really worth judging talent by its output. Yeah. Um, there are other people, fascinatingly, the most, probably one of the most interesting creative lives is Rini, who was very, very lazy, apparently.

Who's Rini? Composer, opera, mostly, but lots of other things. Barbara Seville, uh, who basically at a certain age just got rich enough that they couldn't be bothered anymore. They literally done his compositions. I think he made enough money, but for whatever reason, seems to have just given up. For, I think later in life, he actually returned. But, but I mean, you, you'll also have people who do that, you know. That was like Da Vinci, because that was the dirty guys. He was reading his book about, uh, biography, Walt Risson's on Da Vinci, and basically what Da Vinci would drive people up the [ __ ] wall because his, his whole thing was output. So it's essentially like what, what we do in today. It was basically work smart, not hard. He'd go really intense for four hours, then do [ __ ] all, and they'd be like, "Oh, why?" And he would take these massive long rests. Of course, that's a weird facet, isn't it, of ADD or ADHD, which is that people with ADHD, uh, unexpectedly, you might think, are also capable of incredibly intense bouts of concentration. Yeah. So, it's a slightly different way of directing your energies. It doesn't suggest that you're necessarily sort of dilettante or totally easily distracted, although you might be. It may well be that you need the distraction. Well, Rick Rubin, procrastination is not distraction. Sorry, distraction is not procrastination. Procrastination. Yeah, absolutely right. Distraction is great because that's where, so I've got this another great, we're talking about Quentin Tarantino's writing process changed when he did Inglourious Basterds. So he basically used to sit there and write in a cafe, Pulp Fiction, eat hamburgers, eat fries in sort of this, you know, cafe in America. Um, and he would try and bang out, you know, eight, 10 hours a day. And he basically [ __ ] that off and he would do four hours intense, um, work. Unusual for someone to change method. Yeah, he, he said he could, he says all his films after Inglourious Basterds got better. And then he'd go and sit, and this, and this is why I've got this idea between hard creativity and soft creativity. So I'll tell you about that in a sec. But then he'd go and sit in this, in the swimming pool, and he'd basically say, "I'd sit there and basically by distraction is not procrastination." All these new ideas for his script would come, and then he'd spend a little 20 minutes writing them down, and then the next day he would start again. So we had all this fresh material to.

One reason, one reason I support a degree of flexible working is that there's a surprising value to getting up, um, turning off your computer and stacking the dishwasher, because it's always said of Archimedes that he had that idea, you know, Archimedes getting in the bath, the idea of displacement of water. And of course, people always say he had the idea in the bath, but he actually had the idea getting into the bath. Yeah. Okay. And I think it's important because in the transition between one mental state and another, you, it's a bit like briefly your brain goes into neutral, rather like when you change gear in an old-fashioned, uh, petrol car. Um, and in that moment of going, sorry, in that moment of going into neutral, something might happen that wouldn't otherwise happen. Uh, and I think the very interesting thing, by the way, a great book to read, which is sort of about an interesting kind of creativity, but it undoubtedly is creativity, uh, there's a book I think called Counter Intelligence, uh, which I've just been reading, which is a kind of history of GCHQ and Bletchley Park. So that's the Government Communications Headquarters and kind of code-breaking and crypto analysis and traffic analysis. So it's the government's bunch of spooks in Cheltenham, basically listening in on everybody, mostly electronics, uh, intelligence gathering, but also intelligence analysis and, uh, prioritization and so on. So it's an intelligence function, I think, which reports to probably the Secret Intelligence Service. I, I don't know the structure. And it sprang out of, to an extent, a thing called Bletchley Park, which you've probably seen.

What's it reminds me of? Okay. So the film with Alan Turing and the, uh, Enigma imitation, breaking in World War II, The Imitation Game, that's basically about it. Okay. And that, and what was interesting about both Bletchley Park, which they have continued in GCHQ, is you have a very non-hierarchical organization. In many cases, they'll hire someone not to a specific role, they'll hire someone who's mentally unusual and then find a role for them subsequently, rather than the usual way in which we hire now, which is we must define the per, the role before we hire the person. They do that backwards. It also has some really, really unusual characteristics in terms of how it's sort of self-organizing, um, how it's, uh, you know, very, very flat in terms of structure. And so it's unusual as a government department in the way in which it's, um, surprisingly non-linear in the way it manages people. And this goes back to Bletchley Park, which was a deeply eccentric organization.

How so? Um, well, it was actually one of the things that's probably forgotten far too much. What year was this? So this would have been roughly the war. This is the Enigma. Yeah. So Churchill basically was a big fan of intelligence and spying in a way that Hitler wasn't. And that was probably decisive in a way that Hitler believed that his own military strategy was so brilliant, okay, that you didn't really need to know what the enemy was up to that much. Where and they were overconfident in the extent to which the Enigma code was unbreakable. Uh, in in the Bletchley mix of people, as I said, probably 75% female, um, uh, involved in everything from obviously translating from German into English, um, uh, or, um, uh, but but generally involved in code-breaking and crypto analysis. Uh, what you need there is not the standard structure that a command and control organization needs because rather like police detective work, you're in the business of spotting significance or pattern recognition. And so it's a fatal mistake to try and practice that by being too, uh, dirigiste or directional. More more effectively defining success in advance is how I describe that. In other words, in, in a way, when you start up out in a police investigation, eventually you'll have to prove the guy's guilty. That's what I call the evidential phase of police work. Okay? But in finding out who did it in the first place, before you get to prove it, you have to be very, very open-minded about from where the insight might come. Could be DNA analysis, could, as I was saying earlier. Okay? And so it's a fatal mistake to be too process-driven or too, uh, too tied down to procedural neatness in a, in any process. And I'd include creative advertising in this, by the way, as a kind of weird bastard stepchild of Bletchley Park. What you're trying to do is make a breakthrough. And just as scientific breakthroughs rarely emerge from pure intention, they're accidental observations. I mean, uh, you know, I, to what extent this was actually imagined for the for the film The Imitation Game, but that insight, which is code-breaking is very difficult if we don't know what we're looking for. But if 90 people end their message with "HH," "Heil Hitler," or if everybody always keys in the first five sec, five characters as the name of their girlfriend, okay, code-breaking becomes a lot easier because we're know, we know what we're to expect. Now, that was positioned as the kind of, uh, you know, flash of insight. To what extent that's true, I genuinely don't know. Um, it's plausible, by the way. There was certainly one very valuable German who they didn't want to, they were absolutely desperate that this chap didn't get attacked because every single day he was in some absolute bloody middle of nowhere posting in the middle of the desert, uh, in North Africa. And every single day he would post exactly the same thing, which was "Nothing to report in so-and-so, so-and-so." And of course, that meant code-breaking for the Enigma machine became incredibly easy because you knew exactly what he was actually saying. You just had to find out the combination of dials that would actually lead to this outcome, therefore making the whole.

How do they actually crack it then? I haven't seen. With with an extraordinary guy called Flowers, who is a post office engineer. Wasn't Alan Turing as well? Turing was the kind of computational whiz and mathematical whiz, but actually we should give a load of credit, actually, to a lot of people, um, but also to, um, uh, the technology, which was, I mean, they had a more or less limitless budget, I think, effectively, extraordinarily advanced for the day in terms of weird rotating dials, uh, which effectively led to the first programmable computer, in that it was a machine that could do different things according to what you asked it to do, which is what makes it a computer rather than the machine that is designed with a single purpose and nothing else.

Okay, that's the difference, I suppose, between a computer and an adding machine. Yeah. Uh, but, but no, I mean, what's interesting about it is that you, you fundamentally can't achieve the, and they hired, by the way, quite heavily using proficiency at the Daily Telegraph cryptic crossword as a kind of heuristic measure of your code-breaking ability. One of the interesting facets of that is that, um, uh, people would learn, uh, one of the things that's apparently useful about crossword, uh, queuing is that you also, part of the way in which you solve a crossword is you get to know the setter and you get to know their particular foibles. And apparently that same technique of, "I think this is Olaf. I think this person is so-and-so," by somehow being able to kind of, you know, effectively recognize tacitly certain patterns in behavior, that was also valuable. But I, but definitely read this book. I'm pretty sure it's called Counter Intelligence. I was read, I was listening to the audiobook. What's interesting about it is it's, it's much more obviously, ostensibly, it's partly a history and a, you know, much deserved kind of, um, celebration of the people involved in code-breaking from the First World War really to the, you know, to the Cold War and beyond. But it's also interesting in terms of the fact that they very quickly realized that you do not, you cannot solve this kind of problem by the traditional, what you might call upfront rationality, that is favored in the civil service. You need fundamentally to give people the freedom to speculate and to hypothesize. And to go back to the subject of baths, there was literally a guy in military intelligence, I think in the First World War, who had a hot bath installed next to his office. Now, try doing that now on the grounds that he felt he could think better. He'd read various scientific papers that said that hot water bathing improved. That's basically what Tarantino is doing with this process. He's getting in hot water. And on that note, I think there's a thing of between hard, hard creativity and soft creativity. Hard creativity is that four hours work where you're like relentlessly bludging your way through a problem. But by doing that, there's soft when you're going to walk, go on a walk, you know. I think Darwin used to do the same walk every single morning. Yeah. Done it. It's down in, down in Kent. Yeah. Because he did, he did the same walk to almost prime his creative process into, or his problem-solving process, and prime it in nature. Didn't? Uh, Kant, I think also you could set your watch by Emanuel Kant, because he did the same walk at the same time every single day. Um, uh, walking, Nim Talb is a huge devotee of walking, um, as a sort of creative activity. Yeah. Um, because of course our brains are embodied. Okay. Um, and also, I mean, uh, it may be that, you know, the parts of the brain we use in motor skills somehow free up other. I mean, we don't know, but. What I mean, I've got a vague idea that quite a lot of the of the Bletchley Park people used to go on weird walks and do all kinds of things. I actually had a friend when I was much younger who'd been there, and um, he'd worked in the Italian naval hut and always hated it because he said he could never work up the same animosity towards the Italians as he could towards the Germans. So he always, he always slightly felt uncomfortable about his work. Important though it was, huge.

What do, what do Hitler and Nazis and then Churchill and the Britain teach us about marketing, do you think? Um, if you're really mischievous, you'd say that, um, uh, from an advertising standpoint, Hitler was a bit close to that. Hitler was an art director and Churchill was a copywriter. How go into that more, please. Uh, well, Hitler was undoubtedly an artist. Okay. Not actually not terrible, by the way. Wasn't he? That's why didn't, wasn't he a failed artist? Yeah, he, the, the whole of history, the whole of world history would have been different if he'd got into art school, but I think he was turned down. And, uh, patently was very interested in architecture, design, you know, grandiose designs for cities, etc. Uh, very, and you could, I mean, you can find in slightly dodgy secondhand bookshops, I'm not making this up, I mean, Nazi design manuals on the precise proportions of swastikas, flags, colors, you know, I don't know if they had Pantone references back then, but they were absolutely, it was a visual brand for the most part, okay. Um, whereas Churchill was undoubtedly, you know, principally persuasive through the medium of words and writing, copywriter. Yeah. By the way, I, I don't know where I read this, but I think Hitler's only paid employment in his entire life, because he didn't actually get paid a salary as Chancellor, was two weeks working in an advertising agency on a brief, uh, something like a deodorant or antiperspirant. So, he actually worked as an art director in an ad agency for a couple of weeks. Wow. Um, but, um, I mean, it is interesting because, um, you know, in a sense, um, it's horrible to admit it, but they were really rather good at branding. Yeah. Um, I mean, in terms of, you know, visual consistency. That's what I was going to say. I think as as egregious and heinous as it was, like to create some sort of movement, there's, in the most repugnant things, there's lessons. In the most beautiful things, there's lessons. It's worth remembering that there probably, I don't know about this, it'd be interesting to debate it. There probably was a period in history where you had mass access to mass media. Mass access to mass media. Well, in other words, in other words, everybody had a radio. Lots of people went to the cinema and watched propaganda newsreels or the "Reefer" style film or whatever. And where also people hadn't quite acquired, first of all, they had no alternative set, you know, if you think about it, newspaper, cinema, newsreel, radio broadcast, okay, that is, you know, and word of mouth, okay? But word of mouth is kind of slow, particularly in, you know, less densely populated areas, okay? So those are your sources of information, and they're all controlled by the government. And people had not yet acquired a degree of immunity to communication.

Now, let me just explain, if people went to the cinema in the very early days of the cinema, and you had the cinema screen would show something which is a train shooting directly towards the screen, or a man firing a gun out of the screen. This would be in the silent era, 1910, 15, that kind of thing. Okay. Um, the audience would actually duck below the seat. Okay. In terror. Now, that's interesting because obviously now, you know, I mean, children might do that very, very early on, I don't know. Um, but nobody would do that now. If you went to an adult cinema performance and they had a shot of a train heading straight towards you, nobody would go, "Right, okay." You'd look ridiculous. But there was a time when people absolutely did that. Now, okay. What that suggests is that there was a time when moving pictures were, I mean, just disproportionately potent and persuasive. Um, and also people hadn't acquired a kind of skepticism. So they were extraordinarily kind of susceptible, I think, to mass manipulation because you only had mass media. You know, there wasn't the [ __ ] on Twitter doing the, you know, you didn't even have Joe Rogan inviting guests who thought this Nazism might be not altogether a good thing. Okay? You didn't have any kind of real dissent, and society was fundamentally pretty conformist, particularly in Germany, particularly at certain time, you know, at that period in history. And so, you know, there was an, there was an undoubtedly, you know, you could argue that it was going to happen somewhere. Um, that kind of collective insanity would happen somewhere because it, I mean, I'm not suggesting, I'm not, there are lots of reasons for these things. It was a very unusual media environment.

Yeah. The state, because Germany lost all their status in at the end of World War I, and whole Hitler's whole promise was, Will talks about this in The Status Game, is how they're going to bring up, he was the sort of the promised land of bringing back Germany's status on a global scale. And people, humans desire for status, I mean, there was some economic evidence that that it was a resurgence, but undoubtedly making them feel good about themselves again. And also, uh, selling the narrative that they'd been sold down the of the, you know, Paris Peace Conference or whatever, which they kind of had been, actually, if be honest. Okay. What happened to the Paris Peace? I mean, the, the, okay. So the reparations and general punitive damages imposed on the Germany after World War I, uh, if one's being honest, largely at the behest of the probably of the French more than the British and the Americans, close to, um, uh, turned effect, created a sense of justifiable grievance. Um, justifiable grievance. It all happened. It's all my my cousin Woodrow's fault. He's bizarrely like my fourth cousin.

Twice removed, or something. Woodro, you always say that. But no, no, no, no. I mean, weirdly, but he, he got ill. He got Spanish flu. Um, very strange thing. Somebody wrote to us from Canada who was obsessed with tracing our ancestry back to almost interminable Calvinist ministers in Scotland. And I was reading this, going, and then they were descended from so and so. And the, the guy in, in a painting in Sterling Art Gallery called The Covenant's Baptism, the guy doing the baptism is apparently a sort of distant ancestor of mine, I think, called Williamson. Okay. And anyway, in this sort of footnote, you know, he goes, and, and is also the ancestor of Woodrow Wilson. I was going, kind of, it's a bit more interesting than a bloody Calvinist minister, isn't it? But she seemed absolutely fixated on the, an awful lot of Calvinist ministers. Um, but, but he, he probably got Spanish flu, um, during that peace conference where terms were negotiated.

Who did?

Uh, Woodrow Wilson. And to an extent, went slightly doolally.

Right. Okay. But how did that affect? Back to what? How did that affect?

Well, uh, there were various unfortunate decisions taken with the benefit of hindsight. One of which was, uh, insulting the Japanese by not fully acknowledging them as, uh, and that was under pressure from, I think, the Australians in the Commonwealth delegation, if I'm right, or the Empire delegation it would have been called then. And, um, also imposing, uh, costs on the Germans, uh, of an extent and duration that allowed them to feel, with some reasonable justification, that they'd been sold.

Okay. So, therefore, it paid the. I mean, by the way, this is a sort of bit of a standard narrative, and I might add that there are lots of other explanations for what's going on. Okay. I mentioned the media environment as well. Um, you know, the power of moving image. Uh, you know, one thing they were pretty good at was propaganda, not just branding. They were pretty good.

When you say the power of?

There, there are sections I've never read the bloody thing, but I've been told there are sections of *Mein Kampf* where Hitler. So that's Hitler's own book, where he describes effectively the bestselling book in Germany for about, um, uh, ten, ten or so years, I think, was mandatory in schools, but he describes what makes a good poster, what makes for good persuasion.

Really? And then you also had, I suppose, work of people like, um, so the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was accompanied by Bernays, who was often considered the kind of, you know, his a relation of Freud, who's kind of the godfather of mass persuasion techniques, PR, really. He's more than advertising.

What was his name, sorry?

Uh, so Edward Bernays. Uh, he was the extraordinary influential person who effectively, um, mostly for commercial purposes in United States advertising. But it was interesting that the extent to which persuasion was taken seriously at that time is evidenced by the fact that the president of the United States took a kind of PR guy, an expert in, you know, persuasion and public opinion, uh, took him across the Atlantic with him to the Paris Peace Conference.

Yeah, that is mental.

Um, so, I mean, by the way, I mean, it's a bit of it's a bit boring history to god, they were nasty to the Germans, therefore they made possible, uh, you know, resurgence of, da, da, da. Uh, but I mean, it's part of the truth. I mean, like, like everything, I mean, there are narratives and there are, you know, generally we like narratives because they simplify. Yeah. Um, and, um, but, but it is, I mean, I, I do find it fundamentally interesting that, um, uh, you know, the question is, some of those people who are natural dissenters, conspiracy theorists, and nutters, um, they can be a general pain, but they're, you need them around because sometimes they're right.

Yeah.

Okay. Most of them, I mean, the people who kind of annoy me are the people who believe every conspiracy theory. Okay. Because you go, "Okay, look, some of this stuff, you know, some of this stuff succumbs to a simpler explanation. Maybe they did land on the moon. Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK." Okay. However, um, it's highly unlikely that conspiracy theorists are wrong about everything.

Or at least, they may, their conspiracy may be wrong, but their doubting of the official narrative may be perfectly healthy at some point.

Yeah, that's, um.

Great, a great phrase, by the way. Just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's true.

Just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's true.

So, you know, quite often we explain something with something and we go, "Yeah, that makes sense." And therefore, we stop asking questions.

Yeah.

Okay.

What are some of those questions? Linking this back to dumb smart answers, line dumb questions. Because I know in your book, *Alchemy*, you've got that list of like nine things. It's like, you can't solve solving, uh, problems with logic is like trying to play golf with one golf club or something like that.

Yeah. No, no. I would argue, I would argue you need, you need a.

What are some of your favorite dumb questions, Rory?

Um, I mean, some of them would be simply, what are we trying to do here, really? What does, uh, what? And then.

Really? The operative word. So, so to the point I'm making about defining something, which is, it is considered in engineering and economics circles perfectly acceptable to define a, a train journey between London and Manchester, say, in the case of HS2, by capacity, speed, time, an entirely economic model around time savings and the value of, you know, the connections you create. I would argue that, you know, if you went to Disney, they'd ask a different question, which is actually, what we're trying to do here is to get more people to travel to Manchester, ideally, or, um, from London, possibly less vice versa. We can all debate that. Um, we want to connect the two major cities. But in order to do that, what we want people to do is to prefer to go by train than by car. And the Disney question would be, how.

Wait, so is Disney? So the Disney question would not be, how fast does the train need to be? How many people does it need to carry? What does it need to cost? The Disney question would be, how do we make the train journey between London and Manchester so enjoyable that people feel stupid going by car?

Okay. Now, that's a much more open-ended question, which is why bureaucrats don't like it. Yeah. Because solving that problem requires imagination, and it presents you with a list of different options and a large solution set from which you have to make decisions, often involving incommensurable variables, which therefore means you can't use a model. You've got to actually use subjective judgment. And bureaucrats are terrified of using subjective judgment. So they'll fall back on a bad, decisive model with a single right answer rather than an interesting, creative model which gives.

Rise to multiple answers, multiple interesting answers. And then another question might be, well, if the entire purpose of our £120 billion pound investment is to get people from the center of London to the center of Manchester, okay, then yes, a train is probably the right answer. But is there a way in which we could spend £120 billion on transport infrastructure, okay, which solves, which actually creates far more economic value for far more people? Because it is only a small percentage in any one day in London, it is a tiny percentage of people who want to get to Manchester fast. And in any day in Manchester, it is a tiny percentage of people who want to get from central Manchester to London fast. In fact, it's slightly stupid because most of the people who actually live, or most of the people who work in Manchester, okay, actually live south of Manchester.

Okay. So currently, they don't board the train in Manchester. They board the train in, um.

Isn't it, or it's probably Southport, is it? So.

No, Southport. Stockport. Stockport. Sorry. Stockport. Is it Stockport? So they drive south to Stockport and board the train there, because you're not going to go into the office and then take a train to London. You're probably going to get on the train first thing in the morning. So it's very annoying traveling in the wrong direction. This is why I go nuts that bloody Eurostar doesn't stop at Ebbsfleet and Ashford, because every time I go to Paris.

You got.

I'm going to go to Ebbsfleet, travel 17 minutes in the wrong direction, then spend 40 minutes being corralled in a hideous waiting area.

Okay. Now, ironically, this is a classic example. Okay, they are really worried about how crowded the Eurostar waiting area is at St. Pancras, and it's an obstacle. It's hideous.

It's an obstacle, so they claim. I mean, even the lounge is ridiculous.

That'd be a bottleneck. Okay. That's a bottleneck. Okay. Now, okay. Right. And they claim, perhaps conveniently, that it's an obstacle to running more services. So we would like to add services, obviously, to Germany. There's the potential of an overnight service somewhere, you know. Okay. But we'd like to add more services to more destinations to the Eurostar, certainly including, they've done Amsterdam, admittedly, but you could certainly include some other places in Germany. Um, I don't know where we, I guess Cologne.

We go, we've got a podcast stamp, and we're trying to work out whether we fly with or take the train.

Or take the train. That's another thing from just whether.

You could drive, actually. Interestingly, um, the, um, but the interesting thing about that, okay, is that, hold on, hold on. Okay. So what you're going to try and do is take over more space from St. Pancras station or do enormously expensive building work. There is a solution that probably costs about £20,000 to implement, which is you do a deal with High Speed 1, which simply says, if you're, if you're a leisure traveler, particularly, uh, and you're traveling to Paris or Brussels.

You can save £10, okay, if you take the High Speed 1 to Ebbsfleet and board the Eurostar at Ebbsfleet, where there is an enormous great waiting area and a really cushy lounge, or indeed Ashford.

Okay. Can you, can you, if you got 20 to 30%, 20% of the people?

Yep. Well, you'd have to stop the trains there.

Okay.

If you got 20%, or if you simply educated people and made it possible to board at Ebbsfleet. I had friends who lived in Greenwich who always went to Ebbsfleet to board the Eurostar in Kent.

The Ebbsfleet is in Kent. It's just south of the Thames, just outside the M25, basically.

Um, now, just to be clear, the population of Essex is 1.8 million. The population of Kent is 1.88 million. East Sussex is probably 600,000. Surrey is probably 600,000. Okay. A lot of those, and East London would be another million. Okay. A lot of those people, um, and Southeast London as well. A lot of those people would much prefer to go to Ebbsfleet, park the car, and take the train, uh, than they would go into St. Pancras and then travel in the wrong direction and then go through a ludicrous sort of one man and his dog kept in the holding pen boarding procedure. Why they don't, by the way, let you board the train a bit earlier rather than holding you back and then forcing you all to board at the last minute? There are lots and lots of ways you could solve that problem of overcrowding without making the space bigger.

You change behavior instead. Engineering solutions are calculable and deterministic, and therefore appeal to the human left brain.

Yeah.

Okay.

Psychological and behavioral, uh, interventions are much, much cheaper, but they are to some extent probabilistic and harder to predict.

Yeah. And that's where you've got to ask the dumb questions, because those left-sided brain people will, they'll think, "What the hell is this dumb question?" But that's where the weird answers lie, and the problems are solved. It would be perfectly sensible to allow people to take the High Speed 1 trains, uh, to Ebbsfleet and wait 25 minutes, half an hour there, in a state of complete comfort and luxury.

Okay. Or even, I mean, even allow people one day to board at, um, uh, what is it?

Stratford, which I think that's that's a way off. That's building work. Okay. It's called Stratford International. It's a wholly erroneous name for the station because, uh, there are no international services. It's a bit like North Kensington, you know. It's, it's, it's a marketing name, not a.

Yeah. I was going to ask you who came up with the, the, um, because I was speaking to a guy the other week, uh, um, Mark Palmer, basically, because I went to New York, and, you know, everything's like L1, like the tubes, basically, or the subway. [ __ ] They're like, I actually think that the, our one of our greatest brands, or greatest, yeah, case you, greatest brands is our tube map. And like, who came up with the names? And I'm going back in time then, also it got me thinking, who came up with the [ __ ] road names? Like, who did that?

Uh, the, how was that come around?

Enough. I, I never met him because he died. My wife knew him. She knew the guy called Schulz, Felix, who is responsible for numbering and naming the German Autobahns. Um, he wasn't a Nazi, but he was a civil, senior civil servant.

There is actually an intelligence to road names.

Yeah.

Which is that roughly speaking, they go clockwise from the A1 all the way round, and then the A41 is an offshoot. Typically, the way it works is the A40X is an offshoot of the A4, and the A.

What about the road? What about the road names in London?

So, for example, the A21 is sort of an offshoot of the A2. Okay. It's, it's, it's far from being exact. Okay. But essentially, the shorter the, the fewer the numbers, the number of numbers, the, the more significant a road it is. A roads are more significant than B roads. And so.

What's M3 more significant?

So the A1, I think, is Watling Street, which is largely originally on the path of a Roman road. Uh, the A4, by the way, I mean, Piccadilly is technically the A4, and the Bayswater Road in Oxford Street is technically the A4.

Well, the A3 goes all the way into London Bridge, uh, into Southern.

Into Southern. You're obviously right. Yes. The A3 is what I take.

So, so, I mean, no, no, one, no one ever referred to Selfridges, okay, as being on the A40, but technically it is. Okay. Um.

What about the other roads in terms of like the.

By the way, I have no idea who the people are who do this, but practically every road in Britain has a Wikipedia entry.

Really?

Which is extraordinary. Some, and literally, it will go into the history of the road. The fact that sometimes roads actually overlap. So you actually have a case where two roads actually become one and then separate again. Uh, I think that happens down in Sussex, which is the road to Eastbourne, and the A272 or something. They actually become the, maybe the A26 and the A20. This is this is turning into an unbelievably tedious podcast for the 99% of people. But, but, but I mean, it is the gift of Wikipedia to people who are mildly on the spectrum, like me. Okay. Uh, is absolutely limitless, because, um, I have no sense of proportion about the value of knowledge. I don't really evaluate knowledge by how valuable it is. It's just knowledge, and I value it for its own sake. And so I will literally spend time sitting down and reading the Wikipedia entry on the A26.

Um.

What about the actual road names in like in Lond.

The A272? By the way, there is a road, I'm going to plug this, because it's a great book by a Dutch author called *A272: Ode to a Road*. And it's a Dutch tourist. The D, just technically, the A272, the A272 goes all the way from Mayfield in, I assume it's East Sussex, all the way to Winchester. And so it's a road that goes right across southern England, and it's spectacularly interesting and beautiful. But this, I mean, not all of it. Um, but this Dutch guy has actually written, you can buy it on Amazon, *A272: Ode to a Road*, a Dutch tourist, basically, homage.

To an A-road.

Yeah. Not to make this a road podcast.

No, less, but it's interesting.

We can talk about roadside food. We can always segue into.

Oh my god. We went. So we were down in Cornwall last week.

Yeah.

Uh, doing a podcast. Um, and well, a couple of things.

Are there any happy eaters left?

We stopped at a restaurant called Nice Baps. Um, which is, which, yeah, really good name.

Um, um, so Nice Baps. Got a pair of bacon sarnies on the on the road. I mean, I was.

Where is Cornwall? On the way to.

Cornwall. 303, or did you go down the M4?

Well, this is the thing. This is the thing. This is the thing. Sorry, we'll get off the roads.

You know that the sketch, which is the Minehead violation, where it starts with a Brummy doing this whole, "How was your journey?" And he recounts the entire thing, including the fact that they, um, they actually, you know, I had an extra 15 minutes to stretch our legs at Frampton Cotterell, and tragically, I actually went to Frampton Cotterell and had a, had a little bit of a walk, just as an homage to that Monty Python sketch.

Well, well, this is the thing. So, um.

There is a place, by the way, the entire sketch is completely accurate in its description of the road network at that time.

That's mad.

Yeah.

Well, yeah. One of the things, so I was listening to a podcast the other week who was saying basically, if you've got a car in the UK versus the US, or and or Europe, actually, your enjoyment levels in Europe are like, through the roof compared to the US, because the US road systems are just grids, whereas here you can properly [ __ ] drive. And he was basically saying, I've got cars in both countries.

So curves, to some extent.

They see curves, country roads. I've got American family friends. They came around and they were like, they're like, "What the [ __ ]? Like, we're going through these roads." They're from LA. Like.

The other thing I didn't realize, in the US, a speed limit is not just a restriction. It's also advisory, which is if you have a 60 mph speed limit, it means that on that road, it is safe to drive at 60 mph. And so Americans come here, and this is why my automatic cruise control goes slightly wacko. Okay. Yeah.

Because it's American. My car is American. It's made in Mexico. It's a Mustang Mach-E. And it sees a 60 sign and immediately automatically accelerates to 60. And Americans don't understand it, because they come out of a small village, you know, in Kent, and there's a sign that basically says, "No restriction, 60." Now, what that means to a Brit is, use your own judgment, but technically it's not illegal to to hit 60 on this stretch of road where conditions allow.

In the United States, that 60 sign means it is safe from now on to drive at 60 mph. And so Americans go, "Are you people insane? Who the hell would drive on this winding road at 60 miles?" And the answer, of course, you wouldn't, because you exercise your own judgment according to the conditions. Also, the road signs in America just fundamentally mean something different.

But also, our roads, as in that drive down to Cornwall, is [ __ ] idyllic, whereas in like in America, it's, or not always, but a lot of the time, it's just basically these [ __ ] straight roads.

Of course. Londoners, interestingly, um, Londoners don't enjoy driving because they don't drive very often. If you don't drive very often, you don't enjoy driving. And then, so, you know what it is when you first hire a car, right? It's an unfamiliar car. For the first 20 minutes or so, you don't really enjoy it until you get into a flow state and you're familiar with the controls and the indicators and everything else. If you drive your car very infrequently, as a lot of Londoners who own cars do, or Londoners who rent cars, and they make the mistake of renting a car in central London, so the first 40 minutes is driving through central London in appalling traffic. Okay. Then Londoners are going to disparage cars completely unfairly because they've never experienced how great it is to own a car in pleasant driving conditions where there isn't too much traffic, where you're familiar with the car. Now, there's one exception to that, by the way. Um, driving in London between about 1:00 in the morning and 3:00 in the morning, okay, is one of the greatest experiences you can have.

So, we do, we have.

It's a total late-night driving. There was actually a Volkswagen ad. One of my favorite ads of all time was just night driving by Volkswagen, based on the insight that you, particularly for smaller Volkswagen cars, often bought in cities, there is this extraordinary moment where everybody understands why they have a car, which is rumbling down, you know, rumbling through Shooter's Hill at, you know, at, kind of 2:00 in the morning, or, you know, taking the A217 down towards whatever it's called. Okay. Some of those drives in London are at the right time. It used to be, before they put speed cameras on the on the elevated section of the Westway, you could hit 80 on the Westway, on the elevated section. That was a total bloody joy. And a lot of the fun of London driving.

Like James Bond driving.

Oh, no. No. You used to be able to drive through Paddington Station. So, I used to have friends who'd come into Paddington, and they'd say, "I'll pick you up." And amazingly, you could drive in through a ramp. They got rid of it for the Heathrow Express, and you drove right down into the middle of the station, and you drove out the other end onto Praed Street.

That's. That's another. Yeah, that's another thing that's wrong with, I think, what winds me up about satnavs, or like not satnavs, but sometimes Waze is it will take you the fastest route.

Not the most enjoyable.

Most, not the most enjoyable. So it's like the traffic. So the traffic can sometimes be an absolute [ __ ] nightmare. And I'm, I'm not going to, I'd rather go philosophical question is.

I'd rather go an extra 10 minutes and actually enjoy en moving. There's a difference between moving. My satnav doesn't like going out on the A13 crossing the Queen Elizabeth Bridge down to Kent. Okay. It prefers to take you through the Blackwall Tunnel. It may change it a bit because partly it has a bit of a toll aversion, and there's a £1, £1.50 charge to go across the bridge. Now, of course, there's now a £4 charge to go through the Blackwall Tunnel. So, I don't know what's going to, how it's going to respond to that. Um, but also I would rather keep moving for 45 minutes. Yes. Okay. Than be in stop-go crap traffic for 35 minutes. And it doesn't really understand that concept. I think that's fair.

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I've seen his car, but I won't reveal. And I'll respect Rick's privacy.

Yeah, because didn't you, you did a podcast, didn't you?

Yeah. Yeah. I think I was trying to persuade him to go electric, because it's the future.

Right? Because I.

By the way, there would be more, almost more adoption of electric cars if the government hadn't been so eager to persuade people to buy them, because they are intrinsically better. Okay. I mean, I'm, I'm sorry, but, um, there, there's a certain sort of car lover in religion. You get some people who aren't very interested in God or Jesus or the Bible, but they get really obsessed with things like chasubles and vestments and liturgy. Okay? They're like nerd religions. You know, high church Anglicans occasionally go that way. Right? They're almost more interested in the accoutrements than they are in the core purpose of the religion. Right? Okay. In the same way, there are car people who aren't principally interested in cars as a form of transportation. They're principally interested in things like, you know, I don't know, engine design or V8s or, you know, in other words, the means is more interesting than the ends to those people. And, and I think I sympathize with them, because I will die in a ditch over the beauty of a steam locomotive. I think the steam engine was inherently, uh, you know, you know, a really magnificent steam locomotive. Nothing else touches that.

Why?

Uh, well, first of all, the steam engine is incredibly elegant in its simplicity. in that it's a multi-fuel thing. So, as long as you can provide a source of heat, you can turn that into traction into locomotion. So, what used to happen in the United States, by the way, is the trains used to set off to the west, and they'd start off by burning coal, and then as they got further west towards the Rockies, coal became less abundant and wood became more abundant, and they switched to burning wood.

Wasn't it the trains that set the properly set the time? Uh, I was listening to that, required us by the Cohen podcast. It basically says the train lines are what actually set, before different.

There was no real Greenwich Mean Time except in shipping. In fairness, in fairness.

It was the trains that created actual, where everyone.

You might, you would have needed a reliable time clock for setting your chronometer if you for navigation, if you're a ship setting out on a on a oceanic voyage. So, uh, there are time balls at various. Deal has a time ball. There's a time ball somewhere over Greenwich, weirdly.

What's a time ball?

It's a ball that drops at a specific time every day to allow ships to synchronize their chronometers.

Right?

Um, so that their navigation is accurate in terms of, let me right, longitude.

Right.

Um, however, um, I mean, uh, I think there was a court case that drove it in the UK, because different towns would literally be on a different time zone. You might have one that was six minutes later than another in the UK, and the church clock. So, time, time was set locally rather than centrally. And someone turned up late for a court case, I think, uh, which was the thing, because they said, well, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it's a 40-minute journey, and I left my railway station at 9:00 a.m., which means I should get into Frampton Cotterell. I don't think that has a station. I should get into Frampton Cotterell at 40 minutes past 9, 20 to 10. But when I got to Frampton Cotterell, I discovered it was actually, you know, 10:05, because Frampton Cotterell sets its clocks 15 minutes or 25, whatever it is, you know, faster than, um, uh, uh, uh, than, uh, uh, you know, Eastern Engine choosing West Country places. That's a service station in any case. Um, uh, but, um, the, the, that I think basically required people to coordinate centrally, because you couldn't have people. And actually, there's a really weird problem, which is Portugal. Spain should really be on the same time zone as Portugal.

Why are they not?

Uh, because this is the weirdest reason in the world. Uh, effectively, the Spanish are so far west, they should, they should emphatically be on London time, which indeed the Canary Islands are, and mad. Okay. Uh, at the same time as known as Portugal. And Hitler, sorry, Hitler visited Franco, and Franco is a weird gesture to.

Franco, the dictator, fascist dictator of Spain, 1930-something or other, to 1970-something or other. I can remember him dying, I'm that old.

Um.

What? There was a dictator of Spain?

There was a dictator of Spain in my childhood. Spain was a complete dictatorship in my childhood. Yeah, yeah.

Really? I never, by the way.

It's worth noting that modern language teaching should really have started teaching Spanish rather than French a long time ago. But it's worth, well, it's a much more valuable language in terms of its widespread use. Okay.

One of the reasons, well, I suppose a two reasons. One, bear in mind, we didn't have cheap air travel. So everybody could go to France, but not everybody could go to Spain. Okay. But the other reason was that that the majority, perhaps all, of Spanish-speaking countries in my childhood were either communist or fascist dictatorships in one shape or another. So French it was. But, um, so to impress Hitler, he just announced that Spain was going to be taken onto effectively Central European Time, which is the same time zone as Berlin, which is miles and miles to the east. The decision is completely whack. It causes all kinds of problems. One of the reasons why the Spanish have to, um, eat ridiculously late at night is they all go out to eat at 9:00, and we go, "That's so weird." What they're actually doing is going out to eat at 8:00 in any Portuguese time or London time. And the reason they're going out late is because it's too bastard hot at 7:00 to go out and eat.

See, so effectively, the whole of Spain gets up too early and goes, "Okay."

Who are we speaking to this about? Uh, are we speaking to Storm about this? I, um, who's, who's going to? We basically, this is it. We were saying the, the.

It's proper whack.

But also, you can't get a good, the cafe culture over there is shite, because you can't get good breakfast. Nothing opens to.

I, I agree that the Spanish have not cracked breakfast. I, I, however, in other culinary matters, I think the Spanish have actually, uh, performed spectacularly in the last 20 years.

Yes. I mean, to a point of view where you could make the case that it's, it's as interesting, or possibly even more interesting, a place to eat, uh, depending on what you like, than say, you know, than France or Italy.

Okay. Now, I will agree with you that paella is, or paella is actually a failed biryani. Yeah. Um, so certain of the things that are considered Spanish staples, I consider.

You know, it's almost like a Tex-Mexification of paella, because actual paella from Valencia, which is with rabbit. So the stuff we get with chicken and sea prawn and prawns and chorizo is basically our Tex-Mex rabbit biryani. Basically, it's, it's gone off the rails.

You go to Valencia, there's no fish. You can't get seafood. Well, you can now, you, but the Valencian Valencia, how they, Valencia, um, paella is, is [ __ ] rabbit. You can't get anything else, and it's vegetables.

Which is weird, because it's by the sea, but fair enough.

Yeah. That's that's so, so Valencians regard other paellas, the Hawaiian pizza. It's weird, but it's weird how these foods have these sort of, um, these adaptive sort of moments to become mass market.

It is something I just sort of think about quite a lot. It's like there's almost like an evol, theory of evolution to to food that happens.

Someone dug deep into Italian cuisine and discovered that all the Italian classics basically date back to the sort of '40s and '50s.

Yeah.

That, there, you know, the whole thing of lasagna, many of the basic sort of things which are, you, the narrative is always that it's been passed down by generation after generation of grandmothers.

Yeah.

Apparently, that's not, if you, if you dig into it, not really true.

Yeah. Well, because also it's, Ital, again, it's the adaptive thing. The, it's the adapt, it's Italian-American. That's basically what the Italian food we have is.

Yeah. There's a sort of.

Market is all the stuff was people going over to the States.

No, no, I mean, fatty, I mean, that's undoubtedly Indian food in the UK is not necessarily, not all of it, but some of it's unrepresentative of what you'd find in India. Um, uh, and of course, it's, you know, it's historically a lot less vegetarian than Indian food would often be as well.

One thing I want to ask you about, Rory, is Nassim Taleb's book *Antifragile*.

Um, I think last time we talked about thinking, um, *Thinking, Fast and Slow* by Daniel Kahneman. I'd love to know about *Antifragile*, like, what are the lessons, the big lessons from there, the first principles you take from that that you think you can apply to.

It's, it's really, really.

Marketing, specifically marketing. The statistical assumptions that we overlay on real-world observed behavior. Okay.

Yeah.

Now, *Fooled by Randomness* was an earlier book, which is perhaps more of a behavioral science book, less mathematical.

Why? So.

It's the extent that we actually, that we will often extract patterns out of random events that aren't really there, or we will extrapolate. We underestimate, we underestimate. I mean, there's a great book by Brian Klaas called *Fluke*.

We underestimate the role of randomness, okay, in, uh, everyday life, uh, and probably we have a kind of, and that, I think the book was partly inspired by a meeting between Taleb and Kahneman, actually.

Um, they were, they were.

*Fooled by Randomness* was.

Uh, yeah, I think I'm right, I think I've got the order right there. No, yes. I, it was before Kahneman had written his book, but I think Kahneman and Nim team knew each other, um, quite some time before, um, either of them became a published author, I think. Okay. Because Taleb, obviously, is very interested in the sort of inherent biases that happen in trading, for example.

Yeah.

And, uh, you know, so one of the points he makes is that, uh, we, we tend to conflate the likelihood of something happening with its, uh, with what we should necessarily do. Okay. So, for example.

Well, a poker player will understand that you occasionally place a bet which has a very low chance of success, but in the event of success, you make a fortune. Okay. So Nim would occasionally take a counterintuitive bet on what the market was going to do. And he'd say, "We're almost certainly going to lose money today, but if we make money, we'll make so much money that, um, actually these are the kind of bets which we should be making." The contrary bet, which is known as picking up, known in the in financial circles as picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, is where you take a whole series of small gains, congratulate yourself for your financial acuity, only to find out that you're making those small and continued gains at the price of a monumental risk, which is the steamroller. Okay. So picking up a load of gains from something which, in other words, if you climb, an example would be if you climb very tall trees to go and get extra cherries, but one time in 150, you're going to fall off the tree and die. Okay. You can congratulate yourself on days 100 to 149 that you're the best cherry picker in the forest, but on day 150, you exit the gene pool. Okay. So what Taleb is looking for is a much more nuanced appreciation of statistics and our interpretation of statistics and our interpretation of probability and likelihood. So, for example, we often assume things are Gaussian.

Gaussian.

Okay. This is getting nerdy. Okay. We often assume the normal distribution to events. Okay. When in fact they're fat-tailed. Uh, okay. And the fat tails of the graph are that. Okay. So height, human height, I, I'm, you, I'm not the best person to do this, but I'll do my best. Human height is basically Gaussian in that you will, you're never going to get a working adult human who's 1 foot high, almost certainly, and you certainly aren't going to get an adult human who's 15 feet high. Okay.

Yeah.

So, it's distributed on a kind of normal distribution. Okay. Where tail events are unbelievably rare, and most people are somewhere around the middle.

Is that like a bell curve?

Bell, exactly that. Is that bell curve? Yeah, you got it. Okay.

Yeah.

A lot of things in life actually. Um, now.

He's looking at the tail ends.

So he, he's talking about mediocran, which is human height. Yeah.

And he's contrasting that with something called extremistan, uh, which is human wealth.

Yeah. So to give an example, there is nobody so tall that they could walk into a packed Wembley Stadium and meaningfully change the average height of everybody on the stadium simply by their presence.

Yeah.

But if Bill Gates walked into Wembley Stadium, or if Elon walked into Wembley Stadium, the average person in that stadium would now be a millionaire. Okay. And so not all things are distributed by a bell curve distribution. A lot of things actually, uh, there is far more extremity. And by the way, the poorest person in the world is also likely to be extremely, you know, someone who's literally a billion dollars in debt, for example. Okay? Uh, the poorest person in the world would meaningfully affect the average wealth of people in the stadium, potentially at the other direction. And so his idea is that lots and lots of risk models, uh, in banking assumed bell curve probability, where, you know, people referred to, I think in the run-up to the financial crisis, they'd say things like, "We've had five, six sigma events on five consecutive days," to which you go, um, literally, okay, what you're suggesting there is that something that's a one in a billion probability as a standalone event has happened on five consecutive. Is it's much more likely that your math is wrong than you've just experienced literally an event that shouldn't happen in the entire lifetime of the universe. Okay. So, so what's happening there is that, uh, and in *Fooled by Randomness*, he also makes the point that organic or living systems are not optimized around an average. They're often optimized around a desired level of variance.

Yeah.

So in other words, and I would argue this also applies in things like creativity. Okay. So I think that marketing is fat-tailed in the ex to the extent that, um, the most successful things you do will be so successful. Okay. In other words, 20% of everything you do in marketing will probably deliver 80% of the value. I wouldn't be surprised if 1% of what you do in marketing delivers 50% of the value. And therefore asking for marketing to always wash its face, same would be true of R&D. Demanding that every piece of marketing you do to be matched to a corresponding quantum of profit is a fool's errand. Okay? And yet that's how we measure marketing effectiveness. I'd also argue that sometimes in marketing, by the way, I think bottlenecks explain fat-tailedness, but sometimes by accident you intervene in a way that changes.

So, a bottleneck to ordering a taxi before the Uber app came along was the unpleasant anticipation of the uncertain 20 minutes you spent waiting for that taxi.

We had this in Cornwall. See, Cornwall, Cornwall, you can't get, you can't get an Uber.

There is a weird Cornish Uber substitute, which, which I did download, and you found it. I called the guy, and I was like, going back, going to Cornwall is interesting, cuz you kind of, I mean, it's beautiful down there, but we, I called a cab driver, and they're like, "Hello, love." And I was like, I was like, "Oh, have you got, have you got someone?" He goes, "No, but I'll pass you on to my friend, next [ __ ] cab, next cabs, they're all helping each other out." I called the guy, I was like, "Will you be at this pub?" Was in Padstow Harbour. He's like, "Yeah, mate, I'll be there. Don't you worry about that." And I was like, "What time?" "11:30." "All right." And I was like, I was like, I had this insane anxiety attack, be like, "Is this [ __ ] guy going to be?" So I called him up back again. I was like, "Look." And I was like, "You're actually going to be there." And he was like, "Mate, stop, like, stop taking the piss, otherwise I won't be."

You've been Uberized.

I've been Uberized to [ __ ]! Yeah.

Yeah. And then, and then, yeah. So anyway, we go to this bar in the, in the, in the harbor, having a few, um, whiskeys, funnily enough. And he was there, and it was like, but that that uberification of.

It's mad how that happens.

Oh, the level of uncertainty. Yes. Yeah. Um, and we probably have had our level of uncertainty sort of recalibrated in that, in the, in the pre-internet age, we, we're used to sending a letter to a company and waiting three, four days for a response. And we were just happy spending four minutes not knowing. Four days, sorry. We're happy spending four days not knowing. Now, we're not really that comfortable when we email a company with a customer complaint, okay, and we don't get a reply, you know, because we go, "Oh god, they're gonna reply in the next working day. That's Monday. It's now Sunday. I can't cope with this level of kind of being on tenterhooks for 24 hours."

What does, um.

Yeah. So, what does, back to sort of, um.

So, you're undoubtedly right that, yeah, a Londoner in Cornwall is a [ __ ] nightmare, in the same way that, um, when you go to the Caribbean and you order a drink.

You've just got to recalibrate yourself to Beijing time or Caribbean time.

Yeah.

Um, because.

It takes three days to customize, doesn't it?

And you eventually, you eventually just compensate. You would just order every drink an hour before you actually want it, and everything works really, really well.

Okay. Um, but I quite like that, in a way. I mean, in a way, you know, I mean, in a way, we've lost something as well as gaining something. I mean, you know, one of the problems undoubtedly that the NHS faces is that people have waiting times now calibrated by pizza delivery.

Yeah. My father explained this to me partly because it was wartime. He grew up in World War II.

Whereabouts?

He said, so he, he was at school in Cheltenham, and he said that, uh, if you wanted a nice new fountain pen, you went into probably Cavendish House, which is the Cheltenham department store, and you saw a pen that you liked. I'm not making this up, okay?

And they would say, "Right, we don't have that in stock. This is a display model. However, we will order a pen for you." And four days later, or maybe a week later at school, sometimes three weeks later, a postcard would arrive at school saying, "The pen you have ordered is now in stock."

Wow.

Okay. I mean, a whole load of things totally weird that my father told me, which is he bought a vacuum cleaner in Abingdon and drove it home to Carshalton. I promise I'm not making this up. Okay. Hoover. Now, bear in mind in 195, whatever it was, '55.

How old have you he been at this point?

He was then 25. He was actually quite rich in his 20s because his father had died and he'd inherited a load of property from my father. My grandfather was a GP who'd bought a load of houses. Um, so he was driving around in my grandfather's Humber Super Snipe. Um, and he buys this vacuum cleaner in Abingdon, drives it back. He potters around in Abingdon for a bit, drives back to Cal.

Okay. And when he gets back to Cal, I'm not making this up, there's a local cow is, is just, is sort of five, five or six miles from Amber. Yeah. Okay. Abingdon, of course, now is a food mecca, absolute culinary mecca. The Angel Hotel, there's The Walnut Tree at the New, there's the Abingdon food festival. Um, Cow also is, is, I mean, both of those places, if you lived in Monmouth when I was a kid, were seen as a bit of a dump. Um, but they're now, they've actually, there are now actually in danger of outshining Monmouth as a place. They've had a kind of, in a complete, uh, complete kind of, um, uh, deification, um, deservedly so, and all credit to them. And, you know, a few really major entrepreneurs have done that. It's literally a food scene in a town that size can be changed by five or six people, totally. You know, the actual size of the ecosystem you need to actually make something a food. It's the same thing has happened actually in Oxford, not far from me, in across the border in Surrey. Um, and, um, but, but when he got home to Cow, there was a representative from Hoover, the vacuum cleaner company, asking him if he needed any help sort of, you know, setting up the machine or learning how to use it. So labor was so comparatively cheap, and mass-manufactured goods were so comparatively expensive. Bear in mind, in modern money, the vacuum cleaner had probably cost him, I don't know, 500 quid or something. It would have been several, several weeks' work, certainly for a working man. Okay? And you could then provide levels of service which was, which totally insane. I mean, imagine even if you buy Dyson, right? You don't expect to get home and find a Dyson consultant coming around and, you know, pointing out, you know, the different settings for the brush. But admittedly, even in 1955, my father thought that was a bit weird and probably going a bit too far in terms of providing service. But you had a completely different ratio of how expensive goods were versus how expensive service, or indeed servants, were. Okay? So you could employ people for relatively little, but manufactured goods were insanely expensive. That's something that, that I mean, when we look at Gen Z and we think, "God, they're really weird in their behavior." A lot of it is that in my parents' generation, housing was comparatively cheap, and trips to Australia were insanely unaffordable. And now you get 20. How many of you have been to Australia? Just out of interest. How many of you flown long haul? You, you haven't flown long haul actually. Yeah. Actually, that's quite good because you've got something to look forward to because actually my kid, I didn't fly long haul until I was 29. My grandfather, who was quite a rich doctor, okay, never flew long haul in his life. Neither did my grandmother. Okay. My parents did it once. Okay. Now, my kids don't know how often they've been on a long haul flight. And there's a bit of me which goes, actually, I first did it when I was 29. Flew into the United States in 197, actually. Was I '93? Would have been 27. Okay. First long haul when I was 27. And it was really effing exciting. You flew into Minneapolis airport and you looked down and you saw America and you thought, "Shit, this is [ __ ] amazing." Right? Now, my parents-in-law, I did have to kind of slightly berate them because someone they knew got married and they said, "We don't understand it." They said, "Um, they've, um, they've actually been on honeymoon to Australia, but they're planning to rent a house." And I had to explain to them that when they were 27 or whatever it was, you could buy a house for bugger all, you know, particularly out of London. Okay. But going to Australia was an absolutely impossible. I mean, actually, I mean, for a lot of people, you know, even short haul air travel was pretty damn exotic in my childhood. Okay. And long haul travel was, it certainly wasn't something you treated as routine. Whereas by contrast, buying houses is totally unaffordable. So an awful lot of Gen Z behavior is just driven by finding themselves in completely different economic conditions.

My father always had a theory which I think is interesting, that property was underpriced for a long time in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. M. Partly because things that really mattered to you in terms of consumer, um, uh, good, in terms of consumer goods, which would include having buying a car, buying a washing machine, buying a television, those things were really, really expensive. So by the time you'd actually bought those things, you didn't have that much money to spend on a house. Like an inversion. Yeah. Okay. And the thing that worries me about the economy as a Georgist is that every gain we have in buying, in in manufacturing, for example, enormous flat-screen TVs that cost almost nothing, almost every gain we brought to consumers in the shape of EasyJet or Ryanair. Every gain we brought to consumers in the fact that actually, don't buy, if you buy a secondhand car, don't buy a secondhand car for three or 400 quid. You'll get a piece of [ __ ]. Right. Okay. But if you can cobble together 1,500, actually, it's gone up a bit recently, but if you can cobble together just a few thousand, okay, you can now get a pretty good car. If you bought a car of equivalent cheapness in my childhood, it was a piece of [ __ ]. Yeah. Right. It was awful. It wouldn't start on a cold day, you know, got every goddamn problem. And it was just an awful car. Yeah. That's matter. So my worry is that all we've done in consumer capitalism to give people more and more disposable income has not manifested itself in a better quality of life. It's simply manifested itself in higher property prices, either rent, higher rents, or higher mortgages. Mhm. Okay. Which simply means that the young are now working basically to pay for the retirements of the old. Now, that doesn't matter so much if your parents own expensive property. Mhm. Um, you will have banker friends, bear in mind. Okay. You said you hang out with a lot of bankers. I have no idea why you choose to do that, but I mean, it's not fair. No wankers. Yeah. Right. Okay. Um, I loved it when, when that guy murdered two people in Hong Kong, the rumor got out that he was a member of Shorditch House and they get in touch with the Evening Standard, got in touch with Shorditch House and said, "Wait, hang on." So there was a, a banker who went completely insane in Hong Kong and actually murdered two people in his apartment and then kept them. This is about five years ago, right? Maybe a bit more. It was pre-COVID, actually. It might have been seven or eight years ago. And the rumor was that he was a member of Shorditch House in London. They contacted Shorditch House and they said no. They weren't remotely interested in the possibility that one of their members might be a murderer, but they said no, our membership tend to be drawn from the creative industries. We're not very keen on having people from financial services in our club. As if the greatest sin he could have committed to Shorditch House wasn't actually murdering two women, it was being a banker. Um, but the property they can buy, even if they're doing really, really well, okay, compared to the property you could buy if you were, if you were reasonably successful in advertising, never mind banking, in the 1980s or '90s, is dismal. Okay? And the only reason they're not more angry is they never knew what it was like beforehand. They'd never realized the extent to which the older generation have managed to surf a wave of rising property prices. Yeah, that's another thing. In, in, I think is an antifragile where Taleb talks about like there's almost it's interesting because actually my mates aren't there, sort of bank wankers who sort of ex-Oxbridge and then there's stockbrokers. And stockbrokers are kind of like the, they're the, well, that's boring and safe, isn't it? Well, whatever. Well, you know, in, um, in, in Antifragile, Taleb talks about is it Tony, that you know, the [ __ ] are you money? The fat Tony is basically the guy who doesn't look like he probably hasn't been to Oxford, hasn't been to Cambridge. In our, in our, in our case, it probably be someone from Essex, um, or the East End, which is if you, if you're trying to get into it. Yeah. If you get to choose between two surgeons, choose the one who doesn't look the part because he's had to be a much better surgeon to get where he is. Yes. Than the surgeon who looks like a surgeon from central casting. Right. Absolutely. He said, choose a surgeon who says D's and does trouble. Bucking. Is that that's almost the same in banking as well then? Because, or like, not in because some, because I think I've heard you talk about this as well, is like how we, there's discrimination in terms of people's accents as well. Uh oh. If we're talking about, um, discrimination, it needs to be vastly more nuanced than the kind of DEI debate that we've had so far, which is about gender and ethnicity. Okay. Yeah. Uh, in the sense that, um, it's like a scal CEO in a bank. You wouldn't get that. Scott Galloway says it, we should have positive discrimination and affirmative action. It should be based on color, and the color is green. By which he means money. In other words, you should fundamentally accept the fact that people with a wealthy upbringing, regardless of other variables, have an advantage over people who don't. I would also argue people growing up in London have a huge advantage over people who don't, simply because the opportunities of employment, if you can live at home with your mom in London. Well, I got lucky. Yeah, that's what happened to me. Okay. So you totally, you. Okay. Now, had you been living in, you could have been living in idyllic circumstances in Bourton-on-the-Water, right? But getting into, which even has a model village, by the way, um, but, um, uh, which means that, but getting into the podcasting world would have been inordinately more difficult to do. Well, this is, this is the thing. Is I, I take it for doing this more traditionally food and drink podcast. I could only do this in in London. And it's actually easier than in, in America because everything, Austin would be where you went if you went. Yeah. Yeah. I would go to Austin for a definite to absolutely do some food restaurants over there. But in terms of like this, this city, I don't think any other city, may well obviously not Paris because I don't speak [ __ ] French, but like, I think we probably have the, I mean, one reason the best food, one reason I would argue in favor of living here. A few arguments I'd make. So, funny enough, Rick Rubin asked me this, why have you never lived in the United States? And actually, one of the problems is that in advertising, you'd have to work in New York. And the cities, New York, LA, DC, and San Francisco are annoyingly, I think, industry towns. One's all about finance, one's all about government, one's all about software, one's all about entertainment. Now, London is at least variegated in that a friend of mine actually, who I'm meeting this afternoon, uh, interestingly said that Silicon Valley dinner parties are unbelievably boring because everybody just talks about tech. London dinner party, you'd have somebody, you'd have a journalist, you'd have a mix of people who are not talking about tech, okay? You know, they might be talking about education policy or something, you know, or architecture or something different. Okay? So, that I think is a bit of a problem. Whereas I love American cities like Chicago, or indeed, um, I was in San Antonio for a week. I, it's a magnificent place. But though I wouldn't want to be in one of those kind of industry towns. The other thing is that the good stuff of the US tends to make it across the Atlantic to the East eventually. Whereas you can't say the same of say cathedrals or, you know, you know, you know, or medieval towns. Okay. They tend not to make it over to the West. Mhm. So there's a sort of asymmetry there. Uh, on the other hand, the entrepreneurialism and inventiveness there is absolutely magnificent. It's, it's, you know, their huge accomplishment. Well, it's because they're immigrants and they're actually curious. And they've got space actually. You've got space to experiment. Oh. Um, that you, uh, you don't everything, I think, in London. Okay. So, what I'm starting to notice is that the Kent eating scene is becoming every bit as interesting and easier to access than a London eating scene because you can, in London, if you, no, no. If you add the rates to the, um, rent, okay, can you take risks if your restaurant has to make half a million pounds in revenue to cover the rate rents before it even starts to break even and make you money? Well, that's why I think we talked about this part. Now, in by contrast, in Kent, you could go and buy some derelict pub somewhere, and if you're good enough at your food, okay, you're a destination. You're not paying very much rent. You may even own the place outright, and you've got people flocking to you. Okay? And your landlord, which may well be you, but if even if it's landlord, doesn't have the same power to extract most of the value of what you create. Uh, effectively, most of the most of the value you create through the sweat of your arm and your brow ends up in the pockets of the landowner, not in the pockets of you. Um, and that, that's a fundamental Georgist argument which I think we have to take seriously. Someone was saying to me, is I think you, we were saying when we went for lunch, mate, is that the, the center of gravity of London has now moved from West London to East London in terms of like, certainly to sort of shifted East. And I think I think I was, probably because the, the extent to which you, I mean, what's weird is that expensive London streets tend to have pretty formulaic restaurants, and the idea is you can't take any risks. Well, that's, yes, that's who I think. I can't remember who was telling me. I think we talked about this on our first podcast, is that basically like it got to a point where to do anything innovative in West London was prohibitively expensive because it was so [ __ ] as you say, to cover the rent. So, I would, I would argue we've now run out of East London, going to Margate. You're going to find Margate or somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. But actually also a large part of the innovation, which I think is wonderful. I mean, one thing having grown up in a small provincial, I'm being unfair to it, it was a great town. Um, but having grown up in, in around Monmouth, it was a fantastically interesting town given its size. Is that Monmouth Coffee? Uh, well, funny enough, Monmouth, that's named after Monmouth Street in Covent Garden, which I assume is named after the Duke of Monmouth, who I assume is named after Monmouth. Um, right. But there, in the end, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but, but, um, Monmouth was a very, very interesting place, but of necessity, a town of 10, 20, 30,000. Okay. Could only see 20,000. 20,000 is a bit of a threshold, but you, you can only support so much interesting retail and so much interesting restoration.

One of the really interesting things is internet businesses like Gusto, you know, you could include HelloFresh, you could include Ube Chef, which is a Michelin-style chef on the Isle of Wight who sends out, we talked about that before, you know, ready to heat rather than ready to eat. Yeah. Uh, food of a sensational standard. You could also include, I suppose, I'm intrigued by the fact that, um, uh, somebody bought Dispatch, didn't they? Now, who was that? Was it Waitrose who bought it? Might have been actually. As in brought, as in bought. Bought. Yeah. The company. But actually, the, and also, let's be grateful to you. No one ever says, "Hey, isn't it great? There's Tesco." But actually, we always had Mr. Run in Monmouth, a very good delicatessen. Uh, Abingdon had Vin Sullivan, a fantastic sort of fishmonger. Uh, you've always had a few pockets of extraordinariness, but the ability to eat really, really interesting food anywhere, and the internet has been an incredible geographic leveler in the sense that London's advantage is business connections, undoubtedly. Whether you need to be there five days a week to make those connections is interesting, debatable. Undoubtedly, if you're into nightclubs, dating, theater, museums, um, uh, then it has still a supreme advantage over anything else. It used to have a supreme advantage in terms of food. Well, I only need so many restaurants within a 30-mile radius because, don't forget, when you move to the country, your radius of operations because you can drive and the restaurant has a bloody car park. Okay. Your radius of, of your, I was going to say your zone of interest, but I think that's been, that's not the phrase we want to use. Your, your, your zone of interest commercially. Okay. It's a Holocaust film. So, sorry. Sorry. Um, uh, expands massively. So, in London, it's inconvenient just for leisure purposes to travel more than a few miles. In Kent, you might go to, you might travel 25 miles. I recently went 25 miles to go to the cinema. Okay, because it's a cute cinema in Hawkhurst, and I just liked it, and it's got a nice cafe. You've been to The Pig? Uh, The Pig in Bridge, near Canterbury. Yeah. So, I didn't, I was speaking to Ann about this. They're also taking over a new one in, um, so that's that business. They're going to have two Kent. How, how scale? Seth Godin says scale kills magic, right? Scale kills magic. By that, your daughter. They haven't scaled beyond the realm of, Well, no, they've got quite a few. They've got like 15 Pig sites now. But the genius of it is it is so like, you know, like how, um, the ubiquity of Five Guys makes your daughter like it less because it's everywhere. What they've done so genius is they, it's almost, it's the paradox of how do you scale and how do you keep the magic alive? And I went there the other week. So, actually, I didn't message you. Can you do that? I mean, there was a guy who runs the customer service wing for a long time for Shopify, who, and actually, I think Octopus Energy does something similar. You have teams of about 10 people, uh, and you devolve extraordinary amount of power down to the smaller team. And his argument with shopping, that so in other words, I, I think I'm right here, Octopus Energy has a customer service team which is given a certain number of customers, and they are only bonused on two things: how many customers they look after in that team, and what their customer satisfaction levels are in terms of resolution of complaints and problems. And the reason for that is that if you have a call center which is just dealing with everybody, okay, you have no continuity. No one can shout across the room, "Hey, I've got Dave on the phone again. He's got that problem with his meter." Okay? Every single phone call basically starts from scratch. But the, uh, Toby, the guy who's called Toby Shannon, and his insight was that all sports teams are around 10 or 15 people. You don't get sports which have teams of 30 or 40 people, uh, normally. Okay. And his argument is that just as you have the Dunbar number, which is 150, Dunbar number. So it's a theoretical kind of maximum to the size of a human functioning unit. It varies for different primates. But the size of a unit in which it actually operates fully because everybody understands everybody else, everybody knows everybody else, and everybody understands how everybody interacts with everybody else. That's 150. And, and Dunbar's theory is that the number is somewhere around 150, which recurs in all sorts of things like the size of units in the military and so forth. And an interesting definition of someone who's within your Dunbar group. Okay. So you're probably within my Dunbar group to the extent that if you were talking to someone else in a pub, I could come up and join the conversation without it seeming weird. Mhm. Okay. That's one definition of of your Dunbar group, which is the number of friends you have where you could just wander up to them and go, "Hi, how are you?" even though they're talking to a complete stranger, without your interruption, if you like, seeming slightly needy, weird, or unnatural. Yeah. And that's only one definition of it. The whole thing is that you arguably don't just understand your friends, but you understand how your friends get on with your other friends within a Dunbar group. Yeah. Beyond that, it would get impossible. Okay. And it's, I mean, it's so, tell me how The Pig did it. So, the, the, so it's interesting. So, you know, what we're talking about sort of, um, physical availability and mental availability. I think what you're talking about is physical, how you keep magic on a literal physical level of how many people are looking after customer complaints. I think there's also a mental block where, um, in where scale can kill magic, i.e., the ubiquity of [ __ ] of of, um, Five Guys makes it like less cool. The status of it goes down. You could argue that The Pig, um, The Pig do, they, they each menu is 25 miles. So basically, you go to the one in Bridgeford, the cider is from Kent. I know. I don't know. Absolutely. And but then you go down to the one in Cotswold, completely different menu. So even though it's the same, same operation, same hotel, the kitchen will have a completely different menu. Yeah. And I think that's how you keep the magic, because you can basically put a Pig anywhere as well. You know, you probably could have put it in the center of Birmingham. Places open next year. But it's, um, it's, yeah, I think there, that's one of the great places I've seen do it. Another one's Honest Burger. So, every burger place, every burger they open up, they will have a bespoke, um, um, specific to that town, uh, uh, burger, supplier. A beef, beef supplier. Well, not be, no, not beef supplier, but they'll do that. I see. They'll do their own individually localized burger. Yeah. Localized burger. So, that, that's another way to do it. Um, just want to go back to, um, Yes. In-N-Out refuses to expand where it can't have fresh beef supplies. Yeah. So, it limits itself to Texas, New Mexico, California, and Arizona, I think. Um, uh, f, now, interestingly, Chick-fil-A, they're a franchise operation. I don't think, apparently that's the [ __ ] bollocks, but everyone says Chick-fil-A is is the, is like the, the In-N-Out is in In-N-Out Burger of KFC. I've heard. Yeah. I mean, you've also got a another very interesting entity is, um, Wingstop, which is fascinating, by the way. Um, the, but the, what fascinates you about? Um, uh, the focus on one thing. Yeah. Uh, I think is genius. And also the really, really interesting, um, there's some sort of, right. It's like Chipotle and honey glaze, which I haven't tried yet. Crazy flavors, which the flavors apparently are insane. So, I'm intrigued by that. I'm going to give that a try. And I think they do, they do one, they, cuz I've had it on delivery before. I think they do, they do some flavors that are like, um, I think we've talked about gratuitous perversity before. It's flavors that are actually kind of rank, but they're a talking point. Like, there's this one which is mango, which I have, in a food that's designed for sharing. Interesting. Yeah. But, but I talked about it, or I'm talking about it now, you know. Yeah. And it's, um, it's interesting. Yeah. There's one, I think, I think it's honey, honey, and chipotle or whatever it is. There's another one, or chipotle. I never quite know how to pronounce. Um, the, um, uh, the other one that's interesting with Chick-fil-A, I think they're very, very keen to franchise to families. So quite a lot of the restaurants, although they're a franchise, are effectively a family-run business. So you get that extent to which people are part of a small team where everybody stands in for everybody else. Okay. So one of the reasons Toby Shannon did this thing with Shopify, which is splitting the business into, it appeared very inefficient. Split the business. So effectively, every call center team was 10 people and they had a team leader. Now, the standard way, the standard way would minimize on management cost because you'd have one supervisor and there'd be 150 people all manning the phones, and he wouldn't really understand them as people. Instead, he'd be looking at various metrics for how quickly they're answering a call because that team is now too big for the relationship to be properly two-way. So, you start using proxy management, to proxy metrics, to manage your team, rather than actually listening in on their calls. And it looked inefficient, and he got a quite, quite a lot of grief, but he had the highest satisfaction levels in the company in terms of employees from people who are paid a lot less than say the software engineers within Shopify. Very, very high levels of retention and customer retention, but also you get that weird thing where people step into the breach. Step into the breach. So what that would be would be if someone's ill, someone else picks up their work. You know what I mean? Okay. They almost run it like a brigade of chefs. So 10 people, you'd say, "I've got your back." Okay? And if someone, you know, if someone's mother was ill, people would understand the reason and they'd trust them. But someone will feel a massive level of shame for claiming falsely that their mother was ill because they're actually lying to their cohort and their friends, not just lying to senior management who are a remote load of bastards who don't understand what they really do anyway. So, so you create these kind of reciprocal bonds in smaller teams, uh, which are generally beneficial at the cost of not quite enjoying gains to scale efficiencies that you would do from having larger teams. But the upside in many, many areas of operation, including, I would argue, customer service, probably outweigh the downside costs.

I want to go back to Nasim Taleb and what that anti, that what those books teach us about marketing. Like, um, I know we sort of touched on the problem. Paranoid about my time. No, you've got, you've got time. Do you know what my end time is? Uh, it's 1:15. Your Anna's going to come in at 1:15. And what time is it now? Uh, uh, we've got half an hour. Oh, fine. Fine. Yeah. Yeah. And then your cab's at 1:30. Okay. That should be okay. Yeah. Yeah. I have no idea what the time is because there's no clock in here. Yeah. It's weird how, um, yeah. So, because you, he's, you're like an acquaintance of, Oh, no. No. No. Well, I like him a lot. Yeah. His insight is that fundamentally, what other lessons can we take from him? Oh, there's a very, very big lesson you can take from what Nim's done, which is that, um, uh, it doesn't matter how good a mathematician thinks they are, if they're using the wrong math, they're dangerous. So, you can build an extraordinary edifice of seemingly logical decision-making on the back of a single wrong assumption in mathematics. What would that be in food? Uh, oh. What's the equivalent in food? Well, one of the things would be in food. Yeah. Um, uh, okay, one of the wrong assumptions in food might be around what people claim to like and want over what they actually eat. So, if you research people, they will always say, "I want a healthy option." In the event, they don't buy the healthy option. And the reason they don't buy the healthy option, by the way, the McDonald's salad is quite a good idea because it means moms can take children there, or dads can take children there for a treat, if they themselves don't want to eat McDonald's, but the, you know, the kids can have the Happy Meal, etc., etc. It's not, you know, I'm not saying these things are a total waste of time, and there will be occasions where that happens. But most of the time, when you're sitting in a research group, first of all, you're trying to look responsible, sensible, and good and middle class. So you'll say, "Yeah, healthy option." People say they have three drinks a week. Of course they do. Of course they do. Also, when you go to, often, not always, sometimes you're going to McDonald's or KFC for a cheap lunch. You know, you don't want to break into the six quid barrier or whatever it may be, and you want a hot meal, but sometimes you're going for a treat, and a salad isn't a treat. So, you know, a large part of the food business is that it's completely wrong to look at the popularity of a fast-food restaurant and assume that everybody who eats in a fast-food restaurant eats unhealthily. They might be eating quite healthily at home, but every now and then it's Friday evening, whatever, they just let go. And now Nim might argue, incidentally, that, um, the healthiest diet is not a constant diet of the same kind of stuff, that actually you will, I mean, he would argue that the Mediterranean diet is partly a product of the fact that older Mediterraneans, particularly in Greece, followed the dietary precepts of the Greek Orthodox Church, and therefore they would be vegan for a third, you know, vegan for two days a week, vegetarian for two days a week, on one day a week they'd pig out. And might make the case, in fact, I think he does in the book, that the best to optimize for some, to optimize a complex system, there is sometimes an optimal amount of variation you should optimize for, um, variance, not optimize for consistency. Mhm. So, an example would be in things like, um, artificial lung machines or ventilators. Okay. Uh, a, a kind of someone with a Newtonian mindset would say, "Okay, or given this patient's condition, we're going to set it to a five," whatever the power level is. Okay? And an Assim would say, "Actually, to encourage real human health, human health is antifragile, it thrives on variation." Okay? Actually, the correct thing is not to set it on five, it's to set it on three, then boost it up to five, then boost it up to seven, then knock it down to three again, then put it up to five, because it's actually healthier for a human to be exposed to a level of variance as they would encounter in the natural environment. Versus. So, he, he used to be, what are some ways brands can become antifragile? Like antifragile brands? Well, I mean, I mean, to some extent, uh, of course, uh, a brand patently gives you a certain degree of benefit of the doubt with the consumer, but undoubtedly, you could argue the other thing is that that I've often said that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Yeah. And there are occasions with a brand where you optimize for predictability, and there are occasions with a brand where you optimize for pleasant surprise. Yep. Okay. So there are elements to a brand experience where the consumer basically wants it to be same as it ever was. Nothing to see here. The glorious familiarity of the Amazon website. Okay. And there are certain occasions where what you want to do is make people go, "Wow, that's good. I never expected that." And, uh, and consequently, uh, you might argue that Nim's barbell approach, which is, you know, it, well, I've talked about this a lot. Yeah. A lot. Yeah. Yeah. That, yeah, two, two extremes. I've talked about this a lot on the podcast, as with guests, I asked, you know, James, what about the barbell theory? And he'd read a lot of, um, Nasim's work, and we, you know, because I think it goes, you can almost apply that barbell theory to everything. It's almost kind of holding two opposing things at once. I think one, one question to, to ask is like, you know, what's one thing you'll never change your mind about as a founder? But then, what's, what was the last thing you changed radically changed your mind about? Like, I think those, that's quite a good place to play. I, I love the fact that Will Gdara, in his book, I, I'm talking about this this afternoon, funnily enough, practices what I call reverse benchmarking. You go to your best competitors and instead of asking, "What do they do well that we can copy?" You ask, "What do they do slightly disappointingly that we can hit out of the park?" Yes. So, in his case, it was the coffee and the beer. Yeah. So that's, um, the guy we interviewed in Cornwall. Have you seen the Grenade Protein Bar? Yes, of course. Yeah. Yes. We, the founder of that, Al Barrett, he's an absolute, I mean, he's a [ __ ] genius. They sold it to Mondelēz. Was unbelievable podcast. But that is, Mondelēz has also bought that thing called Clif, is that am I right? Yes. The Clif, the Clif. You know, Mondelēz have only bought two brands in the UK. Cadbury and, Gorilla. And, Grenade. Sorry. Gorilla. But what his whole, his whole thing is, do you know, I think everyone looks, his whole thing was most people look at their competition and saying, "Okay, what are they, how are they, what are they strong at? Where can we copy them?" And his whole thing was a real breakthrough innovation. It nearly all follows what you might call reverse benchmarking. So, if you look at Apple, okay, um, everybody was a bunch of nerds competing for processing power, RAM, all the usual objective metrics of performance. Okay. And Steve comes along and goes, "Yeah, in your pro, in your giddy haste to, uh, produce the world's most, um, high-performing PC, yeah, you've completely forgotten aesthetics and usability. How does it feel to use this thing rather than what is this thing?" M. And so, uh, emphatically, what he did was he, he matched, you know, none of those things had bad performance, but he changed the question and made things which were within the ballpark area of acceptable performance, but in terms of aesthetic, now, literally before there were Apple computers, actually, to some extent, the iMac was a genius breakthrough which deserves to be given more credit actually for weaning people onto the, onto the platform. Um, if you put a computer in any room of your house, you turned it into an office. Was I genuinely? They were all gray. They all had these horrible keyboards. If you walked into anybody's home and there was a computer anywhere in their kind of living room, you basically thought, well, why have I walked into the study? You might as well put a photocopier in the corner and a fax machine and a filing cabinet, because you just turned that room into an office. And effectively, what Apple did was they actually thought about how the things looked, and equally important, how they felt to use, which is why they'll give retentive attention to things like packaging, which would have been completely neglected as beneath the dignity of someone working at, you know, the IBM PC division at the time. The, the other thing, I don't know if it's, I think it is Taleb who says, we need more books like there's so many how-to books and so many biographies of people who've been successful. We need to almost reverse that and say, how-not-to books, or books of biography, or biographies of people who have failed. Oh, I think the number of things that failed because of one or two bad decisions, and sometimes not even product decisions or design decisions, sometimes marketing decisions. Yeah. I think the looking at a really good failure where there, you know, you can identify one or two reasons why they failed, and then you can come back with the same idea, effectively remove those two constraints. The director who was just on Rogan, Robert Rodriguez, he did Spy Kids. His his creative approach is wonderful, but he says you got to study the ashes of your failure. So applying that to marketing, like how-not-to books, what are some of the marketing campaigns? And it doesn't have to be in food, it can be in food. Nuclear power undoubtedly chose the worst two, two terrible marketing decisions. One of which is using the word nuclear. Yeah. And the second one, less so in France, but more in the UK, is the design and location of nuclear power stations, which make them look as sinister as [ __ ]. If, if you had actually put them in fairly mainstream locations and you designed a mock-tuda nuclear power station, okay, our entire reaction to nuclear power would have been entirely different. Whereas at the moment, they look like Dr. Evil's headquarters, and they're always in some remote coastal area, usually shrouded in fog, you know, so they look deeply sinister. Other examples would be another great marketing failure is The Shawshank Redemption, which I, you've seen it presumably. Okay, most people agree it's one of their favorite films. Wasn't that, didn't it bomb at first? It absolutely bombed. Um, and it even, you know, you would have thought that word of mouth might have rescued it. But one, they timed the launch badly, so it coincided with the launch of some other blockbuster. But why the hell do they call it that? Okay, because now it's one of the world's most popular films, we can all remember the name of The Shawshank Redemption. Now, Morgan Freeman himself was livid about the title of the film because he said the original title of the Stephen King short story was Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. And Morgan Freeman's observation was, you've got Rita Hayworth, you've got the Shawshank Redemption. Why the hell would you go with Shawshank, not Rita Hayworth? Okay. Rita Hayworth. That was the poster, if you remember, in the film. The reason it was called Rita Hayworth, a famous actress, extraordinary. So he, it went from Rita Hayworth to Raquel Welch to show how long he'd been in the prison. Okay. Um, Andy Dufresne. Um, but, um, that was an interesting case. There are really, really interesting cases where the reason for marketing failure may well be just lack of patience. In that new significant new ideas. The other thing that's interesting to me is quite often, in order to do a Will Gdara, which is what I call reverse benchmarking, okay? You make, you do what everybody else does, not quite as well, but you invest your resources into doing what they've neglected brilliantly well. Okay. A friend of mine made the point that that was how you invented Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Okay. Sorry. McDonald's did that. Okay. Um, Okay. So, a diner did choice. McDonald's did speed. Yeah. Okay. Right. Very simply, diners, you could have it over easy, you could have it sunny side up, you could have substitutions, you could have link sausages, you have this huge great menu. McDonald's did absolutely the opposite, which said, "We're going to cut down on choice and we're going to deliver on speed and instantaneousness." Because everybody likes, you know, everybody likes a burger, basically. Okay. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was that every other martial art had got really, really good at how to fight when you're standing up. And the guy who was not, not coincidentally Brazilian, who invented Brazilian, Roger Gracie or something? I can't remember his name. Yeah, his his whole insight was, in every other martial art, once you're on the ground, you kind of lost. So, nobody's ever given any thought to what happens to fighting when you're actually at ground level. Oh, there's a great. So, that's how he invented the martial art. There's a great meme of, um, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu takes on, not like a little video, takes on like London mobs and basically the guy's got these like balaclavas on and [ __ ] baseball bats and he's walking around. He goes, "Oh, oi, bruv." And the guy goes, "Come on then." And he gets on the floor, and obviously they're starting up with baseball bats. But the whole point is like, is basically like once it's on the floor. However, the interesting thing is that it's unlikely he'll come up with a brilliant new idea for a, um, uh, I mean, uh, you know, it's unlikely you'll come up with a brilliant new idea for a martial art, given that millions of people in the Orient have been perfecting how to fight while standing up for a thousand years. Whereas how to fight while lying down, that's that's terra incognita. Yeah. That's so, you know, Uber, everybody would focus on aspects of the taxi. I would argue the magic with Uber was the map, the certainty. We mentioned this already with your time in, the, um, I interviewed, who's Chris Williamson's business partner in New Tonic, James Smith. Don't know if you've met him. Um, and he, he, uh, practices Jiu-Jitsu. He's, he does it like three, Brazilian or standing up? Uh, Brazilian. Brazilian. And, um, I was, and he's a like a really interesting marketeer as well. There's whole things like honest marketing, and we can, I want to talk about that as well about, I think you've talked about Robert Cialdini's seventh weapon of influence, which is basically negative selling, which is saying, Yeah, you David Abbott, brilliantly. What's fascinating is that before anybody came up with a prall effect, there was an advertising guy, uh, I mean, famously David Abbott said, "Confession works well in the church, and also works well in the sales room," or something to that effect, that a certain, certain admission where there is a downside to this product, but it's more than made up for. Now, an interesting example of a product that was, uh, effectively unlike any previous product and markedly worse than the preceding products in one dimension, was the original iPhone, which we've forgotten this now to an extent. The original iPhone had dismal battery life. I mean, it was really appalling. Now, it happened that people loved its other attributes so much, they were happy to do workarounds. You'd either buy an absurdly bulbous case with a battery in it. You did that. Or you'd take a plug and a cable into work with you, and it barely made it through to lunchtime, but you were sitting there on the desk and you'd plug in your iPhone somewhere and charge it up. Okay. Now, quite often, I would argue the same is true of the electric car. The electric motor is a vastly more suited device to converting energy into, into, um, transportation than the internal combustion engine. It has only one negative, okay, which is that charging is a bit more problematic. It takes a bit longer, and you may need to do it a little more frequently, okay? Um, my argument would be that, um, that is often the case with an innovation. And that's by the way, one of the reasons B2B innovation is slower than consumer innovation is that the iPhone would never have made it as a B2B product because procurement would have set out a specification for the desired mobile phone, which would have included a battery life of 26 hours, say. And the iPhone at that stage would have been completely impossible, okay, to attain that kind of battery life with that kind of screen. So B2B would have awarded the contract to Blackberry, or Motorola, or awarded the contract to Nokia. Consumers are prepared, just as consumers in dating, or consumers in buying a house are prepared to trade off two indifferent negatives for one massive positive. It's very common in B2B purchasing that the, the metrics around which optimality is defined are basically the metrics determined by the brand leader in a particular category, which means that anyone.

With an innovative solution, you are at a disadvantage compared to the incumbent or the typically dominant player in the category. So, for example, IBM would have set the category parameters as processing speed. Okay. Apple would have come along and said, "Yeah, yeah, processing speed's a bit worse, but look at the usability." And the procurement people would have said, "Usability doesn't factor into our key performance indicators or our, you know, our balance scorecard of values." So, I'm afraid we're going with the incumbent.

And so, procurement and what my friend Blair Ens calls "inefficiency," i.e., that the cult of efficiency, as defined, prevents innovation. Okay. Uh, those act effectively as a massive drag on potential innovation because the innovative solution is almost certainly an outlier on quite a few measures. The incumbent solution is generally optimized towards the existing measures in the marketplace.

Yeah, that sort of links what I was going where I was going with James Smith in terms of the Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And we'll get on to sort of the seventh rule of Robert Cialdini in a sec. But one of the things he taught me, I was like, "What are the parallels between jiu-jitsu?" One of my favorite things is to look at two completely opposite things and what can you learn at the sweet spot? I believe for everything, you learn something in the crux of two random things. I was like, "Brazilian jiu-jitsu and marketing." And he was like, his um, he was basically saying his biggest learning that you'd apply from jiu-jitsu to marketing is putting yourself constantly in a disadvantaged position because that is, in almost like a weird position that you don't want to be in, because that is where one, you'll get better at jiu-jitsu because you're like, instead of it's almost like, oh, you learn how to recover.

Learn how to recover, but also learn insights. I, I suppose maybe an analogous way of doing this is like, say you're skiing down a mountain, you go down the same route, it would be going like that way, kind of thing. Failure often contains valuable information, including at the simplest level, the information that if we did the opposite of failure, it might succeed.

"What have been some of your failures, do you think?"

"Oh, lots of. I mean, I've been wrong. I mean, you know, I look back on my time and, uh, one of them is, I think, endemic to the advertising industry, which is a failure to walk away, uh, and to say no, which is where a little too desperate to please. And on a few occasions, I've been involved in pitches where I didn't believe in the strategy. I didn't believe what they were doing was, um, uh, in any way beneficial to the brand or that it respected the brand that they'd built over the previous 20 years. And I wish I'd had the balls, looking back, to, you know, on two or three occasions to say, 'We're not pitching this because we don't agree with what you're doing.'"

"Um, that's one example of a failure, which is a failure of over-optimism. Um, other things are lots of things I've got wrong. I've predicted lots of things completely wrongly."

"Which are?"

"Um, I, I, I met the guy who originally came up with the phrase 'podcast,' who, in the very, very early days of podcasting, was introducing this concept to me."

"What was his name?"

"I can't remember his name. I've got a vague idea who's Israeli, but I'm just trying to remember. And really nice guy. I remember thinking, 'Yeah, this will really work in the U.S. because they have a lot of drive time, but I don't really see it working in the UK.' But of course, I failed to anticipate AirPods."

"I was literally about to say that. Yeah. Because the AirPods are what gave you it became about."

"Now, what is weird, which all of us would have been wrong about, I think, okay, is that when I go on a long drive, I am vastly more likely to listen to an audiobook or a podcast than to listen to music."

"Yeah. Now, again, when I was a kid, one advantage of being 59 is there are changes of which you are aware that young people have never seen because they didn't actually exist in the status quo ante. So, you know, how, you know, the fact that going to Australia on holiday would have made you the absolute center of attention among all your friends."

"How much to fly then, do you reckon?"

"Uh, it would have cost. I mean, in my immediate, in my young childhood, it was like the price of a car. Certainly taking, okay, you know, maybe not the most exotic car, but taking a family to Australia would have been, you know, I mean, I had a friend who literally went back to Barbados for the school holidays only in the summer because the other holidays were too short to make it worth going back. And his parents, he flew, he was older than me, he must be in his 70s now or late 60s. Uh, he flew to Ganda, then I think flew to New York, then flew to Miami, then flew to Barbados. So it was a four-leg. And his parents basically paid every year the price of a new car to get him home for the school holidays from the UK to Barbados."

"That's mad."

"Okay. Right. Now, I don't know. You could do it now. What? 500 return if it was off-season."

"Yeah."

"Okay. Um, admittedly, it's a school holiday, so it's a bit more expensive, but you know, um, uh, the, um, but the interesting thing there is you have this kind of chronological context which you don't have if you're 30."

"Yeah."

"Like, you knew what the world was like before the internet, where you wrote to somebody and waited. I mean, I used to buy things off the pre-internet, which was mail-order ads in newspapers, and they typically took 28 days to arrive. They would always say on the coupon, 'Allow 28 days for delivery.' And so you'd order a clock radio from an ad, you know, on TV or on, typically on in the Sunday Times color magazine, and about a month later, your clock radio would arrive, maybe three weeks if you're lucky. And of course, nobody realizes these things. And of course, we grow up thinking that the, the, that the contemporary world is the normal and everything else is new."

"Mhm."

"But to anybody my age, large parts of the contemporary world are deeply abnormal still, um, in terms of what things cost, um, in terms of, uh, what you can do with technology."

"Uh, I told the story about I was on the tarmac at Sydney airport and I just laughed because I was [ __ ] around with my phone because it was before takeoff."

"How long ago was it?"

"This is about, I can date it actually, about seven or eight. No, nine years ago."

"Yeah."

"And I laughed and my daughter said, 'What's so funny?' And I said, 'Well, just for 20 seconds back there, I turned on the central heating at home.' You said, 'Dan, you're such an idiot.' And I suddenly realized to her, there was nothing particularly interesting about controlling your central heating from the other side of the world."

"Yes."

"But to me, the idea that, you know, 25,000 miles away, a boiler went 'click' and turned on at the behest of me sitting on a phone with a handheld device. It was still completely magical because if I, if you told me I could do that at the age of 15, I would have told you to piss off."

"M."

"It wasn't going to happen."

"Ironically, it was actually more technologically, some of what we now have with the internet was more technologically possible then than we thought."

"Okay. So, you could actually have controlled your boiler, but you would have needed a second phone line, which would have been really expensive, or you would have needed a special device to answer your telephone line. It would be technologically possible, I think, you know, even in the 70s, if you were a really super nerd and you had a bank of nine phone lines to actually achieve something like a connected home to a very, you know, trivial extent."

"Um, and I've always wondered why, one of the things that always bothered me is before mobile phones came along, why we didn't have message services where, so if you wanted to meet someone in the pub in 1989, okay, you could have a mobile phone then, but none of your friends did because they were pretty expensive and they were the size of a brick. You'd have to say, 'Okay, I'll meet you in the pub at 1:00.' And then if they didn't turn up at 1, you were in a complete funk. You had no means of getting home."

"This is mental, right? So I was talking to this is normal life in 1989, but yeah, but but but what's interesting is someone could have invented, BT could have invented then, 'Tell you what, my message number, if I'm running late, okay, I'll leave a message on my message number and you can call that number from a payphone and you can pick up a message,' or we could have had, I don't know why the public didn't have cheap alphanumeric pagers, why nobody tried to consume that. Maybe there wasn't enough, um, band, maybe there wasn't enough kind of frequency spectrum in the airwaves to carry that number of pages. But partly, I think the reason was because nobody had had them, nobody realized they wanted them. Okay?"

"So if, if let's say the world's mobile phone network crashed, okay, you would go insane to buy a pager, right?"

"Because you now, you now have an expectation of ready connectivity. Yeah."

"Which you didn't have in 1989. And so because you didn't have an expectation of it, everybody found a load of useless workarounds. Like I suppose you could eventually phone the pub and they'd go, 'Is Dave in?' Right? Now, has that ever, I mean, it happened to me actually in a pub where I was out of mobile range, where my PA actually called the pub to remind me to leave to my next meeting. That was the first time I've been summoned to the telephone by a barman since 1987."

"This is what I can't. By the way, the old joke was, uh, to ring up and ask, 'Um, could you put me, I need to get in touch with Mike Hunt?' And then the barmaid would shout out, 'Has anybody seen Mike?' And everybody would burst out laughing. And we found that hysterically funny because it was 1987. Okay, now that is a joke you can't really play on a mobile phone network."

"I mean, it's worth noting, okay, that we go to Gen Z. I always take the piss out of Gen Z because they seem, you people, you're obsessed with photographing your own genitals, aren't you? And then it occurred to me that had we wanted to photograph our own genitals, okay, in 1987, this is what you would have had to do. Okay."

"I thought you going to get your genitals out."

"No, I was not. Okay. Right. Right. Right."

"I don't want to see your only. You would have to get a camera pointed at your genitals with no idea whether they were in focus or whether it was any kind of decent photograph. Okay. Then you'd have to wait until your 36 roll of Kodak, what was it called? Ektachrome or whatever it was called? Kodachrome."

"Yeah."

"Until you'd used all, all 36 non-genital photographs. Okay. Right. Uh, you then have to wait until you've taken five photographs of your next birthday party and your mom. And then you'd have to go down to Snappy Snaps to get them developed. But you couldn't go to Snappy Snaps in Monmouth because the person who worked behind the counter almost certainly was like the sister of someone who went to school with you and they'd probably get to see the photograph of your genitals and you'd be exposed to widespread, uh, rivalry. So you don't have to go to Snappy Snaps in Cwmbran. Okay. Get the photograph developed under a false name, come home, retrieve the photograph of your own genitals. Okay?"

"Yeah."

"Then you would have to ring up your girlfriend from a phone box and say, 'I was thinking of sending you a photograph of my own genitals.' Okay? Then you'd have to get an envelope. If your girlfriend was so willing, you'd have to go and get an envelope and a stamp. Okay? And you'd have to then put it in the envelope, write to your girlfriend at her home address, and say, 'Here with a photograph of my genitals.' And you then put it in the post, hoping that her mom didn't open the letter. Okay? So when boomers say, 'You young people are weird sending photographs of your genitals to each other,' it's worth noting that at the age at which it were possible, we might conceive of such an idea, it wasn't really practically possible."

"So that's that's my point, which is there are a lot of behaviors among the young which old people, God, young people, they're doing these weird things. Well, you couldn't get [ __ ] avocados, and we loved them. Okay? It was called an avocado pear in 198. I can remember the date exactly because I first had an avocado pear speech day, Punch House, Monmouth, upstairs restaurant, 19, probably 79, 80. Okay. And it was called an avocado pear and it was a starter on its own with a spoon and a bit of vinaigrette, and that constituted a starter because it, you didn't buy them in the shops. They were kind of an exotic thing and restaurants would occasionally have orange juice as a starter and you got a small glass of orange juice and you drank it and that constituted a starter."

"Okay. I mean, the food world was unbelievably bad then in some senses."

"But the reason young people eat avocados is because avocados are available everywhere. They're cheap and abundant and actually quite easy to farm, apparently. Okay? Just turn a tap on in the morning and then go to the pub. Now, I may be doing a massive injustice to the world's avocado farmers here. It may be a deeply demanding, uh, science which requires long, laborious work, but, um, an awful lot of the behavior of Gen Z which battles the old is partly because young people are fundamentally different to old people, not because they're a different generation or that their their genetics is somehow weirdly different, simply because, um, they're young rather than old. Okay? And secondly, because they find themselves in a completely different context. And large part of human behavior is driven by context. It's not driven by, you know, in other words, we have innate urges like status signaling."

"But the channels by which we will, we will, we will use to status."

"Now, when I went to Cambridge in 1989, so it's a rich, it's a [ __ ] rich, I mean, you know, I know it's all meritocratic and we're all really clever and everything else, but the thing that really, the thing that really characterized a lot of people is that most of the people were middle class. The number of people who are, you know, who are working class, uh, were, they were fascinating, but they were rare. Okay? They were the most interesting people in many ways, um, but, um, uh, the number of people who'd actually flown anywhere long haul, okay, at the age of 19, 20 was, I mean, I'm just thinking it was about, I mean, they were overseas students who obviously flown long haul to get there, they were Americans and so forth, but the number of people in my cohort who'd actually flown long haul already was, was way below 50%. And it occurs to me that travel has become a status signal, um, among young people and that you would find yourself at a massive social disadvantage if you're in fact, in fact, one of the, one of the things of The Inbetweeners actually basically parodies that, yeah, which is, you know, the guy who's met a shaman and, you know, done all this [ __ ] stuff all over the. To be honest, you learn as much, a lot of these middle-class some people in southern England would learn more going to [ __ ] Blackpool for a week than they would going to bloody Nepal. To be absolutely honest, and in fact, it would be much healthier for them to go to Blackpool."

"I, I asked a question of, ask this question any audience, 200 people. Okay."

"How many of you in the audience have been to Machu Picchu?"

"And then you ask the next question. How many of you have been to Lincoln Cathedral?"

"So it's, so interesting."

"Now, Lincoln Cathedral is a [ __ ] day trip from London on the train. It's a lot more impressive architecturally than a load of [ __ ] stones, uh, you know, 15,000 feet up in the bloody, you know, Andes."

"And I'm sorry, you know, that suggests that difficulty of access has become a status signal, signal in travel much more than the intrinsic value of the actual place itself."

"Well, the other, the other."

"How many minutes now immediately?"

"Okay, we'll finish up there."

"Yeah. Yeah. So the, the, um, on that note, like there's loads of, um, founders like they who are creating these brands. They're like they're latched into LA and what's on Instagram and so a house in London. So they're creating these products for Sainsbury's or Waitrose, whatever, but they're actually only ever going to sell in the Sainsbury's and Waitrose and Tesco's in London. So one of the things I say is if you're going to have your NPD meeting, your new product development meeting, go and sit in a Sainsbury's car park in Hull and you'll see how it works. Fairness to your general Brit. Okay, I'll give a lot of credit. Just as Americans are very good consumers because they, they'll try new things. Americans fundamentally believe that life is capable of continual improvement and consequently, when you when you offer them a new way of doing something, they'll give it a try. They're an adventurous consumer group. Brits are very good like that with food. Okay? In that the number of people go, 'I don't eat curry,' you know, 'I don't eat foreign food.' The number of people who are unadventurous with food is quite small."

"Mhm."

"What you speak of, there's actually a name for, and this is probably a very good point at which to end. It's called the Boston Market effect, and it's a stock market phrase because a load of people working on Wall Street used to be going home really late, and there's a place called Boston Market where you could buy very good rotisserie chicken for quite a lot of money. And they all thought, 'Wow, all my friends are going to Boston Market. I go to Boston Market all the time. Boston Market's great.' And they bid the stock price up and up and up, okay, until someone finally realized that yes, in New York, when you've got a Wall Street Goldman Sachs audience, Boston Market's always going to be a massive success, but the market for it in Peoria, Illinois, isn't quite so exciting. Okay, that's when you realize that everybody, you are not everybody."

"Rory, as always,"

"It's been an absolute joy. Thank you very much indeed."

"Um, yeah, let's wrap that up because I know you've got to run, mate. And, um, [Music]"