Transcription
Rory Southerntherland, welcome.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Fantastic. Really pleased. Tell me, who is Rory Southerntherland? If you've heard of me or you know the reason I'm here, I suppose is the question I'm going to answer. There is, I suppose, all I did in truth was take some habits of thought and mental practices which are relatively common within the advertising industry or within marketing, and repackage them to be used elsewhere. That's about it, really, in a sentence.
Went rather well for you, though. So well, I mean, bizarrely, my argument would be it was an extraordinary failing of both marketers and advertising people to have missed this opportunity, uh, you know, for the most part up until now. But what I, what I suddenly discovered is that there's something quite unusual about what is the standard mental practice within the creative realm of marketing, which is, in most of business, sort of rationality is the gold standard. If you come up with a rational argument which holds water, then tick, job done. Nothing to see here. Fantastic. All over. In advertising or marketing, rationality is kind of the bronze standard. Well, yeah, that makes sense, but are you sure we can't do something better?
Did you make a conscious decision to almost go against the grain? Because at some point, you must have turned with the tide. By the way, I don't think that's unique to advertising people. I think it's an entrepreneurial characteristic as well, which is bureaucratic, technocratic, managerial people whose motivation is self-justification. Okay. Generally want to think the way other people think and know what everybody else does so they can benchmark against themselves and look rational and sane and make decisions that are unlikely to get you blamed. What I noticed about the entrepreneurial mindset is it's completely the opposite. It only really values information that nobody else has. Hence pioneers, innovators, disruptors.
Property developers, in a sense, what they're looking for is not value, it's untapped value or undervalued property. Or, in other words, the question is not what is this, but what could I make of it? And that's a fundamentally creative question. It's not a, it's not a rational question. You know, there isn't a process by which you can arrive at that. It requires some sort of inspiration or, I think there's a technical term for it in philosophy which I think is called abductive inference. It's a kind of "what if" rather than a "what is." And I think, you know, fundamentally, I think you'll notice out of anybody who has an entrepreneurial mindset. Not everybody's an entrepreneur. Some of them are to be found scattered around in larger businesses. Uh, their, what you might call, their approach to information is fundamentally different. Uh, it's opportunity-based, in a sense, rather than defensive. You know, uh, you know, most people in business optimize for efficiency rather than optimizing for opportunity.
Get that. And at the heart of that is creativity. And, and fundamentally, of course, those people are uncomfortable with creativity because it usually involves something which isn't strictly speaking a process in the conventional sense of the word, you know. Now, I think, in, if you want to be creative, I think there are checklists. Yeah, I think there are tools you can use, you know, whack packs you can use to stimulate creativity. I mean, Brian Eno famously produced a whole deck of cards called Oblique Strategies. You know, Rick Rubin's written about this in his new book, but it isn't a reliable, deterministic process which frightens the out of certain people, particularly people in finance, because you go, "What will this?" You know, if you do something fundamentally new, there is not data to predict what will happen.
That's the mathematical brain malfunctioning without process, without. You've got it exactly. They're, and it fundamentally discomforts them because they, you know, they're optimizing for predictability and low variance and all those sort of things. Whereas, in a sense, the phrase I used, and I, by the way, I don't play either, but generally you don't find entrepreneurs in chess clubs, you find them in casinos. In other words, you know, they have a fundamentally different statistical frame, I think, which they bring to the world. I mean, one of the interesting things is that you, in a sense, if you do gamble, and I have done it periodically, if you play poker or you play blackjack, what you realize pretty quickly is that you've been playing all evening, but in fact, five or six hands determine most of the outcome. It's fat-tailed. And I think, you know, entrepreneurs are like that. They're happy to fail 15 times because what they're interested in is, if I can just be disproportionately successful on four occasions, I don't need to worry about all the other. And that's, that's probably a mindset which is too scary for someone who wants an absolutely kind of granular measurement of cost and return. "Every penny I spend must be moving the pebble forward." Whereas the other mentality is, "I'm totally happy to spend a load of money not moving the pebble at all if sometimes something remarkable happens."
That's, I love the way you've articulated that. There's an optimism. You mentioned property. I, you have to be disproportionately optimistic. I'm a frustrated property developer right now. And, and you know, you ultimately are looking. My father's a property developer, my daughter works for JL, my daughter's effectively uh in the property development arm. It's a very creative world because, as I said, it's spotting effectively seeing what other people haven't seen as the only way you can make money.
I love the fact you said that, and that's what drew me into it. Plus the, um, what I could see that apart from the barrier to entry being finance, that and and actually being able to buy property and fund through the development side of things, that was something I could see was a human part of it. That was, that was, that was not a mathematical science degree or what have you. That was actually, "Well, I just go to people, and I'll find the skill will be, I'll find people that can get me good opportunities. I'll find people that can help shape them, and I'll find people that will fund them." Now, an interesting thing to me is one of the reasons I repackaged kind of ad-think or mad-think for other industries. It occurred to me that the people in advertising and marketing are overwhelmingly concentrated in fields like packaged goods, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, spirits, drink, probably, you know, all of that is kind of 5% of GDP or something, right? And there are these other industries like transportation, infrastructure, real estate, which between them are probably 20% of GDP, but they receive less marketing attention than say Unilever does or Dove does. And it strikes me that those habits of thought that are found in marketing people might be equally valuable in the property sphere. And so my daughter and I were having this conversation just the other day, and I think the property industry, because let's face it, residential London property, particularly, is very soft at the moment and doesn't, you know, I don't think you can rely on capital appreciation anymore from property ownership in large parts of the country. And when you think about that, suddenly whole areas of activity like buy-to-let, once you don't have assumed capital appreciation, they're a mug's game.
And, and there was a graph that was a constant for years. It's constant. And actually, there are a whole bunch of people. I mean, I'm old enough to remember, what was it? Uh, I think it was 1888, was it? There was a really bad. You're too young to remember this. I remember it. But there were absolutely dire property crashes in commercial and residential property from time to time. There are a hell of a lot of people now who who aren't even aware that can happen. They're also confident of the fact that they're never going to be taxed because they're too many of them. And so we've created a sacred asset class in real estate. And, you know, all of that could change because if loads of people exit buy-to-let, which demographically a lot of them want to do anyway, given the age of the typical buy-to-let landlord, and they suddenly realize, "Okay, I'm not getting capital appreciation anymore, and it's time to move out." You could have a fall in property prices, but also a huge increase in rental prices because a whole load of currently privately rented accommodation disappears from the market. So there's the potential for something quite scary, I think.
No, you're absolutely right. Um, but it really interests me because one of the things I said is, if we do have effectively, you can no longer basically build it, sit on it, wait for it to go up in value, you'll need a hell of a lot more marketing to sell developed property developments. And I was just joking to my daughter, and she said, "Well, what everybody in property does is if something isn't selling, they drop the price." I said, "Well, in marketing, in economics, that's the most rational thing you can do. We can't sell it at 450, so we'll drop it to 420." And I said, "In marketing terms, that's the worst thing you can do. Bribing someone to buy something is the most expensive way to sell something." And I said, "Let's play with some games like go to Transport for London and see if you can bundle seven years of of travel card in with the property because that might cost you a lot less and actually be more motivating. Costs for seven years." That might be much more motivating than the equivalent reduction in the purchase price. And so one of the interesting questions is, will we need to bring back real marketing expertise to the property market? There was a lot of it, by the way, in the 19th century. All of those places, okay, if you take Bayswater, bits where they were all branded. I mean, all of those developed West Kensington, okay, South Kensington. By the way, was never called South Kensington, was called Brompton. And then when they built the Victorian Albert Museum and the Science Museum, they realized, "Well, Brompton sounds like a village. It doesn't sound very cool." So they decided to call it South Kensington. I mean, North Kensington is not even contiguous with Kensington.
I was based in South Kensington for 10 years. I didn't even know that. No. No. It was Brompton, and it was kind of like a, you know, an out-of-town shopping center kind of place. And so they rebranded it South Kensington, basically to make it sound a bit more she-y to get people to go to the museums. And all of those places, Pimlico, Bays, Bayswater was going to be called Tyburnia by analogy with um Belgravia because it was near Tyburn. And, you know, there was really, really ingenious marketing went into, um, you know, 19th-century and 18th-century building. You know, you had to brand a whole area to somehow make it. And of course, people do that jokingly when they refer to CLA or, you know, in other words, they rename something. Um, and, um, my hunch is that obviously that happened when you had very large-scale developments. They were branded. Uh, I would love to see architecture and design uh more heavily front-foot in property and location less so. So, that's, that's just one of my, you know, one of my. Because when you make location the central focus for what a property is, location and location is a property program, all the gains go to the landowner, not to the developer. If you actually had, now I noticed in, is it Dubai, there's a development by Pininfarina, in other words, they've taken a famous car designer and they've applied the name to the property development. And so you're actually selling it on the basis of its design, aesthetics, and hopefully functionality. I haven't invested, rather than on where it is.
Yes. That struck me. Okay, that's a step forward. It is, which brings branding and and and incredible kind of marketing association to property. It gives it, gives it. Actually, then the developer makes the money, or the person who licenses the brand, or both. Whereas if you genuinely make it all about location, then basically the landowner makes all the money, and then the developer takes all the risk, which seems very unequal to me.
I mean, it's so ironic talking to you now, so stimulated from a curious point of view. Uh, to ask you so many questions and actually be talking about property development where I lost my passion for it because the stimulation and the enjoyment came from piecing all the people together. Yes. And then actually getting, uh, real traction and doing really big numbers in the space. But the planning, the politics, the, and I've got no issue with overcoming obstacles, but just the time delays and the lack of communication and the lack of, well, this, the sort of lack of stimulation of curiosity. Sorry.
Also think that the buildings are very boring. That's what I was going to say. An architect, I had a full-time architect employed. We were not able to be creative architecturally. We had to conform to the precedent set over there. You put something else in front of the. My argument is, I mean, I live in the roof of a Robert Adam house which is converted into apartments, and at least when I doled out the actually not very high six-figure sum to buy in, I go, "Well, I, you know, at least I'm buying into a work of art." You know, it's a, you know, there are, you know, what is it? There are only, I think I'm right in saying, there are something like 6,000 Grade One buildings in the UK. Now, four, something like 4,000 of them are churches. Of the rest, about half of them are things you can't live in, like the Royal Opera House or Nelson's Column. So there are only about 1,500 Grade One buildings in the UK where you can actually live, and I live in one of them. And the premium I paid for that was basically zero. You know, it's the same per square foot as a boring thing built by a jobbing architect in the same location, you know, 800 yards away. And I kind of go, my, my insight was the cheapest way to buy art is to buy architecture.
And imagine a world where where you could get, oh, it's it's a six-by-nine canvas. Oh, that's nice. Yeah. Who painted on it? Well, that one's Picasso, and that one's by a bloke next door, and they're the same price. And you suddenly realize there's this really weird thing, which is we've completely failed to capture an aesthetic premium in property. Now, talking to Shlomo Bernati, a very brilliant UCLA behavioral economist, he argues that quality of design and aesthetics are an enduring contribution to your happiness. If you live somewhere that's beautiful and well-designed, it's a form of pleasure that it's a gift that keeps on giving, to use a marketing phrase. And you know, if you've got a beautifully designed house where someone has put real thought into the both the functionality and the aesthetics, it will contribute to your happiness in a way that yours, and yet no one pays a premium for. They just go, "Where is it? How big is it? How close is it to the train?" There's a, there's a Gropius building in, now obviously because it's in Notting Hill, is bloody expensive, but there's a Gropius building in Notting Hill which is no more expensive than the building next door. So it even applies to modern architecture. Um, you know, Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are no more expensive than, you know, random buildings nearby. Now, all I'm saying is, don't get me wrong, maybe there's a really good reason for it. It seems to me weird, you know, and also most houses are really boring. And my only theory is it's the same reason as to why most cars are a really boring color, which is because people buy cars on personal contract hire. The garage technically, you can go to the car manufacturer and say, "I want it in pink." The garage, who knows that they will be, um, basically you can return the car in three or four years. Okay. So they'll be left with this effectively difficult to sell pink car in four years' time. So they do everything they can to persuade you to get a black one, a silver one, or whatever it is. Now, in the case of property, interesting, property is much harder to sell. It might be nicer to live in, but it's harder and slower to sell than boring property. Consequently, since people buy property for its investment value, not for its use value. In other words, they're really buying the property in order to make money on it, not to enjoy living in it. As a consequence of that, people want to buy B. Now, this is my only theory, that people actually want a boring house because they want something that's easy to, you know, that's liquid, easy to sell. Go and buy a lighthouse. Okay? It's a much more interesting place to live, but it's a living nightmare to sell. And then estate agents are also not interested because they know it'll take a long time to sell and, you know, it'll require a particular kind of buyer. So we're, we're genuinely optimizing for boring, I think, because they should. If you look at how you know, okay, if you look at how a car has improved, and the fact, okay, all architects should commit suicide ritually on the basis that I, who's a technology-obsessed, you know, kind of futurist, choose to live in an 18th-century house. That should bring shame on the entire architectural profession. In, when was my house built? 177, no, 1781, I think. Right. Okay. He literally got 250 years. In 250 years, no one's come up with a house that I'd rather live in.
He brought cars up. I haven't bought an electric car. Is there an element of like, you know, I, I was, where was I? I was at Westminster. Oh, go and buy an electric car. They're fantastic. Ignore the whole environmental stuff. You will be helping the planet, but that's not the point. They're just much better cars. But they're all, they're all starting to look the same. You know, we met in the, um, we met in the pit lane. Yes. Yes. The British Grand Prix. Mhm. An absolute hub of innovation and sort of refinement to try and get the sort of edge over the competition. And by default, wings and little things are popping up, which is where my kind of conversation is going on, that sort of stimulating creativity. Whereas give five to ten years, there's a thing in design called "maya maya," which is maximally advanced yet acceptable, which I think was coined by Raymond Loewy. And when you come up with something genuinely innovative, it has to have familiar elements to the person buying because if you're too weird, it's too difficult. So that's why, you know, for example, okay, a digital camera goes "click." It doesn't need to go "click." Digital. But if you have a camera, you know, that doesn't click, it weirds people out. So the early stages of electric cars, I think, have to have that kind. In the same way that digital radios used to have dials, you know, it's called skeuomorphism. It's called a skeuomorphism, which is the incorporation of an element from an earlier technology which only is there to add ease of familiarity and ease of adoption rather than for any functional reason. And, um, it's Greek temples had it. So even though they, they hadn't been built of wood for 50 years, they still have these weird, I think it's called, I think metopes, where the stone is carved as though there's a beam, you know, as though there's a kind of chamfer joint or whatever it might be. And it's kind of like it's a carryover from an. And actually, I would argue that most electric cars are a bit boringly conventional. But you, there's a limit to how it came from, I think, a Raymond Loewy thing where he produced a, a fan, an electric fan that was completely silent. Now, logically, that was a brilliant thing to do, but it completely weirded people out and kind of go, "This fan isn't working. It doesn't cool me down." Because you expect a fan to make a noise. And therefore, if you have a fan that's completely silent, effectively, it's, it's, it's a bit similar to that uncanny valley thing, you know, it, it just weirds people out. Now, in time, what we'll see with electric cars, I think, will be really, really interesting. A kind of Cambrian explosion of innovation, one of them being very small forms of electric transportation. The Heathrow Pod, I'm a big advocate of that. I think it's a fantastic form of transport. Uh, not least because people really enjoy riding in it, and also because of something we can't say, which is we love our own private mode of transport.
It's why a lot of people don't take public transport. No, nobody. Somebody said a conservative politician once said that people prefer their cars because you don't have some smelly stranger sitting next to you. He could have also added that, you know, there's something lovely about getting back. If you've been on a plane for 12 hours, and you get to that Heathrow car park, and you climb into your car, you can, you know, there are all kinds of things you can do in private, which, and there's that glorious feeling of decompression when you're no longer in a public space, you know, and, and, and we always joked about this. I, I was saying there must be a German word for it, which is the joy of climbing back into your own automobile after spending time in a public environment. And it, it's like that time when you kind of leave a party and you get into your car. I mean, I once, I got upgraded, um, to first class once on a flight back from, I think it was New York, and it was British Airways first class, you know, fine wines, Belgian chocolates, you know, the finest wines known to humanity, the whole works. And it was magnificent, but the best bit of the whole journey was getting back into your own car. That you, nothing matches that feeling of, "Right, I'm finally in my own car. I'm autonomous. I'm private. You know, nobody can bother me. I'm safe." And so, I mean, you know, one of the interesting things I think will be micromobility. And by the way, we can include scooters in that. We can include, um, uh, you know, cargo bikes, uh, deserve to be included in that. Electric bikes are really important. But also, little, there's a thing called a Microlino, which is modeled on a little Italian bubble car of the 1960s. Actually, Swiss-made. There's a dealership on the Cromwell Road, I think.
Your knowledge is unbelievable. I give my daughter absolutely strict instructions not to let me go past that dealership while I'm drunk. Okay. Because I just wander in and I'm impulse buy one of these crazy little electric. You've got about four on order already. No. No. But I, I, you know, I think what happens is that if you want people to transition from one powertrain to another, give them one thing to cope with at once. If you also give them a really weird car, it's behavioral change is difficult, and people find that frightening. And so there is an element. Now, in fairness, I think electric cars are, you know, some of them. I bought a Lotus Eletre recently, which is, I think, really, really interesting from a design point of view. It's actually too big, but I quite like that. Well, actually, I quite like the fact that when you've got a really, it's awful confession. One of the reasons you have a, people drive these big cars is that it makes driving a bit difficult. I know it sounds completely counterintuitive, but it's so easy to drive a small modern car on on British roads that there's a little bit of me which thinks that actually the sense of accomplishment you felt from getting somewhere.
So there's a challenge. That adding a small degree of difficulty might might make something more enjoyable. I'm not quite sure. But it's a fantastic car in terms of, in terms of its design and the effort put into the, uh, functionality. It, it, and I actually bought the minimalist base model precisely for the aesthetics of, you know, the simplicity of the thing. Um, but I think it will, I think what we'll see is five, ten, fifteen years' time, we'll start to see genuinely a kind of explosion of different forms of transport which is made possible just by the electric motor, which you can miniaturize, which is actually extremely reliable, which has very few moving parts. And so, you know, I mean, if you think about it, golf carts were always electric for a very simple reason. You know, and actually golf carts behind horrible if they had a petrol engine. The petrol engine would be probably two-stroke and nasty and so on.
Well, be a quad bike, wouldn't it? So, we know. And actually, electric motorbikes are going to be something else, right? In terms of performance, it's going to be extraordinary. So, no, I'm, I'm forgiving the car industry for that because you have to take the consumer with you. But, but the property industry, the level of boringness. So, I, I wrote a piece in The Spectator about this, which is, let's say you're a really, really successful lawyer in London and you're earning six figures and you're thinking of buying a house in Fulham. Now, there are all the things you can spend your money on that have been invented since 1910. Okay? You know, jet travel, you know, charter a yacht, you know, think of the things you could do with sort of £900,000, right? The creative, amazing things you could do, you know, you know, extraordinary technological developments. But what you're doing when you're buying that house in Fulham as a really successful corporate lawyer earning six figures is you're saying, "I know what I'm going to do for the next 25 years. The vast majority of my discretionary income is going to be spent owning a place which a postman would have lived in in 1910." Now, all I'm saying is, I'm not saying go and buy a Bugatti Veyron and sleep in a tent. Okay? Well, actually, I'm a bit okay because if you look at, you know, if you look at what you get for six figures in the car market, it's a work of art. It's something magnificent. It's, you know, hundreds of PhDs have put all their intelligence into designing this thing, and it's genuinely magnificent. Now, Louis XIV, if he saw a car or a flat-screen TV or, you know, an internet terminal, would give you half of Gascogne in return for just the telly with a Sky package. And yet we pay sort of £40 a month for that and grumble about it. The one thing Louis XIV wouldn't understand genuinely about today, he would look at these people and go, "Look at the wealth. Look at the riches you have. Why do you live in such a house?" And housing has taken up a greater and greater part of people's discretionary income. It's mopped up most of the gains to the two-income household. Two-income household, great news for the government. You've got twice as many people to tax. Fantastic news for people who own property. We've got twice as many people to pay rent for. The, the two people themselves, let's say husband and wife, but we don't have to be gender-specific, they've lost 35 to 40 hours of discretionary time every week in return for no improvement in their overall living standards. You know, not a great success.
No. And now if you're single in London, and I, you know, I know it sounds weird, you know, saying, you know, we must campaign for the rights of single people, but you're, unless, unless you're earning mega bucks, not being in a relationship or having a bunch of friends, maybe you're just a bit of a loner, you're frozen out of London completely, I'd argue. I mean, it's just impossible.
On that. And on that, what what relates to a lot of stress, um, and and kind of potential mental health kind of connotations. Yep. Absolutely right. I want to just switch your brain to mental health, almost flowing on from this conversation. Property, cars, branding, marketing. Can you name a cool, really cool mental health platform, business, charity? The reason why I ask is.
Interesting question. The reason why I ask that is that it affects all of us. It affects us in a positive way and a negative way. Um, and we're all being told to talk more. I'm going to give a really mischievous answer there.
I just, I tell you what. Okay, that nobody's ever going to say this, but I'm going to be mischievous about it, which is, you know, there are interesting. Okay, there. I mean, there are some really interesting moves, by the way, to explore recreational drugs as cures for certain mental health problems, including psychedelics. And all I can say is we need to explore those because we created a ludicrously false dichotomy between recreational drugs and medicinal drugs. So the definition of a medicinal drug was one that wasn't enjoyable to take, almost, you know, in other words, tasted horrible, you know, and had unpleasant side effects. And as soon as a drug became enjoyable, we immediately said it's a recreational drug. Now, one of the side effects of that was nobody researched the positive upsides of recreational drugs. Now, I'm not into, apart from nicotine. I don't even drink very much. I'm not.
Cannabis is a good example. This. I'm, I'm also wary, by the way. I'm wary about its complete legalization for complex reasons. Not because I think it's bad for 95% of people. It's probably, a bit like alcohol, actually. It's probably neutral or beneficial for the vast majority of people, but catastrophically bad for a certain percentage. And often it's catastrophically bad for people who are in a bad way already. Gambling would I, I'd put in under in the same category. You know, you know, general gambling, most people know how to handle it, they enjoy it to a reasonable extent, but there is a group of people who, for circumstantial or genetic reasons. And, you know, I've always sort of defended nicotine. I wouldn't defend smoking anymore because you can vape. But my only defense of smoking is that the second-order externalities of people smoking, although people complained about passive smoking and the smell, well, compared to alcohol or gambling or, um, some other drugs, the knock-on effects to other people. No, nobody ever says, "I can't go into town on Saturday night because all there are all these smokers there, right?" You know, if you, I made this point, if you're an unborn child and you were asked, "Would you like to be born into the household where the dad says, is a heavy smoker, a heavy gambler, or a heavy drinker?" You choose the smoker. Okay? Now, smoking is slightly different because it's quite bad for a lot of people, but you could argue that some behaviors are worse because they're catastrophically bad for a few people. So, I mean, generally, people didn't die at 20. I've known quite a lot of people who died in their 30s and 40s because of drink. I don't know anybody who's died in their 30s and 40s because of smoking. There's quite a few people who died in their 60s. Fair enough. But there's a difference between a bummer and a tragedy. Um, and the only point I'd make is that I think one of, there was a very interesting statistic which I think 95% of schizophrenics smoked. And one of the theories is it was self-medication. It helped. And one of the things I think we need to be open-minded about people like David Nutt, who've done obviously, you know, much more important work than me. I've merely looked at the behavioral biases behind how we categorize drugs and an investigation of the possible beneficial effects because, let's face it, if people are choosing to take these things, yes, there's a totally trivial explanation for that, which is they like to get out of their heads, but it's highly likely that psychoactive drugs might have beneficial effects if administered in the right way to people in particular circumstances. And we've, and of course, it, if you think about it, okay, let's say you're in a research company or you're trying to get funding for a bit of research and go, "Yeah, yeah, we're going to research ketamine." Okay? It's going to be a lot more difficult to get funding for what looks like a highly kind of, uh, irresponsible study than researching some boring thing that might vaguely affect angina or whatever it may be. But this, you know, I mean, we should be open-minded about this. That's all I'm saying. I'm, I'm, I'm kind of wary about the cannabis thing because my argument is that it almost certainly is really enjoyable and probably pretty harmful for harmless, sorry, for a lot of people. But then what about the 5% of people for whom it's catastrophic? I know, I mean, I only asked about cannabis or brought it up because there are clearly, in my opinion, from the sort of experience I've got of people around me that have explored it from a business point of view, there are really good benefits health-wise, uh, that that are not about smoking a spliff, you know, it's.
CBD obviously is different from THC. I mean, you can separate those two. Exactly. But just, but just felt like it was untapped and it was almost like a no-go area because, like that's my point, and it's like, "Well, why would you not explore that?" Because what if you could actually produce? So I actually had to defend a colleague of mine who kind of almost got into trouble with HR for writing in favor of psychedelic research because it was considered, you know, and I said, "No, no, no, no. You know, this is a business where if if we can't ask slightly unfashionable questions here, you know, we're we're not a proper advertising company anymore." And I basically leapt in and said, you know, "I'm not sure I agree with her, but I absolutely agree with her right to raise the raise the topic." Is that, is that a constant with you? Um, and what I mean by that is I use that analogy of going against the tide. For you to be able to get to the heart of a problem, to get to, um, people's emotions from a marketing point of advertising point of view, you've got to basically turn around and sort of break tradition or stop.
And where would you draw the line? Well, here, here's a naughty one, which, okay, and we, it's too early to say whether it succeeded, but I occasionally annoy my wife by in very select areas defending Donald Trump. Okay. My argument was, if you take the Middle East, my simple argument is, "What the hell?" People go, "What the hell is he doing now? This is crazy." To which I often reply, "Yeah, it's not like all the rational people solved this problem, is it?" You know, we've had hundreds and thousands of highly educated, completely rational people looking at that problem, and no one's got anywhere. Arguably, if you have a problem that seems immune to rational solution, the only sensible approach is to try something that doesn't make sense. Uh, because, you know, you know, I mean, and actually, I would also argue that one of the things that entrepreneurs are really interesting in, well, I mentioned the fact that they have a diff fundamentally different way of valuing information, that information that they have that nobody else has, they see as much more valuable than information that everybody shares. So conventional people are looking for the consensus, and entrepreneurs are, in fact, looking for the counterintuitive or the deviant opinion or the count. And by the way, you know, you don't have to be 100% right to be a successful entrepreneur. If 20% of people do a weird thing, or even 5% of people do something which is the opposite of somebody else, there's still a business in that market. You know, if you can get 100% of 5% of any particular, you're you're doing fine. But the interesting thing I was noticing with entrepreneurs is if you said something that was a bit counterintuitive or a bit, um, mischievous, even if you say that to a bureaucrat, they become annoyed because it messes with their model of the world, and their model of the world is designed for neatness. Entrepreneurs take a completely different approach, which is the more counterintuitive or ridiculous the theory, the more likely they are to entertain it. Because if it is true, which it may well not be, but if it is true, it's disproportionately valuable precisely because of its non-obviousness. I think that makes sense.
I love that. And we, a key part of our sort of connection, if you like, is the entrepreneur community. You know, I came down to breakfast at the Ideas Fest uh event, and you were right in front of me, and that optimism, that, um, sort of innovative, I used that word disruptive earlier, that sort of lives in that entrepreneurial ecosystem is something that I found really interesting and I thrive in. But I also wanted to bring up something.
You can't be a pessimistic opportunist, can you? No. You see what I mean? I mean, it goes back to what you were saying. Look, you're looking for something that there is no path, but back to what you were saying earlier, there's no process. Um, and I, I thrive in that environment, like, "How am I going to, how could I make that happen?" Looking around you, but have no idea how I'm going to get.
They're very good company, aren't they? They are good company. I wanted to, um, we touched on this just before we started filming. Funny observation, by the way, combining mental health. I hope I can say this, but Dan Ariely, the behavioral scientist, says that when he deals with bureaucrats, in other words, people whose only interest is not the quality of the outcome or the value of the activity, but the adherence to process or adherence to policy. Dan said something very interesting. He said, "When I deal with those people, I kind of know what it's like to be autistic in the sense that I know what it's like to live in a world where you have a system of thought that is completely at odds with the people around you." Because he said, "It's so alien to me," which is that you derive pleasure from stopping something happening on spurious kind of legalistic or technical grounds. To him, it's so counter to his nature that he says, "You know, this is literally an alien intelligence."
It's so interesting you want the autistic side of things because I was going to bring up ADHD. And we touched on it just before we started filming. Unconscious of time, this is probably the last bit we can we can open up.
Go a little bit longer. But yes, but this is really. If we're going to talk about ADHD, it would be ridiculous to keep into a tight schedule, wouldn't it? Exactly. Wouldn't be ADHD at all. And I, and I've gone through my own personal journey with this where at Fest last year, uh, I started to show a real interest in the fact that there were so many people around me talking about it and saying, "It's because of their ADHD," or, "You know, this is why the ADHD allows them to have this hyperfocus, relentless energy."
It's very weird. I think a lot of people with ADHD, because they also have this hyperfocus thing, they, it's never occurred to them they have ADHD because they're capable of supreme acts of concentration, and therefore they reject the diagnosis. And I'm three months into being diagnosed.
So, I wanted to flip that. I've never been diagnosed. I've never. Having said that, I've never been tested. Um, one daughter of mine has been. Um, I don't see it as a problem, actually. I see it as, well, okay, let's talk about Helen Ed. Oh, crikey, I need to remember her name. I think it's Helen Taylor at UCL. She's an academic who argues that neurodiversity is a natural evolutionary um process in the sense that groups which were not, which contained no neurodiverse people, would be at a disadvantage in the evolutionary environment. Because if everybody sees things the same way, effectively your collective consciousness and your collective information gathering and information processing would probably get stuck in a local maximum. In other words, you need other people to see the world differently sometimes to shake everybody out of their conformity. And her argument is that we've evolved to be neurodiverse, and it's a natural part of, uh, you know, what makes us human. And therefore, diagnosing a minority mental state as necessarily something that needs to be medicalized.
No, this is realistic. You could say, "Well, maybe it's the environment that's wrong." Totally. You know, that interesting thing, okay, are you using the ruler to measure the table, or are you using the table to measure the ruler? Uh, I had a discussion once with Daniel Kahneman, and it always amuses me to take a Nobel Prize winner and talk about something really trivial about a speed camera on the M11 near Chigwell. And my argument is, if you have a speed camera that catches an unusual number of people, there are two possible interpretations. Either it's in the right place because it's an area where loads of people speed, or it's actually in the wrong place because what you've done actually near Chigwell on the M11 is you have a motorway where people are tooling down the M11 at 80 mph. They suddenly see a sign that says 50, and a couple of hundred yards further on, there's this bloody speed camera which makes more money than all the other speed cameras in Essex. Now, I would argue that's either because the drivers are in the wrong, or the signage is in the wrong place. That, in fairness, if you're going at 80 on a motorway, all your instincts say, "Do not break unexpectedly. Do not do anything dramatic on a motorway because it's dangerous." And then you have a speed limit that demands that you decelerate very, very fast. And so your instincts come into conflict with the the law, and your instincts win. And therefore, what the extraordinarily high rate of activation of that speed camera means is that you need to make, you need to basically move the speed camera a bit down the road, or the, or the 50 mph limit, that there's something wrong with the sign, not with the driver. The signage is at fault, not the driver. Now, equally, in the case of ADHD, you might well argue that it's a perfectly normal, healthy mental state which is only made difficult because of the environment in which we insist people operate.
ADHD. I mean, our environment is totally unnatural compared to what we've evolved for. And so you might argue that all that is is effectively, um, in a sense, demonizing a natural human mental diversity which is supposed to exist, um, simply because someone doesn't conform to a a majority norm.
On that. And we're generally not in favor of that in other fields like ethnicity or sexuality. So, you know, ask you, ask the same question. It's got the word "disorder" in it.
Yeah, I know. And so you said. It's a superpower, perhaps. And then, and then you get told off for that. So this is the journey I've been on. Right. So I have something that, uh, I've now been diagnosed with that's got the word "disorder" in. I've never felt. I've felt. I haven't started taking medication.
You made a load of money as a property developer. You seem perfectly fine. I don't feel like it's the superpower of it. I get, I totally get the reference to that. I, I am relentless when I'm focused on something. You know, I have, uh, a disproportionate amount of energy compared to what other people might. I would argue that the ability to concentrate for long periods of time on something that's boring and pointless, which is commonly found in bureaucrats, is a bigger disorder than the ability to get distracted from something that's a waste of time. Be honest about it. Okay? You know, I mean, you know, you know, strict adherence to a kind of procedural neatness creates much more economic inefficiency than people with ADHD do, surely.
No, I totally get. The person from the council who can't make an exception even though the context makes it absolutely obvious that the law doesn't shouldn't really apply. That's a far weirder and more annoying mind state, I would have thought. But with your brain knowledge and all this incredible creativeness, creativeness that you've got, what would you call ADHD? Um, well, I mean, it's patently a spectrum disorder, isn't it? I mean, that's probably fair to say. Um, and undoubtedly it would be problematic at extremes, as are other spectrum disorders. I mean, that, again, bear in mind I'm, you know, I'm, I'm not a psychiatrist in any way. This is where it becomes really interesting because there's a book written by a guy called Joseph Fishkin, who's a law professor at UCLA, called Bottlenecks. And I'm planning to interview him as part of the Bottlenecks podcast series, fairly obviously, as he's written a book.
called Bottlenecks. And he argues that we've made this weird mistake which seems perfectly intelligent. It's micrational but macro stupid. And what it is is we we're obsessed with equality of opportunity.
Now the first requirement if you like of equality of opportunity is you apply the same criteria to everybody. Now the problem with that is it's notionally fair at the level of the individual but it's collectively catastrophic because you overweight for certain qualities like the ability to write essays or solve mathematical equations and you underweight for other really valuable human attributes. So in other words, the same you probably change the order of people in the queue a bit and make it a little bit fairer for people from slightly worse backgrounds. But the problem is someone who's brilliant otherwise but happens not to be brilliant at the criteria you've determined should dominate the sorting process is at a completely unfair disadvantage.
Now I I'll do an analogy here. Okay? If someone's really good at chess, they're probably in some respect quite clever. Yeah, I'd accept that. Can you say the opposite that someone who's bad at chess is stupid? No. Now, similarly, if you take academia as a weird selection process like 21 and above, yes, I think you can confidently say that someone who gets a 21 assuming they haven't done grade inflation hasn't become completely insane. I mean, I was at Oxford the other visiting Oxford. go there for god sake but I was visiting Oxford the other day and you know about 40% of people get a first now now you know I was at Cambridge obviously higher standards but when I was at Cambridge it was you know there were there were subjects where like music where nobody had got a first for 25 years so there is great inflation but if you make that the criterion now yes it's probably fair that someone who can do well under those circumstances is both reasonably committed and pretty bright and capable and will make a desirable employee Yeah, fair. I think that you know just as someone who's good at chess patently has some sort of special intelligence. But can you make the opposite assertion which is someone who doesn't like writing essays about thusidities is a bad employee? No.
You know, and the advertising industry used to be very interesting in this front because you occasionally there were parts of the world where working in advertising was unbelievably unfashionable. So you couldn't really recruit you know you know there you know there are parts of the world Switzerland famously you expected to go into banking or a large multinational. So if you went into advertising was basically like saying you know my son's a crack addict or something and and so you had to you had to recruit in a really imaginative random way and some of the people you recruited from completely non-standard sources turned out to be brilliant. I mean there there are a whole bunch of advertising millionaires who came into the industry with no degree entirely by chance. And so what we've done is we've we've we've privileged fairness of process over quality of outcome. And I would argue that a good organization needs a mix of talents that are complimentary. That's how human societies evolved. you know the you know the person in the tribe with ADHD was probably a pain in the ass in some respects but disproportionately valuable in others. Same probably being for the person who is you know a spuric. Um plenty of inventors if you think about it are not neurotypical. Plenty of entrepreneurs are not at one stage let me get this right the majority I think it might have been all but three of the people on the board of Tesco were dyslexic. So, you know, at some level we've evolved as a social species and there's a kind of complimentarity to that that and what we're doing instead is we're saying no, no, in order for for successful people to feel virtuous and that they've entirely deserved their success, we must deploy this very narrow criterion for what it is to be legitimately successful, which is you go through that academic channel and it's it's unbelievably it's a bottleneck. exactly why Fishkin called his book bottlenecks. It's created this ludicrous bottleneck where there aren't even enough jobs for those people to begin with. So it it it's a shitow, you know.
Now, as I said, people who aren't good at chess are not stupid. People who are good at chess pro, you know, I'm going to accept the fact that some grandmaster, although to be absolutely honest, I wouldn't want to spend an evening in the pub with them. They do have some really valuable mental capacity for pattern recognition, memory, whatever it may be, I don't know. But they're special. But no, you know, and I'm saying that making academic attainment a criterion, the sole criterion in the name of fairness is just as stupid as making chess the sole criterion.
>> No, I get that.
>> Now, interestingly, in city trading, there were cases, I think, where they looked for traders among back gammon players because it was a compliment. It was kind of predictive ability, the ability to think of different odds and different outcomes. Batgam is actually a really interesting game. Um, and the ability to kind of think of diff effectively to think of five possible futures at the same time was just really valuable in that particular thing.
>> That's breeding strategy, isn't it? That's creativity.
>> A guy called Dave Horry, an art director, not a copywriter, got a job in an ad agency because he turned up for an interview at 9:00 in the morning and he'd already finished the Times crossword. And actually, they looked at his work. I don't know what his work was like, but the fact that he'd finished the Times crossword before 9:00 a.m. was basically, okay, good enough. Give you a try. Now, actually, you know, people who are really good at word games, you know, sensible ad agency, we probably should recruit a countdown champion every now and then or something like that. And what we've done instead is no no it's got to be fair because if if we start you know looking for different attributes um it will be unfair because one person could succeed on one basis and another person can succeed on another basis but but but we we haven't got a we haven't got a frame of comparison. So how can it be fair if we don't have a comparative frame of reference and it's it's actually it looks it looks intelligent through a very narrow pinhole once you take the bird's eye view of the whole thing. It's stupid. It's really, really stupid.
>> We are going to run out of time and you are unbelievable to listen to. You are incredible to talk with. Thanks.
>> Your brain
>> I'm undiagnosed, by the way. I've never I'm not diagnosing you and I'm I'm complimenting you as a as a human being. Like, but also that learned knowledge that you've got, it's clear like you are someone if ever I need to go to a pub quiz with just like you're you must know the most random
>> football. the football questions would come up and I'd be absolutely useless. This is another point about a pub quiz team, right? What do you optimize for? Breadth.
>> Yeah,
>> actually the pub quiz team is a very very good analogy. I could not be on any although I did once recognized Wayne Gretzky from a photograph which is a bit weird. Um uh but actually probably okay on really obscure sports, but football is totally boring. You know this scandal about the West Midlands police refusing to police? I don't think they're going far enough. I' I'd refuse to allow anybody to attend any football match. I think they should be because all it means any Okay, how many other people think one of the most annoying things about being middle class in 2025 is you got to pretend to be interested in football. I'm just not.
>> Okay. You know, it means there are a load of annoying people on the train every time there's a bloody match.
>> Oh my god, it's so so obvious.
>> Football is far worse than smoking in terms of its, you know, passive football. Nobody ever talks about that, but it just brings massive annoyance to everybody else. This is where the other bloke should be turn say well I'll fill in the football knowledge and I can't I can't I don't support a team there. Yeah. I I think we should extend that West Midland's police policy to all football games that no fans should be allowed to attend because it's just annoying.
>> Oh, I just realized my face is hurting from smiling and just being and I'm marinating in your voice. I don't want this to end uh but it has to. But just I'm going to just thank you for for the speed of your brain and how busy you are with everything you do. you made time to come and talk with me and educate me.
>> In truth, one of the great problems we've got is we've privileged rational argumentation as a mode of decision-making over anything else. Now, that brings me back my Trump point. It's not like all the rational people solved the problem. I'm not defending him in general. I think he's a deeply uh you know, you disturbed and in many ways, you know, unattractive human being in all manner of ways. But his his ability sometimes just to go in and do you remember his surgical use of the word a really interesting approach which Americans are not good at generally in terms of foreign policy is attacking both sides. You know they've been fighting each other for so long they don't know what they're doing. And by the way, that mirrors, we were talking to a primatologist at Nudgeto and there's an alpha male move uh in primatology, which is two junior chimps are fighting. Okay. And the big alpha male just goes in and bashes both of them. No, it's you like it doesn't seem to be a sensible move by the by the a sort of rational scheme of things, but for whatever reason, it's an instinctive maneuver which probably sometimes works.
>> I can't I've got to stop. My face is hurting and I can hear these guys all giggling and laughing behind camera. You are so awesome to speak with.
>> It's been a joy. Would likewise. Absolutely. I think we're I think we've got a kind of Vulcan mind meld going on here. you. You are. Yeah, you're electric. Thank you so much.
>> Pleasure. What a joy. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.