22 Laws of Food & Drink Marketing You've Probably Never Heard Before - Rory Sutherland

[Music] [Applause] [Music] So it's mad, but but so, but back to your um, pessimism thing. So I've just wrote about this in my newsletter actually, cuz I've read, when I was in Costa Rica, I read um, oh my God, have you read Matt Ridley's *The Rational Optimist*?

Yes, such a good book, a very, very interesting, very good book. And in food and drinks specifically, or brands, there's like a lot of things to be pessimistic about, because you've got cost of living crisis, cost of living crisis rates, crisis rates, crisis supermarkets not taking cost price increases.

Yep, because they've got the the power.

Yes, and there was this this kind of undercurrent of pessimism going around my kind of small industry, and when I read that book, I, it makes you kind of, I think what he says, which is really interesting: when you zoom in, all you see is p—well, what I kind of took from it is: zoom in, all you see is pessimism, but when you zoom out, all you see is optimism, because over 50, 60, 70 years, it's like, well, now there's podcasts.

Well, it's funny you mention this, because there's a generalization, but nonetheless true, which is that bad news is fast and good news is slow. Yes, and if you look at the food and drink, hotel, hospitality and entertainment sector and compare it with my childhood, the comparison is almost laughable.

Yeah. I mean, the hospitality sector in the UK, outside London and a few big cities, was pretty dismal. People ate out incredibly infrequently, and it wasn't uncommon for fairly prosperous people of our acquaintance in the 1970s—they'd probably go out for a meal, it's kind of wedding anniversary stuff, you know, it was literally special occasion stuff. And um, uh, you know, I, I mean, not this sounds bizarre, but not really for cost-saving reasons—when you traveled on the train, you took sandwiches with you, because you couldn't depend on getting anything edible on your trip.

Um, and so, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, if you if you zoom out, but there's there's an equal thing, which is if you zoom in; if you ask people, "How happy are you with your life in Sevenoaks, Oxted, Tunbridge Wells," whatever, okay, generally people are pretty happy, and then you ask them, "How are you happy—are you happy with the state of the world?" They become completely miserable. Now, most of our lives are experienced locally, so if we're happy locally—which is how how we really judged our happiness until, you know, the mass media age—um, you should be reasonably happy. You know, if you're happy with your life where you live and with the people around you, uh, you know, what's actually happening on the other side of the world shouldn't really disrupt, bother you all that much.

The yeah, it's it's uh, yeah, the kind of the local, global thing is is fascinating. M, it's I think there's a Naval Ravikant quote, which is uh, he talks about kind of right at your court, every in your you, in immediate family, everyone's a socialist, and as you—I don't know if you know that quote.

Yes. No, it's actually a guy, it's two brothers called Grahe. I've heard it, which is that it's um, at the state, at the national level, I'm a I'm a Libertarian.

Yes.

At the state level, I'm a Republican. At the town level, I'm a I'm a socialist. I think, no, I'm a Democrat. In my family, I'm a socialist, and with my dog, I'm a communist.

Yes. Yeah, that's the quote, which is just, yeah, I think it kind of plays on that. Um, and by the way, I mean, that's you, there's a fundamental inherent problem in humanity, which is to use Jonathan Haidt's phrase: where 90% chimp, 10% bee. In other words, we're not a social species like bees or termites or ants. Okay, we don't subordinate our interests entirely to the whole; we're selfish, rivalrous, you know, we uh, genetically we, you know, we compete, but at the same time we're sort of, what is it, pro-social, if not u-social, and as a consequence we have these elements of cooperation and we have these elements of selfishness which will always be in conflict. Um, but you know, in a sense, you know, as humans, we're not really one thing or the other; we're not an entire, you know, I suppose dogs probably have the same problem to some extent, um, but we're not, we're not entirely um uh, collective, and we're not entirely individualistic.

Well, I don't understand the B bit of that.

Oh, bees are social insects, so effectively it's only the queen who reproduces, and uh, the entire what you might call uh, it's optimized around the survival, reproduction and growth of the hive as it were, or the nest, not around the individual bee. Um, I can't remember why it is, it's because of something called, I think, haploid genetics, where all bees are very close relatives of other bees, so the genetic prospects of your fellow bees are very closely tied to your own, so it it it makes possible an extent to which, in evolutionary terms, you can subordinate your individual interest to the interest of the collective. So there's a famous story about E.O. Wilson, who's a who was the world's sort of leading expert on ants, and he was also a very brilliant evolutionary biologist—he died fairly recently—and the story goes that he sat down at dinner with a Marxist who went on a long rambling discussion of what what Marxism was about, and E.O. Wilson replied with a single sentence: "Beautiful theory, wrong species," which is quite interesting, you know, that we are, you know, I mean, you know, there there will always be this tension about what is collective, what is best done collectively in the collective interest, and where does that diverge from the individual interest, and in a sense it's probably that very um, divide that makes us successful as a species, and that we have elements of both; we can cooperate to an extraordinary extent. If you look at efforts like, you know, World War II, you know, where we more or less, you know, people were—whether this is still true, but people were content, in the case of my my wife's grandparents, uh, you know, to be posted in the Army and not see their wives and families for four years.

Have you seen the uh, world, the the docu, the new documentary on Netflix about the World War II, not the one that's in color? It's come out, it came out in just before Christmas. It's I watched, I I don't, I I struggle to watch TV. I'm more like ADHD, YouTube kind of down that rabbit hole, but once you get YouTube Premium, actually about 50% of your viewing becomes YouTube. Oh, and also, but also the, so the my, I lost my credit card, I got a new credit card, and um, I I had, I just was lazy about uploading it, and um, I realized how much pain it caused me when all the adverts started coming back up.

I oh my God, I spoke to YouTube, this is very common that people let the, because YouTube Premium in a way is the least logical thing to subscribe to, because all content is available for free, it just has advertising. That's not true of Netflix, not true of Amazon, etc. Maybe true, maybe everything on Amazon's available at a price, but it's quite a high price for a series. And so YouTube is the one that people often most readily cancel, and then what happens is they cancel, and then very rapidly they suddenly remember how annoying it was, and then they rejoin. So it's quite common, the quote is: "You only real—you only realize the benefit of meditation when you stop." It's the same thing. So you only realize beauty, beauty, probably through therapy as well.

Yeah, 100%. I want to go back to the humanity uh, collective versus individual, and the um, the war thing. What I was saying about this this documentary, um, as I said, I struggled to watch TV, it was on this horizontal on the sofa yesterday for like 6 hours.

You—no, no, no, on this on this documentary. Yeah, it's all about, but all it shows the collectivism, and you're watching this this color footage of D-Day, and you're just thinking, what, like, how is that? It just, it shed shivers up me, do what I mean.

Yes, but then as you say, when there's the collectivism and the humanity part of it, when it pulls together, is uh, it's it's I think it touches upon what you're saying earlier about that kind of where we sit in the individual versus collective. No, and and there are people who question whether we've become so individualistic and so sort of solipsistic as a culture, uh, so obsessed with our own individual take on the world that sort of heroic collective efforts like fighting World War II—now you might argue there are good aspects of that, like maybe not fighting World War I—by the way, we can we can debate that endlessly. I mean, I'm, you know, no one really knows whether it was a mistake or not, um, but you know, those heroic collective endeavors, are they still possible in a world which, in a sense, doesn't really have consensus anymore on many things, you know, I mean, or or in in a media environment where, in a sense, there is quite a sensible middle-of-the-road consensus on many questions, and yet strangely all the attention goes to the people who are dissenting.

Hey guys, thank you so much for watching this video. Honestly means the absolute world to me. Um, I'd be so grateful for a small favor, please. Is so hard, gr—YouTube channel is so bloody hard. Um, if you please enjoy these videos, just click the Subscribe button. Um, more subscribers equals bigger guests, bigger guests equals better conversations, and hopefully you can learn more as you build your food, drink brand. Thank you so so much. So you know, you have this strange thing, I tr—tried it as an experiment, which is: try going on Twitter and expressing a middle-of-the-road opinion, in other, a qualified opinion with which most people could sensibly agree, and I tried sentences like: "I'm really fond of Piers Morgan in small doses." You you can try the same of say Jordan Peterson, who I quite like in reasonable doses, but I wouldn't want to become that invested in a point of view. Okay, and the strange thing is: nobody responds to that opinion on Twitter, middle-of-the-road opinion; it doesn't garner any response, it doesn't get retweeted, it doesn't get replied to, but also stranger still, you feel really weird writing it, you know, the very as you type and press send, you feel slightly ridiculous. That Twitter opinions are supposed to be kind of the equivalent of a kind of [ __ ] slap, or you know, or a or a highly contrarian position, and when you write something seemingly banal, uh, not only does it get no attention and no traction, and so you do have a very strange media world in which opinions which are to some extent ridiculous effectively out-compete, in an evolutionary sense, opinions which are moderate and perfectly sensible.

Yeah, I mean, you know, our opinion, you know, for I, me, we mentioned this I think on the last podcast, which is your, you know, a perfectly sane opinion on Starbucks is: I don't think it's the word, last word on coffee, but equally I'm quite glad there's a lot of them around because I can always I can always get a pretty good coffee anywhere I want to go. Yeah, but that opinion doesn't gain traction in a social media environment where people just go: "I hate it," or "I love it," and so we live in this sort of slightly weird Marmite world. Yeah, you can't, nothing, even as brands now, in term playing this like through brand, you've got to stand for something, like it's it's kind of almost like it spawns out of that social media, it's like: who can be the most—there was a piece about this, I don't know if you saw um, if you, the brands Surreal and uh, uh, Day's One's alcohol-free beer and one's uh, like protein cereal.

That's right. They they've done this, they I think their marketing is is absolutely genius, I think they've done um a great job, and it's all very tongue and cheek, so I think the guy came from Innocent um, as in a marketing director, but it's all like they'll they'll do like kind of what I'm wearing now, they but like, "Does every entrepreneur in London have to wear this?" I'll do a photo shoot, dress like this. It's a piss-take; it's I think it's hilarious, but then uh, and it is, it's divisive, but but I think the best marketing and the best anything is divisive. I think if you otherwise you become like a vapid vanilla, just me. And anyway, so some some reporter got a hold of it for the Grocer and wrote this piece, and he'd done some like research, I just thought it was a [ __ ] stupid article, but he basically saying all the that one of their things was um, they'd done this billboard saying: "Look, Dad, you I'd asked for a tenner, look at me now." They just got into, says me something like that, very like, lovely.

Yeah. Lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah, lovely. Anyway, some guy's gone into it and looked up and he like, yeah, your dad's a gazillionaire, something like that. But and and it's and and straight away everyone's piled in.

Yes, piled in with, and as you say, it's e—it's either, so it's it's extremes, it's Marmite, it's either um, you know, uh, challenger brands and FMCG, is it's built for um, it's built for like rich kids who can actually afford to take these risks and set up these businesses, this side, the other side is: "Oh, it's not built for working-class people," and I kind of I agree, it's kind of in the middle. It's like, yeah, these kids um, their dad may be super rich, but they've still worked their bollocks off, they've still they've still created something, they still created something, and they're still trying to do something. So, but as you say, please God, we might have more people, everything, everyone wants everything in in every kind of every—this is just talking about spe—this specific niche, but everything has to be binary these days, nothing can be as you say, if you take a walk down the middle and and say, "Piers Morgan in small doses," you feel like a weirdo. I think what's what comes out of that is that um, a fundamental, I mean, you may know, you will have seen him on the podcast circuit, Rob Henderson.

Rob Henderson. I was listening to him last night on Chris Williams, a brilliant guy, the coiner of the phrase "luxury beliefs," and there's an additional take I'll have on that which is is that people—could you define—yes, I want to explain this. So Rob's thesis, he grew up in foster homes in Los Angeles, he just published a book uh, which I really recommend, it's actually a a bestseller in the US already uh, called *Troubled* about his childhood and um, he effectively had a, you know, he I think has only a couple of memories of his mother, don't think he ever knew his biological father, ended up being fostered and fostered in turn in a slightly dysfunctional home, and I think, you know, Rob would probably agree when I said that he got his [ __ ] together by joining the USAF to some extent, and then ended up uh, going to Yale and then on, US Air Force, US US Air Force. Yeah, and um, uh, one of the interesting points of the book is that the stability of your home background has a bigger determinant on your future success—this is not by the way, I want to be absolutely clear about this, this isn't destiny, okay, it's simply statistics—but if you look statistics, then generally people's life outcomes are more predicated on the kind of stability of their family background than on family wealth or an education, and yet what Rob noticed is that when he got to Yale, it was fashionable to say, you know, "I think marriage is just a social construct," you know, and uh, you know, "I think people should be free to, you know, live in, you know, open partnerships with the, you know, polyamory and so on," you know, you know that now those people themselves didn't actually adopt those behaviors, but it was fashionable to advocate for them.

Yeah. And he argued that this was and and he coined the phrase effectively uh, you know, fashionable beliefs, in that there were beliefs that people held not because they really believed in them or that there was empirical evidence that these beliefs were uh, indeed true or useful, but simply because it raised your status holding that belief. Wow, there are certain beliefs, it's very very interesting if you talk for example on the question of cannabis legalization, okay, now by definition if you've got into Yale, okay, you're probably not a stoner and you don't have a major problem with drugs, because if you did have a major problem with drugs, you probably wouldn't have got there, but it's very fashionable, people who've got there who don't have a problem to go, yeah, "All be decriminalized and blah blah blah," simply because that's a belief which has become almost arbitrarily fashionable. Um, and so you cleave to the beliefs that high-status people uh, tend to have regardless of anything else, simply because they make you look good and feel good.

Yeah. Now, what's interesting to me is that to some extent the political left might have taken a wrong turn here, because if you if your principal motivation is the redistribution of wealth and resources, okay, there are ways psychologically where you can get rich people to give their money to poor people and still feel good about it. Okay, there are all sorts of psychological tricks. I mean, that's philanthropy after all, you know, that's the Gates Foundation at an extreme level, but it's also paying tax, paying duties. You know, airlines have worked out ways in which rich people pay considerably more to fly to the same destination than poor people. There are lots of ways in which you can separate the wealthy from their money without making them feel bad, but there's no way you can remove someone's or reduce someone's status and still leave and leave them feeling better. That that mechanism just doesn't exist in my opinion. So by turning politics into a status war between tribes, where each group seeks in many ways to essentially promote policies and beliefs which make their own group look and feel good and uh, and which perhaps demonstrate their commitment to a group that holds those beliefs and thereby diminishing the status of people who disagree with you, you'll never change anybody's mind. Now, if you look at advertising, you can look at all the world's advertising, you will not see a single, for example, invers from Ford going: "If you drive a GM car, you're a [ __ ]." Okay, now I'm sure it's been tried, in fact I know it was tried, but it never I think it never ran, in the very late days of um, Bill Bernbach I think, where they kind of showed Keys drinking other brands of beer, and that that was an ad which Bernbach himself killed because he said: "What we're trying to do is to win over our competitors' drinkers, and you're portraying them as as apes." Yeah, okay, you can't change people's minds by diminishing their status. Okay, I mean, the least persuasive message you can possibly say, you can possibly construct is effectively: "I'm right and you're wrong, you dumb piece of [ __ ]." Okay, it's not persuasive. In many ways, if you want to persuade people, you do the opposite, you practice flattery, or you do things that elevate their status or make them feel good about doing something, and as I said, you can make people feel good about surrendering money and resources and time. Okay, all sorts of voluntary activity goes on in life; we've got evolutionary mechanisms for that. What we haven't got, as far as I can see, is any evolutionary mechanism by which I can actually reduce my status and feel good about it.

Have you read of heard of um, Will Storr's *The Status Game*?

Yeah, I've read it; it's fantastic. I I've literally, the science of storytelling, um, the status go has has um, and his point is absolutely fair, which is that your P—I mean, this is where of course, you know, great restaurants aren't always about food.

100%. Okay, it's about, in particular in places like New York, I mean, I find it a bit irritating in New York, you say, "Where are you going this evening?" You name the restaurant, they go, "Oh, that was so last year," and you go, "Well, is the food any good?" Because I'm not really interested in whether it's last year or this year, but you have this kind of weird kind of, I guess it's a positive feedback effect where places just become hyper-fashionable for a time and then basically hit a peak and fall off. I think London and the UK is less guilty of that, generally, we a good restaurant can remain a good restaurant for decades much more easily here. I think social media is is is what pulls gasoline on the status, s—beginnings of the status fire, cuz it's like, I think what Will actually, when I said um um, I think I said…

Fashionable beliefs—he actually calls them luxury belief, luxury belief, fashion belief, luxury belief—but I, I think pulling this again into kind of food and drink, the ultimate um, as you, as you said, you can't say you, you buy a Ford because you're a [ __ ] [ __ ].

Yeah, but where I think this has almost gone to the next level is, you know, those um vegan meat brands. Yes, who have their way of almost saying it is, we're going to like look, we're not going to be like tofu or um, uh, like tofu, what's the other one? Tempe, which is like a kind of… I know exactly. You know exactly what it is. They're going to say we are, we are, in terms of this binary piece we were talking about earlier, like we are um, we are bacon. We are… and it's almost say you had, you had of course the brand which I think is now owned by Unilever called the Vegetarian Butcher. You had a brilliant branding effort in Beyond Meat, yeah, which was effectively saying this isn't a compromise, this isn't actually a substitute for meat, it's actually meatier than meat itself.

Yeah, and that's a very clever branding, in a sense. You know, um, Tesla very cleverly did it with electric cars because it had always been assumed that an electric car was a kind of compromise, you know, that it was slower, it had obviously had lower range, that's kind of inevitable at least at this stage, but you know, it had, you know, uh, that you bought an electric car entirely as an act of self-sacrifice to benefit the planet. And Tesla comes along with a car which is basically a saloon car which has the performance of a supercar.

Yeah, okay. I mean, literally, it, it squares the circle if you like, it, it doesn't, it actually says this isn't a contradiction at all, there's no, there's actually no compromise required when you have an electric car, you can have an electric car which is a better car. But that question of, of turning politics into a status game where you seek to demean, for example, I mean, calling people racist things which are not remotely evidence of racism on the part of the person using the language, for instance, um, uh, particularly some of that status game, I think is evidenced by people taking up arms on behalf of minority groups rather than actually letting the minority groups speak for themselves. I find something creepy about that. Well, that's, I want to hear from trans people, I don't want to hear from a bunch of political activists affecting to speak on behalf of the trans community. I want their voices on the TV talking about their own personal experience. Okay. And so when you have those people who essentially take up a kind of white savior approach, that's a status game, that's a luxury belief going on there now. It happens on the other side as well. I'm not suggesting this isn't in any way one-sided. What I'm saying is that there is no real form of persuasion that's effective that is preceded by the humiliation of the person you're trying to persuade.

Wa, say that again. So, so there's, there, I don't know of any effective form of persuasion other than the worst kind of Stalinist show trial, okay, where you effectively torture someone into confessing, but I don't know of an effective enduring form of persuasion which starts off by humiliating the person you're seeking to persuade. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, so what, what, what you can learn from the advertising industry, I'm often find myself criticizing these things not because I necessarily disagree with the intention behind them, but because I think they're just adopting very poor tactics. If you wish to succeed now, okay, there are behaviors you can stigmatize, okay, you can stigmatize drink driving and that works, but actually effectively stigmatizing what you might call the foundation myths or the core identity of the person themselves, okay, uh, that's not going to, that's not going to succeed. If, if something is deeply entwined with someone's identity, okay, then effectively you will impress your own peer group, your own ingroup if you successfully humiliate the opposition. Off is that right? Yeah, I'm do that in a second. Um, and what someone call this is the footification of politics. You know, if you look at football fans, they love yelling, you know, really, you know, potent abuse at the opposing fans, okay, that doesn't, you never get anybody who's, you know, what's the great mball phrase? No one likes us, we don't care. Okay, that, that behavior makes you feel great if you're a Chelsea fan abusing, you know, the fans of poorer Northern sides by waving money in the air, okay, it's, I'm sure it's great fun, okay, it may make you feel great and make you look good in terms of your standing within your own particular crowd, but there's not a single recorded instance of someone going, you know, you're right, I'm going to abandon my support for Middlesbrough or Newcastle and I'm going to become a Chelsea fan because of that activity. It doesn't work that way. Now, what we got to remember is that because football loyalties are entirely kind of baked in, it isn't really an attempt to persuade, it's an attempt to humiliate, okay, and it's entirely tribal, but it's not a healthy thing, it doesn't, it's not really a vehicle for voluntary social change through collective consensus.

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Yeah, it's um, are you right? I'll go do that. Yeah, yeah, up it's um, I think the, the point about the, the kind of the extremism point we were talking about earlier about people jumping on the bandwagon, but I think, I think the these vegan meat brands, why they've done very well is, or some have done well is they kind of, they did two things, they played on the luxury beliefs thing in that obviously veganism being better for the planet etc, etc, was like on the rise, one, but then they also, you probably know this well, you will know this better than me, but there was, I think because they stole, not even the semiotics, they stole like this literally looks like a burger. What I mean, that those two things worked really well. I think that's why we had such a big um, like explosion of vegan meat. It was a time about two years ago when it was like everywhere, everywhere, and every everyone was like stuff in their face with it. You know what I mean? Yes. I mean, I think that's, that's one of the most interesting things in the world, by which I mean, can you tell the difference? I mean, that's, that's the billion dollar question, which is, can you tell the difference between something that's a flash in the pan and something which is an enduring uh form of social change? Now, if you look at post-covid effects, I would say that, you know, uh, it's well, actually I think it's much more interesting if you disaggregate the data because we saw this huge surge, restaurant going, sociability, pub going, holiday making, all those other things, yeah, but I also think there's, there's a proportion of the population who remain agrob after lockdown, arobic fear of going out, you know, generally they're much more conscious, you know, aversion to crowds, aversion to, uh, you know, social events. I think there's a, there's a subset of the population which has got stuck in the old behavior. Equally, I think there are other behaviors that emerged from covid like flexible work, are the idea that well, I've got three Zoom calls and I've got 100 emails to do and I've got to write a presentation, why would I need to go into an office to do that? That behavior, I think that, that new, effectively we have a new comparative frame where before going into the office was the default and you needed a really good reason not to do so, okay, although that was actually never quite true on Fridays among senior people, by the way, a lot of whom before covid used to work from home on a Friday quite commonly, but what you now have is it's no longer a default that you go into the office, you look at your diary and go, is it, is it a good idea to go into the office tomorrow? Would I be more productive at home? And I don't, I don't see that reverting to the status quo anti at all. Um, I think that's stuck the genie out of the bottle, the horses bolted. I think attempts to say, you must be back in the office 5 days a week, you know, a Goldman Sachs can do it because they probably pay people enough for people to do, you know, you're already being rich, humiliated in exchange for money, so this is just yet one further humiliation, okay, um, so you know, they can probably pay people enough to do that. I don't think most employers who actually need to hold on to staff and for whom staff loyalty and commitment is important, I don't think most employers can afford to do that anymore. But what happens with trends like the vegan food trend is you basically, you get things which are flash in the pan, you know, one-day wonders, you know, uh, you get, you get products like that that you, when you buy them, you think they're amazing, but actually my use of my Oculus Rift or whatever it is was fairly intense for the first few days and fairly negligible ever since. You know, 3D, 3D TV always seems to be one of these things which is, uh, you know, it's got a great future and it always will have, you know, and every few years there's this great surge in interest in 3D TV and then it ends just as quickly as it began.

What's psychologically, what's happen there? If, if we talk about right at the beginning, we talking about sort of bees and collectivism and like CU cuz I, I saw it come out of kind of nowhere, you had all these vegan meat brands bubble up, you had, and I don't, do you know the kind of the story of a lot of them basic, I think other than one, most of them are in decline now, they've gone into retail hasn't really worked, and you have some restaurants that, that have, have them, uh, I mean, in some ways in America it was huge, but, but kind of the thing that probably will endure is that most restaurant menus will continue to contain a vegetarian option and a vegan option, which in many cases of course doubles the meat-free option, yeah, for the customer. And as a consequence of that, by the way, I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but one time out of three just by the law of averages I end up eating a vegetarian or vegan meal, and by the way, that's a perfectly acceptable way to reduce meat consumption, which is a, instead of a few people abandoning meat altogether, you have a lot of people actually, that's you walking down the middle though, that's people want you to, people want you to make a stand one way or the other, and actually, you know, just as actually a perfectly acceptable um, uh, response to the reduction of carbon emissions is, wherever possible, use less carbon rather than we must have a net zero target by 20 so and so. You know, an awful lot of change happens through what evolutionary biologists would call the adjacent possible, it's what you can do right now, in other words, it's not the theoretical ideal, you know, an awful lot of kind of political movements start with something like communism, which is this is how society will work, this is how it will work better, and we're going to proceed on that basis, in other words. Now, most progress is really evolutionary, you do what you can at any given time, um, and provided the direction of travelers in the direction. What's the problem now? A huge amount of the reduction in meat consumption in the UK, I owe this to a, a very good guy who's on Welsh, Walty on Twitter, who did a lot of work with farmers, and the farmers would always say, well, of course meat sales are down because all these bloody vegetarians you see, and he did the research and said that actually the decline in meat consumption occasioned by people becoming vegetarian is relatively small. What's making the difference is a trend for food, food that contains very little meat. So if you think about it, if you go back 30, 40 years, your main meal would often be a big slab of meat with some vegetables alongside it, yeah, and the main meal now might be a pizza which has some pepperoni and a few little slither of ham on top, but it's for the most part a vegetarian meal with some meat trimming. Okay, the meat is no longer the centerpiece of the meal, it's a kind of ornament to the meal, okay. Now, I, you know, so a pepperoni pizza, when you think about it, if you actually take all the pepperoni off and you stack them, it's actually not much of a sausage, okay. I mean, it looks a lot cuz it's covering the whole surface, but it's been very thinly sliced, and so the greater part of the reduction in meat consumption came through non-vegetarians eating meat differently and less rather than people, a small group of people who are eschewing meat altogether. So that, that the, so it's almost like if you have this, this theoretical Northstar, so I, I.E, say you could say communism, and then it's the adjacent possible, yeah, vegan meat is right, we're going to supplant, we're going to supplant McDonald's burger, we're going to supplant the McDonald's burger. That's their kind of communist North Star, that's the, that's, that's, in other words, it's a new reality, we're, we're going to impose a new reality regardless of where you… Adam Smith says something about this, about this, the idea that you can move people around as if they're pieces on a chessboard, the man of system he talks it, and the point is there's so many interacting forces between the different people on the chard that you can't simply move from one equilibrium state to another equilibrium state without passing through quite a lot of intermediary stages, if at all, by the way. And then, uh, so the idea is there's a graffiti which I think it's Caitlin Moran quotes, and it's actually even though it's actually a graffiti, or technically a graffito I suppose, um, gra, it's the singular, the singular of graffiti really, yeah, um, but it's written on the wall of a toilet in Brighton of all places, but strangely in a way it's a very conservative statement, and it simply says, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can, and that's a very good encapsulation of what you might call the intermediate possible, if you know. Now, I'll give you an example, I'll give you an example of the intermediate possible versus the theoretical perfect, okay, so in, so yeah, just, just to those quickly, the intermediate possible if you want to reduce meat consumption is the pepperoni pizza, okay, that's the intermediate possible, um, full-on universal veganism tomorrow is what you might call the centrally planned sort of communistic uh approach, in other words, one, one of them is bottom-up and it starts where people are with what they have and what they can do, and the other one is top-down and it imposes a new reality on people regardless of their situation, context, uh, circumstances. So evolutionary biology understands this thing called the intermediate possible, which is where can you go next, yeah, okay, and it's more interested in some ways as good innovation is for the most part in the intermediate possible than it is in creating some theoretical dream world that exists only in on paper. I got an example of that actually, um, I know this is supposed to be a food podcast, I'm now talking about home heating, but my brother's an astrophysicist and he knows all the [ __ ] about heat pumps, in other words, if you have a heat pump, uh, it's effectively five times as efficient at warming your home as a boiler is, and the reason is the boiler is creating heat, it's generating heat, it's making something that's cold hot, whereas the heat pump is moving warmth from the outside to the inside, and actually countries with a climate like the UK are ideally suited to heat pumps because it's never that co, sorry, most of the time, okay, very rarely as it extremely cold outside, okay, and so generally you're bridging quite a small distance in degrees Kelvin, not Centigrade or, or um, or, or Fahrenheit, but in degrees Kelvin versus absolute zero, you're bridging quite a small divide between the temperature outside and the temperature inside, and therefore heat pumps can be five times more efficient, in other words, moving heat indoors is five times less energy intensive than using gas to generate the same amount of heat, and that's why heat pumps are environmentally efficient. Now, the government currently says that yes, will give you a grant for installing a heat pump, but you have to rip out your existing boiler, replace your radiators, bury a vast great pipe in your garden under your lawn, which is where the warmth is, is derived from outside, okay, and it will involve you in expenditure of, I would say realistically £15,000, will quite a lot of disruption. My brother doesn't do that, he just buys air conditioning units. Now, what he's still got an oil boiler or gas boiler, I can't remember which it is, okay, but he just installs every now and then, one at a time, couple of thousand pounds a time, you install an air conditioning unit. Now, an air conditioning unit is a heat pump, okay, it simply, when you use it in reverse, it's a very effective air-to-air heat pump, and when you reverse it, when it's too hot indoors, okay, it does the opposite, which is in air conditions which it, it refrigerates, it removes temperature from your home and dumps it outside. Well, so air conditioning can be a heat pump. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the same thing, okay, all you need is a single basic toggle switch. And where did you get that? My father, before the last heat wave, my father's 93, and my brother and I bought him an air conditioning unit for the main room where, where he is in his flat, yeah, and um, uh, when it's very, very hot, he uses it to cool the room down, because when you're 93, you really don't want a heat wave, okay, and then the rest of the year he uses it as a heat pump, and when I go into his room, if anything, actually the room's too bloody hot for me, so it's obviously doing a pretty good job, and it's enjoying this kind of five-fold efficiency now, but how come loads of people don't put, but nobody knows this. Oh, right, so yeah, but why don't you get a subsidy? And the reason is that they didn't want to subsidize air-to-air heat pump stroke air conditioning units cuz they thought that well, if people then start using air conditioning, it will increase their energy…

Consumption to which I'd say, mate, okay, this is the [__] UK, right? Okay, fair enough. If you're the Italian government, the Greek government, right? If you're the government of bloody Somalia or whatever. Fair point, you don't want people air conditioning their homes that much because it will increase energy consumption. Although you might argue in Britain that at the times when there is quite high uh need for cooling, uh solar PO is probably going gangbusters. Okay, so maybe we don't need to worry quite as much as we thought because the solar power will take up the slack. But in any case, it's like 3 weeks of the year; the other 49 weeks it's either switched off or in the winter it's producing warmth extremely efficiently. You can keep your existing boiler and use it in extremis, which is if your air conditioning units aren't doing the job. And you could easily get it by simply saying, in order to get this government subsidy, you have to sign up for a thing which makes your gas disproportionately more expensive. So that when you do use gas, cuz the heat pump can't quite hack it cuz it's minus 7 outside because there's a freak cold snap, okay, you can use gas to top up the effect of your heat pump, but you've got to pay. That would solve the problem. It's not a one-off payment of 15,000, 20,000; it's a bit by bit enhancement to your home which will also doesn't require you to do, make the terrifying step of actually tearing out your existing heating system.

Okay, now what I'm saying there is that the intermediate possible is a much better solution to the problem than the theoretical perfect. Yeah, and most change, I would argue, and all of evolutionary change has happened that way; it's by exploring the intermediate possible. There's no capacity in Evolution for you to jump intermediate steps. Well, okay, I better not say that because I'll have a few Evolutionists after me, but broadly speaking, it happens through building. And effectively, to use that graffiti in the Brighton toilet, it's uh, start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. So with linking this back to the vegan meat thing, is is like that's that's the theoretical ideal, which is that if Americans reduced their per capita meat consumption to the level of the UK, it would make more difference than if the entire UK went vegetarian. Yeah, that's wild. And and there's a planner, brilliant planner at Ogilvy called Matt Waxman who's written about this in, on LinkedIn, for I think Creative Review magazine, where he says that quite a lot. Vaping rather than getting people to quit smoking. Okay, that would be an example of the intermediate possible. Um, another example of the intermediate possible would be um, you get people to wear condoms rather than getting people to practice abstinence. In other words, the 10, the 10K steps a day that you know.

Yeah, that that was exactly an example of that. Yeah, yeah. In other words, 5K couch to 5K was a great example, brilliant example. And actually what used to happen, and and we we we did quite a lot, I hope, to prevent this happening because it was silly, was you'd be going to people who, like me, are markedly unfit, and you'd show them images of Olympic athletes, okay, as like, you know, the perfect ideal of Fitness. Now to them that is such, first of all, anybody under, over 30, you're not going to make that level of Fitness anyway. Okay, yeah. An awful lot of, particularly women, but also men, uh, just not interested in the fitness thing. It doesn't make them feel any better if they go jogging; they don't feel good, they just feel worse. There are awful lot of people who don't like it. But as you rightly say, getting people off zero, there was a there was a an intermediate, in Costa Rica that's was one of the best things I've ever seen. Sorry, did I say intermediate? Intermediate possible. Yeah, the better phrase from evolutionary biology is the adjacent possible, but the two are kind of linked. I get it, but there was a there was a a place in Costa Rica which is, as you say, if you're if someone's is is, we need everyone is obsessed with these extreme things, but actually most people want something along the middle, which is that middle ground. There was a um a gym in Costa Rica, and the name of it was like, it was like a kind of workout class, yes, and obviously like you're on the beach, and it was called Happy Hour. And I thought that's such a good name for a, obviously it was a play on the cocktails, obviously Happy Hour, and obviously you go there for a for an hour, and then they said, and and like this the tagline was something like um, fairly hard workouts because you're on holiday, which is basically that, which is that basically like you're coming here for Happy Hour, we're going to do a bit of workout. Happy Hour, play on the, this is fairly hard, yeah, and it is that middle ground. I think, I don't, the names escape me, but I think that's a great, that's a great, that's a great piece of marketing which acknowledges the context in which the person finds, because most people don't want these extreme things. And back to the [__] the first point, my suggestion which I never got Public Health England to adopt was, if it is true that genuinely having 10 or 15 minutes of aerobic exercise three or four times a week, okay, was genuinely beneficial to their health, um, why don't you just encourage people to have more sex? Okay, because Nature has already found a fairly strong existing inducement to for people to engage in, you know, reasonably vigorous um uh, you know, exercise, okay, which has its own inbuilt evolutionary reward. Why don't you capitalize on that rather than saying you just got home, you've turned on the telly, but no, you've got to go and get changed and put on ridiculous clothes, you know, at the end of the day you're getting undressed anyway, and you know, I've often looked at, I've often looked at interesting questions like that which are, you know, actually how do you build on an existing behavior or trend and simply accelerate it rather than attempting to reverse a trend or to fight a trend head-on? Yes, and in a way, people's natural inclination is, as I said, is adversarial; it's I am right and you are wrong, and actually, you know, I mean I noticed this that when I moved out of London, I still have it a bit cuz I moved out of London, so I lived in Bayswater for from 1988 to 2001, right? And I really liked it, but then we had twins, so we thought, okay, had we had one child at a time, I think we would have stuck it out in London. For child number one, we were in a two-bedroom apartment. Um, you could you could have had one kid; having two, having a double buggy on Oxford Street isn't much of a laugh. I upped sticks and moved to a place called West Malling, which is kind of just outside the M25 in Kent. Yeah, and I kind of, it's rather like those people who leave London who decide they like London and they move to the outer Hebrides, you know, and I go, look, mate, you're overcompensating. I I'm I'm perfectly happy to accept that when you're above a certain age, London both loses some of its magic because, you know, I'm not going to some weird nightclub and stay up till 3:00 in the morning and going woo. Okay, I'm too old for that [__] and it's just not what I want to do. And anyway, young people's music is crap. Okay, but on the other hand, okay, lot of indignation, on the other hand, don't make the mistake of moving to the outer Hebrides or to, you know, mid-Wales, because what you're doing there is you're overcompensating. You've decided that London's impossible, so you're then immediately going to the opposite point of view. Actually, no, no, this is again interesting. Suburbia can actually be pretty nice, you know, you get a patch of garden, you can park your car. Suburbia is not cool though, that's that's the status quo.

Well, there's there's one exception to that which always interests me. A lot of Brits, cool Brits, okay, there are two things you can do if you want to get out of London because I don't think we can bring this into the restaurant conversation, if you like. I don't think that the advantage that London confers on consumers relative to the rest of the country, like smaller provincial towns, okay, is nearly as stark and nearly as impressive as it was in 1988. You know, in 1988, when I left London and kind of went back to stay in the country where my parents were at the time, after about a week I was climbing up the walls, you know. And when I finally got back on the Westway and saw the signs going, you know, the West End, the City, and I was driving along the Westway cuz there were no speed cameras then, you'd hit 80 on the Westway, and I'd pull off for the sort of turning for what is Westbourne Grove, and I felt, you know, I felt myself come alive. Okay, now part of this is me getting older, but part of it is things like the internet. Okay, the internet, large parts of consumerism now are effectively geographically irrelevant. Okay, if you want to buy weird hi-fi equipment, when I was a kid you had to go to, well, you sometimes go to London, you'd certainly go to Bristol or Cardiff to buy the kit. Okay, now you just go online. If you want to buy a weird book, if you want to watch a Korean film, all of that stuff, if you want weird food ingredients, a Cardo, okay, that's the best shop in Britain, right? Okay, you know, if if you want to buy really interesting, you know, you know, if you're interested in high-quality food of any kind in variety, um, there isn't a shop in London that competes with a, well, isn't a, okay, that competes with a Cardo. You've got Gusto, you've got, one of the things I really like is Michelin star restaurants. Um, for example, there's a great website, ubereat.com, which is a restaurant mandarin in the Isle of White where they'll cook and ship the food to you. Yeah, okay. I actually, enough, I order a meal and I spread it over three days. In other words, rather than having one fantastic meal, you have three meals with a fantastic component; it's better value for money. Uh, you have businesses like My Supper Hero, okay, which will send you utterly fantastic food. So all I'm saying is that, okay, London offers fantastic employment opportunities currently, although flexible working might slightly blur that line a little bit, but in terms of the quality of consumption, particularly when you consider the hassle you've got to go through to live there, you know, okay, you've got lots of friends, yeah, but it takes three weeks to arrange to meet them. All of those disadvantages, all I'm saying is the advantage of living in London over living in Monmouth, where I grew up, which was stark and absolutely self-evident in 1988, isn't altogether clear to me now. The so the couple of things on that is you're younger than me, so in fairness, London has more upsides. Are you single? Or are you single? You're single. Okay, if you're single, there, you know, I imagine that Tinder in Cornwall gets a bit repetitive, you know, right? Okay, you know, um, you know, um, you know, there are huge advantages if you're single, obviously living in London; there are huge opportunities early in life in terms of simple opportunities which present themselves and what you might call, you know, being there, showing up, being present. But those diminish, I think, with age. And also, in many ways, the the extent to which for a person aged 45 or 50 who already has kids, the benefits that London confers are not really that clear-cut to me.

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Lucky Say, my boy Aaron from DFF is coming on this podcast in a couple of weeks; he uses it to manage the team of 30 people, and they've, Lucky Say have unlocked 500 draft listings by using Bohemi. Like you've got to get involved with this stuff; it's absolutely insane, and it will categorically change your life; it's just the sickest platform. I use it all the time. Island, the, was I, we'll get on my, my where I'm, where I sit on that kind of spectrum, but in terms of the the restaurants and kind of leveling the playing field is you've, and and this Middle Ground piece, right? So you'll have somewhere, hips have raised the floor. Chains, um, no hip ra, yeah, I love that. So and what you have, this is my defense of everything from Travelodge to Premier Inn to Starbucks to Costa, etc. It's very fashionable to deride them, but what they do is they say, if you, you can open a hotel, you can compete with us, that's fine, but you've got to be at least that good. Yeah. Now, if anybody who remembers British hotels from the 1970s or early 80s, okay, it was possible to survive as a hotel simply on what you might call distress purchases while being absolutely shit. I mean, literally appallingly crap. Broadly speaking, if you want to survive as a coffee shop now, you've got to be at least pretty good. Yeah, and so that business of eradicating the worst, that's the role that chains play, which is actually very valuable. Yeah, so so that's raising, ra, that's raising the floor. And what hipsters do, ra, the what happens, what happens is the hipsters generally gravitate in areas where there are low property prices or cheap rates because you can afford to experiment. Yeah, okay. And I'm not sure if you gave me a week and said, do you want to do a culinary tour of London or do you want to spend the week doing a culinary tour of East Kent, you know, I'm including Margate, Ramsgate, Sandwich. That's why I was just literally, I was literally about to say the middle of the ground. I'm not sure, Ian, I'll give them a shout-out. Up-Down House, just outside Deal, extraordinary place which you wouldn't find in London. Yeah, and there's parking. And this tragic thing, okay. But but we can crap on as much as we like, but the best restaurant is the one with a [__] car park, you know, okay, cuz you turn up, you pull in, and you walk into the restaurant; you don't have, you know, um, there's affordable property there for people to experiment. I'd rather spend um, I think a week on a culinary tour of, you know, Thanet and East Kent. And by the way, I'd cover the whole waterfront, you know, I'd go to Nell's Cafe just off the A2, which is a fantastic transport cafe; it's just, you know. And actually, I think the variety, experimentation, and interest, but that's the great creative, there are two great creative tricks if you want to move to Suburbia and stay cool. Okay, you move to the seaside; that's okay. I don't know why that is, but you go to Brighton, you got Hastings, Whitstable, Margate, okay, that's cool. Okay, if you move to the Cotswolds, not cool really. Sells many things, not cool, right? Yeah, yeah. And the second thing you can do is move to Los Angeles, where, of course, everybody lives in Suburbia. And one of my theories is that creative Brits love LA because they can actually live in a Suburban house, but all their friends in, in back home in the UK go, it's my cool friend in Los Angeles. Yes, you don't have a cool friend in Chester to the same extent. Yeah, there's, there you got status, the status. So so and probably that's true of Chicago to an extent. You can live this in, cuz American Suburbia is brilliant. Okay, uh, it's British Suburbia is pretty good. Dan, Belgian Suburbia is very good. And and one of the things, how's Belgian Suburbia good? There are countries that just do suburbs really quite well. But like, how would you say they're different? How would you say they're different? SL better than UK, American Suburbia? If, do I really envy really rich people who live in New York? No, not really. Um, but I had some friends who lived in Wallingford, Pennsylvania, and it literally is beautiful, white weatherboard house, you know, picket fence around the outside, um, you know, nice lawn, um, and you know, lots of parking. And you do go, actually, this is a pretty nice quality of life, you know, really really good. Classy American Suburbia is a pretty pretty high quality of life in terms, back to the um, these, I think, why the leveling the playing fields being leveled out is because the hipsters raising the ceiling, they are not geographically bound now to London. And actually, actually the rates in London have become punitive. Yeah, but it's high; they still get high status by saying I've traveled to this new and discovered X. So so so in uh, Margate, you've got the fish restaurant there which is called, the name is [__] escapes me, but this town, by the way, is absurdly under-discovered because everybody in London when they leave London they head to the nearest single-digit A road and they keep going. So West Londoners always went out on the A4. Well, okay, that's a two-digit A road; they go out on the A40, they go out on the M4, they go out on the A3, and they go Southwest or West. North Londoners go North. And what was so interesting about the Kent Coast is shits on the Cotswolds in my opinion. I mean, I have a particular aversion. My mother's family lived in the Cotswolds effectively from about, I think literally it's like the the late 11th century or the early 12th century pretty much until, there, some of them still there. Yeah, so I'd also resent going down to a place where your family have lived for, you know, 900 years, but you're considered as a [__] down from London. Now in East Kent, I am a [__] down from London, so I don't mind who treats me like that, but I I I would um uh, you know, those, you're obviously right to mention those restaurants in Margate, which which one, by the way, I haven't been to yet, but the level of experimentation and interest, and you can get a table and you're not ripped off, okay, and the clientele are vastly more agreeable in my opinion, you know, your fellow diners are much more likable. But it all starts with a hipster; it starts with a the hipster. So for example, the shock troops of gentrification. Yeah, yeah. So what they what they're doing, and now because of social media, is is the hipster goes there, talks about it, suddenly there's a scarcity thing, or not necessarily a scarcity thing, but the restaurant in, um, call the names, it's on the tip of my tongue, but it's only 12 seats. So suddenly you have scarcity, right? Because people are, oh my God, I need to, this [__] influence has been down there. Jay Ray has been there, for example. Exactly. Per, okay, so um uh, Suffolk, that's a big big starting place. My my friend George Pell uh used to be the general manager at um at Learo. I don't know why.

I said it like that, learo, in uh, in SoHo, you know, the French, French institution. Marco was there, he then, and he calls it the frontier, so he, during they, they like, we need to make some money, so they went, he went up to Suffolk, right? Yes, Suffolk has, is notoriously, his, his, his analogous way of saying it is, we've got the best um, paint in the world and paint brushes, I.E., produce; we just don't have any canvases, I.E., restaurants. So they've got the beautiful, he's a great tater, and anyway, so long story longer, he set up this hotel; um, he's left his job, he's moved up to Suffolk, was living in Brixton; um, I've gone up to Suffolk, and he then gets a review, and well, I talked about this when they had the podcast with him from Jay Raina, right? So Jay R, I mean Jay R is not a hipster, right, but he's, he's definitely the neoi, I know him a bit, he, he makes a very brilliant distinction, which is he says, I'm not a food critic, I'm a restaurant critic. Yes, in other words, he criticizes, he, he, he, his critiques of the whole place, the whole experience, and the whole question of why people go to restaurants, where in some cases, of course, the food is surprisingly incidental. Yes, what? Yeah, so, so, so, so what George has done is, so you get, but other influences gone up there, so once you get JR, JR goes there, you then have the, the hipsters and the influencers and the, the early adopters going up there saying, oh, this place is amazing. More press comes, and then suddenly, and what, what, what we're, they're doing in Suffolk is, you know, George only has uh, maybe I don't know, 20 seats, so suddenly there's a scarcity thing, so you're fully booked, so it creates this, this kind of constant stream of demand, and then more hipsters see that, that, or influencers see, so they're like, oh, look, I've managed to get a table at the Suffolk, which is the name of the restaurant, and then they have high status because they're saying, I've been in this restaurant, and then it, this is happening all around all these satellite cities. Manchester is like now absolutely becoming like the, the um, I'm actually interviewing, I don't know if you've ever met him, I'm a Georgist, and it's a strange, when you say Georgists, I've heard you say that, L, that means it's a strange economic belief, which means that the principal sort of form of tax should be on the value of unimproved land. [ __ ] H, how did you get to that? The point being that um, the insight of Henry George is that when you have an activity that depends for its performance on its location, okay, most of the economic gains don't end up going to the person who performs the work, they go to the person who owns the land. Okay, so an extreme case would be when you buy a pair of, why is Heathrow Terminal 5 full of luxury goods? Okay, well, it's partly they're there for advertising purposes, not to sell, but the main beneficiary of those extraordinarily high margins actually is the owner of the real estate, the airport, not the person in the shop or the owner of the brand. Y, and so you can escape that, thanks to the car by the way, not just the internet, by going and buying undervalued land and making it a destination. V, Henry George would say you should actually tax what is extracted income, in other words, income extracted by owning the land. You remember when people said after Covid, you must come into London to bail out Pret and Costa Coffee, and my argument was, you're not actually bailing out Pret and Costa Coffee, you're bailing out the Duke of Westminster who owns the land on which those shops reside. Okay, and you now have a situation in London where the combination of rates and rent effectively mean that you're not really paying for the food anymore, you're paying for the location. And so the clever thing to do was, you might call, you know, the, the, the, the solution is to avoid the depredation, so I, someone from a very, very good Indian restaurant opened a place called The Amret; there's now one in Canterbury, one in Rye, but they first opened in Margate, and what they did is they couldn't afford to open in London, they had the culinary talent, but they didn't have the capital, and probably, do you necessarily want to run an Indian restaurant where it cost 70 and half your money goes straight out of the door to the landlord? Okay, and so they, they took over what was effectively a derelict pub in Margate with parking, created a great Indian restaurant; it's a great destination, people drive there, they get to, they don't charge as much as in London, but they get to keep more of the money. That's what you said, the word destination. I, I, destination; it's the language of the Michelin guide, which is V, Voyage. You see, you have these various things, I think it's, was it one star, two star, there's, there's vola detour, which is worth going out of your way for, and there's um, uh, um, I think it's visit, which is if you're there, this is worth going to. There's vola detour, which is worth going out of your way for, and then there's a vola voyage, which is a destination in its own right. Yeah, okay, and if you can become vola voyage, I don't mean you have to have three Michelin stars, but a place where people are actually happy to go, let's get in the car and go there, you can make a lot of money, because as I said, you know, what you're paying in rent and rates is the same as the chitty pub, you know, 5 miles down the road, but you've now got people flooding to you. Yeah, and so what this is my argument that actually London is pricing itself out of being interesting, and I think, I think we saw that before with West London versus East London. Okay, West London became so expensive, I have a very, I have a very interesting um, uh, axis, which I call the, the skanky wanky axis, right, which is if an area is exclusively poor, it becomes a bit too scanky, but if an area becomes too rich, it becomes wanky. Yeah, and where you want to be is a place where there's a mixture of, you know, there's genuine gradations of wealth. L is the example of that, you might argue. Yeah, yeah, yeah, skanky and wanky, skanky and wank, the amalgamation of skanky wanky, skanky wanky. And so, so I think, I think there's something interesting there, which is that actually, you know, I'm now, you know, I look forward to a trip out of London on culinary grounds, you know, that I'm going to discover more interesting stuff, and actually more easily. Obviously, there's hugely interesting stuff in London if you want to be massively ripped off, okay, but I'm, I'm actually feel my heart race more, you know, with a trip down to Margate in terms of what I'll get. There's an Adventure Curve Coffee Roasters there, Broadstairs has a few utterly fantastic restaurants, deal at ly sensational. Um, yeah, it's, I completely agree. One, one thing I've always wanted to ask you is um, and this again kind of going down different kind of pathway here is what, and the other, the other interesting thing is that if you do well in Kent, you earn repeat custom. I would argue that Londoners are now so sated with choice, they're always, if they're always wanting to try something new. Well, and also you won't get, you won't get the really valuable feedback for a restaurant as two people come back; that's the only thing that really matters in terms of a measure. It's why, why actually, you know, and I always ask this weird question, which is if you ask people what's the most amazing meal you've had in your life, and they answer, and they typically name some restaurant in Copenhagen or Madrid or whatever, and then you ask the question, how often have you eaten there? The answer is always once. Yeah, well, that's in a weird way, that's not a great restaurant, is it? If I, I mean, measured by my form of, you know, it's rather, it's rather like those technologies, you know, like, you know, Apple Vision Pro, which may well be a really expensive technology which everybody tries and goes, that's amazing, but then mysteriously it ends up in the back cupboard, uh, you know, after 3 months. 100% um, yes, so, so the question I wanted to ask you is in food specifically, I think, I think um, you can do it a lot with food. The biggest example is it's almost like why, what is happening in the human brain, like why do humans love kind of alliteration and onomatopoeia when buying things, like what's actually happening? So the, I think it's the [ __ ] best, and it, it genuinely, it does something palpable to my, of get me drooling like a famished Rottweiler when I drive past the McDonald's uh, it's the McMuffin sign, and it says 7:45 a.m., and it's loads of M's, and it's like that to me is like that, it's that the M of the morning, like waking up the um, of the, like you have to, by the way, in marketing terms, the McDonald's have played a blinder really. Yeah, they're, I think they're the best, they're the best, but what, yeah, on like, I don't know if you know what that, but what is happening, like why, why is it when, when humans, it happens a lot in food and just in marketing. Um, the other example, KFC, I, I um, I had one of the second guys I've had on the podcast is um, he's like a language um, he built this AI tool that's obsessed with language, and he had three different versions of language; he had um, uh, uh, since no, what did he have? He had factual language, which, which is words that bit on the wanky side, right, is with companies love, but humans hate, so it'd be like corporate social responsibility, or really hard words to digest. Sensory language is, is words like, in terms of food, it would be like, let's use KFC as an example, it would be like warm, Finger Lickin' Good. Well, yeah, so that, so that though, it'd be warm, lick warm, um, warm delicious chicken would be picture um, sensory language, picture language, which is like the most persuasive form of language, he says, is something that creates a picture, so Finger Lickin' Good, like it's almost the hard consonant sounds, it's almost like the contours, crispy chicken, Finger Lickin' Good, like that, really, I don't know, but I'm trying to work out from, it's authentically kind of Southern, it's got, in terms of three words that do the job, it's sensal, proper. Have you seen when, when KFC run out of chicken? Yeah, and they changed the name to FC [ __ ]? Yeah, it's so good. Yeah, so what is happening with, when, when what's happening to humans when we see onomatopoeia, we see alliteration? Well, I mean, the language around food is fascinating, because, you know, I mean, one of the things is that there are various things that will increase the price that people are willing to pay for food on a menu; one of them is provenance. If you put PM, Brie potatoes or Jersey this or whatever, anything that has a place of origin commands a premium, and weirdly, just, you know, seemingly meaningless words like succulent carrots rather than just carrots, also uh, there's a whole um, extraordinary science of menu design um, which goes into detail like, you know, you don't put the pound sign, you spell the price out words rather than doing it in digits, you uh, get rid of, you get rid of the second two digits, so you just have round pound pricing. People who experiment enormously with this, which is what conveys promise, but you're right in that um, it, you can't separate, okay, I, I'll get into a tiny bit into the neuroscience of this. Yeah, that's what I'm trying to get um, which is that it looks as though most of what we perceive is a prediction, and that we use our senses to error correct where the prediction deviates from the reality, and that's a more efficient data architecture for the brain than effectively me looking at the picture in front of me and processing every pixel. If, if you're into digital photography, you'll be familiar with something called raw mode. If you got a fancy digital camera, you can shoot in raw mode, where there's basically um, a few bits are used to describe each pixel in painstaking intricate detail; every single pixel is described. The reason you do that as a professional photographer is for editing; it's better. The way you achieve a JPEG or an MPEG is through a form of data compression where there is a likely value for each pixel based on the pixel that precedes it or adjoins it, okay, and you only use data to describe the extent to which the pixel value differs from the expected value, and that's a much more economical use of data, because if you've got a blue wall, you don't need the data going blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, for every pixel, okay, you just go blue, and then one single bit, same again, okay, same again, same again, same again, same again, same again. Yeah, okay, so that, I've probably done a complete disservice to the genius people who um, who do um, effectively data compression and photography, that effectively, as you have an expected value for everything, and you use data only to the extent that the reality differs from the expectation. The book you need to read on this is by a guy called Andy Clark; it's called *The Experience Machine*. He's an academic at the University of Sussex; he's a philosopher as well as being a kind of neuroscientist. Um, and Andy Clark's book, *The Experience Machine*, effectively takes this model of human perception, which is the brain generates an expectation, and then the senses then convey the contrast between the reality and the expectation. If it's right, it's not a new theory; Clark admits this; it was advanced first by people, I think, like William James and Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century. Um, Hermann von Helmholtz and Co didn't have the advantages of JPEGs and MPEGs to understand data architecture; they didn't have really the advantage of information theory to understand why the brain would work that way, but we've got limited bandwidth in the optic nerve; it makes more sense for the optic nerve to concentrate on surprising information than to concentrate on all information. And if that's true, it explains essentially, I'd say the verdict of that is the science is in, and the marketers were right all along, that things don't taste how they taste, they taste a strange combination of how they taste and how you expected them to taste. And there's a guy you must get on the show who's called Charles Spence at the University of Oxford, who's a kind of um, how would you describe it? I suppose you call it psychophysics or, or else you might call it phenomenology, but it's all about the science of how, not, not the science of how we measure the world as scientists, I degrees Centigrade, but how we experience reality as human beings. Now you'll know this if you've been to America, the weather forecast will say, you know, tomorrow Scottsdale, it's going to be 97, feels like 92, and American weather forecasts often have a feels like temperature, which is not the actual objective temperature of the air; it factors in things like whether there's a breeze and the level of humidity, both of which affect how we as humans experience heat. You know, high humidity, no breeze is a really painfully hot day; if you add a breeze and reduce the humidity and leave the temperature the same, I've wandered around places like Phoenix, Arizona, when it's 100 degrees, but because the humidity is really low, you basically wander around perfectly comfortable. The same temperature in Singapore, you're sweating like a sex offender, right? Okay, you know, and so the, so Spence's work, particular in taste, he'll do things like wonderful experiments where you produce something that looks like a lemon, okay, looks exactly like a bit of citrus fruit, but you flavor it with strawberry essence, and the only scientific way to describe the human reaction to this is, it [ __ ] with people's heads. It, so in other words, you don't go, gosh, that looks like a lemon, but it's actually strawberry; that's, that's, that's how you'd expect if, if, if the antic Clark theory isn't true. Instead, it most creates a completely new taste, which is the taste of something that's strawberry-like when you expected it to be lemon. So the marketing of food, yeah, yeah, yeah, uh, the, you know, the expectation you create when somebody goes in has a huge bearing on what they perceive, just as, as they always used to say about lager, people don't drink the beer, they drink the advertising. And so the onomatopoeia, or, cuz let's, let's use KFC as an example, Finger Lickin' Good, right? So I was in Colombia, and um, before Costa Rica, I was in Colombia, um, oh, fantastic, which was, which was really interesting, but I was, I was in this place called Santa Marta, and I mean, the food was [ __ ] rank; it's, you know, it's, the prawns overcooked; there's no, no excuse for that, is they, their raw materials are presumably fantastic raw materials. I mean, one of the most beautiful countries I've ever been to, I did get, I did get held at knife point twice, but that's a story for another day, which is crazy. Well, my, my love, Colombia, my love, Colombia, bizly got um, effectively awakened by watching *Narcos*, because you couldn't help noticing that while they were committing mass murder, they were doing it against a really beautiful backdrop; it was that. So I mean, I, I came out the airport and had a couple of beers from Miami, came out of the airport, jumped in a cab, which was [ __ ] foolish; um, guys in the front seat driving, uh, this is Bogotá, is it? This is no, this is Medellin. Yeah, um, guy, jump, another guy jumps in the uh, front seat, you know you're in trouble. I jumped in the seat next to me, and I was like, oh, no, here we go, here we go, this is going to be a nightmare, and do they have some [ __ ] story at first that I'm just giving my friends a lift? Cuz that happened to, that happened to a German friend of mine in Seville, no, in Rome, in Rome. Yeah, Germans always get it worse cuz they carry so much cash, cuz Germans don't like credit cards. I mean, I should, I may as well have a sign saying, mug me. I came out of the airport with like a, I was a little bit squiffy and had, you know, I was on the flight, getting on the beers, have knife, came out, did it. Well, no, so then basically, I had that backpack there and in my seats and I was thinking, oh, [ __ ] hell, here we go, like cuz my friend was already there, we were driving along, they like, welcome to Colombia, your man, like this country, welcome to my beautiful country, give me all the spiel, but I was like, I'm [ __ ] here, I know I'm [ __ ], and they um, he pulled out a bag of cocaine. I, I don't do cocaine. He was like, do you want some cocaine? I was like, no, no, no, no, no, I don't like, I just want to go to my hotel, mate. Can you take me to my hotel? Throws this big bag of cocaine in my bag, and I was like, and he goes, yeah, you basically owe me 750 quid now. So I was like, I was like, what? I was like, what the [ __ ]? Get back to the hotel or get to the hotel, and I'm like, well, this is a bit like scary because this guy knows where I live now, the three of them know where I live. My mate comes down and uh, it's like, yeah, just cuz they had my case which had all my podcast kit in, so I was thinking, if it was closed, I would just said, [ __ ] it, like it's done. Yeah, but I had like, well, this kit was all in there, and uh, they, they were so, my phone comes down and they're like, you, you owe his money for the, and like, we just gave him the drugs. B, like, we don't, we don't want it. I like, she threw it on the thing, and uh, he was, no, no, you owe me your money, you owe me 750, and then they started getting really aggressive; they're like, you want the whole Medellín on your man? I was like, [ __ ] this, I've just got here, right? Yeah, so then I was like um, he was like, sent me to the cash machine, and I was like, 300 meters away, let's walk; it's the middle of the day. He was like, no, no, no, you have to get in the car, so the big boy, my mate stayed with the big boy, was like, you're coming with me, Dan, you go, so they uh, took me down the shanty towns, which…

Which it was? I reckon it was a 25-minute drive, but it felt like 2 hours. I imagine, yeah, it's the whole like time when when you—but it was it was absolutely terrifying. They pulled me out; they put a knife to my thing here when I got—you know, the ATMs in foreign countries are not—they're like in a like a room, you know? They're not like on the street, for some bizarre reason. The uh, my card—it was almost like a—my card wasn't working. That's what, you know, what I was saying earlier, to get a new card for some [ __ ] bizarre reason, it wasn't working. Then he started getting really aggressive, so I—oh, here we go. So then they took me to a uh, Saints Breze—well, not Saints, not Saints Bre—in Columbia, but like their equivalent of the Saints, local. I was like, Hallelujah! Like, we're in the middle—there's—we're in normal normality here. I'm not in the back of this like Toyota 4x4, yeah, flla thing. Obviously, they're all in it, it. And then this is the heist they do every day, and um, they made the, you know, Don Julio, the tequila. Yeah, yeah. So he gets out this trolley, walks around, and I'm just like—and I was just like—I was like, just you just—I just got the flight; I was sober as a [ __ ] judge at this point, but imagine that sobers you up. Yeah, it does. And I was just like, let's just get this over and done with, like, just—just—I just want to go home or get—get to the apartment. And um, he pulls out 12 bottles. Yeah, 12 bottles of Don Julio Julio Tequila, scans them all through. And then last minute—which TR found quite hilarious—he just put some chewing gum on. It's like, you're going to mug me, and you're going to ask for some chewing gum as well. And uh, so I paid for that, and then he—he got in the—go in the car, and at that kind of point, I just knew it was a bit of a um—it was a—So, by paying for the Don Julio, had you—it was about 750 quid. Oh, right. It's serious sh—I mean, ridiculous bottles, but it was um—it was uh—it was it was a wild experience, but—but yes. So—so that happened, but where—where I was originally starting was the food in Columbia. The food in Santa Mara was um—was repugnant, like, and I—and I was just—which was the food was amazing, but in Sant Mar, this other Seaside town, which as you said was like—as your wife says—it's like watching Narcos. Right, got mugged there as well, but I won't tell you about that, but same sort of thing. But I was like, I just need some sort of form—um—normality. I need—and I saw the finger lickin' good signs; I saw the KFC, the kind of the lured lights, and I was like, Oh my God, that's the promise. And as you were saying about um your friend at the University of Sussex, it's like we—we're waiting for that kind of what we expect, and we—and we're almost like speeding up to what we actually get.

Well, I—I can remember a similar experience, getting stuck in quite heavy snow crossing the Rockies between Taos, New Mexico and Farmington, New Mexico. And all I can remember is we were terrified because there was no mobile signal. If you went off the road—this was a road where it's—it's incomprehensible to Brits—but you're driving through Northern New Mexico, and you will go for 40 miles without seeing a car or a house or a building of any kind. You know, once, after about 50 miles, you come across a truck stop; you go another 50 miles—not a single house—just wood. And the snow was falling, and the temperature was dropping, and I was convinced we're going to—you know, because it was getting increasingly snowy; we weren't in a 4x4—we're going to go off the road. I remember finally getting into Farmington and seeing a sign saying Burger King, and it was seriously—it was—it was—you—my reaction was—you know, it was like the promised land, you know, last—you know—and um—and—and—and of course, we got to understand—of course, with food—that there is the food that gets written about, which is the food that is remarkably good. Okay, typically—yeah, most of the time when we eat—our deepest unconscious psychology isn't attempting to uh effectively use food as a form of status signaling or a form of—you know—extraordinary entertainment; it's actually—is this okay to eat? Yeah, that's our evolutionary instinct. It's, you know—basically, the great thing about—they—I call this—this is called satisficing. Okay. Yes. And the reason McDonald's is so successful is not because it's the best restaurant in the world—and os—um—it's because it's um—it's incredibly good at not being bad. So when you go there, you know what you get; it's going to be entirely expected; it's going to be very predictable; the bun has been toasted for 1 minute and 39 seconds; there are no surprises. Is it—it's exactly what—like as it was last time; it's exactly what you expect it to be. And as a consequence, it's a very, very successful mind hack because you know—Nassim Taleb writes about this; he was baffled to see people eating at McDonald's at Milan railway station—you know, Milan, pretty good foodie city. And the point was the people weren't looking for great food; they were looking for food that definitely wasn't bad, but—but also—back to that—we—we talked about the promise, the promised land. So I eventually go to this KFC in S—Santa Mar, and I'm craving it. I—the food arrives; I get this—I get the full—full shebang; I get wings; I get tenders; I get [ __ ] everything. It was horrendously bad; it was the chicken was rank. What? KFC? The KFC? And I was like—I couldn't believe it, but—but—but what in terms of like the promise. And then we—you know, we've talked about like—we want these things—the kind of what we've got in our head and the expectations—be met with a—with a chain when you—when it is kind of that you see—you have to be absolutely—you know—this was—I supp—Ray Kroc's great, you know, sight—you have to be absolutely fascistic, consistent in what you deliver. Yeah. And I mean, it might have been a fake KFC or else the local franchisee has gone rogue. I don't—but—but so then to your point, but this one thing you notice when you try McDonald's or—or Burger King in a different country is you have the similarities of home, but the differences. Yes. And I've always found that—how you keep consistency yet—let—yet tailored—localized markets—that canundrum fascinating. The McDonald's—I got McDonald's delivery on Rappi, which is a—of Deliveroo. Yeah. I—I was like—I may as well be an ejaculating when I was eaing it because it was so—it was exactly it. I could've gone down to um the McDonald's in Liverpool Street. You—I mean, it was exactly the same. I was like—and that is the promise I wanted, you know what I mean?

Of course—of course—that—that—and of course that's also true of hotel chains that we forget. You know, if you're a frequent hotel stayer, quite often what you want is absolute predictability. You want to walk in, and you know—you know how the shower works; you—you know—you don't—you don't have that battle of kind of uh—you know—confronting surprises or unexpected components, you know, to the experience. And actually, you know, this—this concept of satisficing, which was kind of by a guy called Herbert Simon, who's kind of polymathic, won the Nobel Prize for economics—um—interestingly—but his—a surprisingly interesting person to win the award actually—um—but um—he—um—he interestingly made the point that in making decisions under uncertainty—his whole sort of shtick was decision-making under uncertainty—the avoidance of a negative probably looms larger than the attainment of a positive. You know, yes. Um—and uh—it is um—it's a useful tool to understand human behavior because everybody in human—in describing their own behavior—always talks about—I chose this because it was the best, and actually it probably isn't the best. Okay, you buy a Samsung television not because—for the same money—you might not be able to get a SL—you know—you probably could get a slightly better television, but there's a 10%—5%—whatever it is—risk with that other television that it might be a piece of [ __ ]. Yes, you know. And actually avoiding buying a bad television is much more important—both—I think that's why Subway is successful because I mean—I will uh—they—so—so for example, with coffee, there's Pret; there's Gail's; there's Black Street—Black Sheep coffee; there's—there's not many—um—sub—there's obviously sandwich chains like Pret; there's not—not many sub sandwich chains other than Subway. So everyone going there is probably satisficing something because it's not like the—but whereas a sandwich shop could be—I mean, it's literally like a—that's one thing that hasn't like—you know—it's literally a roll of the dice. You're in a new town; you fancy a sandwich; there isn't a—if you go a Subway, you know exactly what you're getting; you know exactly what you're getting; you have kind of some kind of agency over what you put in it—whether you put—yeah. I think some fancy restaurants make the mistake of—I think you should have one or two unchanging staples on a menu—Y—and maybe they make the mistake of being so keen to kind of—you know—overstimulate their customers, but quite a lot of the time, actually knowing that a restaurant has—well, if the worst comes to the worst, I can always have the X, cuz I—now—weirdly—interestingly—my—didn't you say WR something about a burger or something—while the burger is the best seller or something?

Well, yeah, there's a wonderful phrase coined by London ad agency called um—DDB—Adam and Eve—and their phrase is—what they call the burger effect—that when you look at a menu, once you've seen the burger, it's difficult to get past it. That's the—that's their view—that you have those things that are very sticky. It's interesting that nearly all places do a burger now, don't they? Because people who can't decide are always—you know—it's—it's rare to have a burger that's actually bad—not impossible—um—but there's also the thing—I think that a lot of restaurants do—I stopped going to Wagamama because there were various things there that were absolute staples. I didn't always eat them, but I—I knew I always enjoyed them. There was something called Surendra Curry, which was fantastic, and there was a hot coconut-based noodle soup which was quite spicy; I can't remember what the hell it was called now, but they took them both off the menu, since when I haven't been back to Wagamama in about 3 years because now I don't know whether—you know—I go there and I go—well, there might not be anything I like there. Yeah, it's uh—it's—it's—it's crazy when they take away those—those things that you—that you like—you love. So—so just back to these—what—actually—that's an interesting measure because restaurants don't have that metric; they know what's selling, okay, but they don't—unless they have a loyalty card, which I suppose KFC and McDonald's do—they don't know what's selling repeatedly. That's why supermarkets want a loyalty card because if you talk to—for example—um—the people at a Cardo, they don't need a loyalty card because they know exactly what everybody's buying; they—they actually apply two valuations to the items at a Cardo: there's how much it sells, and there's how much it repeatedly sells to the same people. Yeah, so repeat purchase will keep something—doct—Cardo—even if the overall volume sales might not seem to—to uh—justify it. And the reason for that is that—aart—something else—if there's something you really like that you can only get at a Cardo, you'll end up doing a whole 100-pound shop at a Cardo just to get the—actually, Erwin soda bread—I don't know if you're a fan of soda bread. Okay, there are a few things—tardo—there are a few Korean things—there's a Korean hot—or—switch—Cardo sells—and 50% of the reason I order from Cardo is because I know I can get those things there, and I can't get them anywhere else. Yeah, that's—that's why—so the bulk of our listeners are—Our Brands doing that. I actually think—I think that—I think that's a really interesting thing—if you get something which is a staple. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask you about—so—so satisfying—so sat—sat—supermarkets are the mecca of—physical supermarkets are the mecca of satisficing. You have—go down a little—or a Waitrose or a Sainsbury's—most people—P—even if you're—whether a young professional with a small basket or you're a—M—with a big trolley and a toddler in the front—you're going through habitually buying the things nine times out of 10. So you're getting the peanut butter you always buy; you're getting the uh—the sweet—there are different segments—there is a segment with Cardo—not give away there—but you know—there is a highly adventurous segment. Yes, within the buying—well, actually, of course, that will vary according to context as well. Yes. A lot of the time, depending on your level of price constraint, your level of risk-taking—you're absolutely right—most people—most of the time—are—you know—50% of the population effectively lead a kind of hand-to-mouth existence, and this is something I'd like to do something about—where essentially life is a cash flow problem; it's not a wealth problem; it's a cash flow problem. And in that case, you have a very strong incentive to buy things that you've bought before—even more so if you have kids. Yes. Okay. So a rich household can try and get their kids to try new foods, and if they don't like the food, you can CH it away. If you're a poor household—exactly the same with a cat—you don't take a risk with your brand of cat food because if you vary the brand of cat food and the cat just won't eat it, you just wasted a few quid. Yeah, so you buy the same cat food—same with kids. So how—how—so in terms of the adoption curve, right? So you have brands who are starting—you know—like the chocolate I sent you—and the—I can get you some more of that as well, by the way—that was sensational. So—so that is—that's expensive; it's—it's for Waitrose shopper, right? It's—it's venturesome; it's expensive; is premium. So that—that brand is—may struggle—is—we'll get to a point where you probably get the hipsters who are buying it; you'll get the—the moms who've got money. You also—you also have a group of people—they famously—one of the first things I learned—well, it must've been on my first week in advertising—sales of Fairy Liquid go up at Christmas—um—because people have guests in the house; they want to be seen buying a premium brand. So people—people—people effectively affording hospitality uh will tend to up—uptick; they'll tend to premiumize, and they might go to a deli rather than just going to an ordinary shop.

Hi guys, super—super quick one. So—so excited! Look, for years I've been badgering on about Hungry, the podcast—you probably bored to death—thanks for putting up with me—but Hungry is also an agency, and we look after one amazing brand called Islands Chocolate. We've had a great time over the year; we've won listings at a load of wholesalers; we've—W—Milk and More; we've got our first grocery listing coming very soon, which is very—very sick. But what I'm thrilled to announce is Hungry is merging with HC Consulting—my boy Harry Clark and his wonderful team; he's an absolute G. They do brand strategy, new business, business, and account management. But why I really love working with Harry and why we've got on so well over the last couple of months is Harry was actually the founder of U—the Booja-Booja ice—Le Brown pops. He's been in the trenches; he's grafted his face off; he's had the sleepless nights; he's had the turmoil; he's had the triumph; he knows what it is to be a founder; he is a founder, and he's got a proven track record in grocery, out of home—holy moly—dips, the gut stuff, Saval drinks, Remo gelato. So if you're a brand and you're—you're stuck; you're looking for like new business help; you're looking to scale—drop us a message; we'd love to chat. Thank you so much. Back to the old episode. Well, this is—shopping now has changed, so—so um—it's kind of—again—back to this middle ground we've been talking about. I actually bought—I actually had some people around, and I went to Gail's to—to pick up the—an order—just because people—just coming around for tea—want to SCS and everything, so they do pretty good SS—um—but Gail's interests me because there's something wrong—I—the food product is pretty good; I think you'll agree—there's something wrong with their queuing system, isn't there? Do—do you—do you experience the same thing—that the—the whole thing is a bit of a mess—that you—you know—you're not quite sure whether you actually take the bread off the shelf or whether you ask for the bread, and then there are people in front of you who are asking for coffee, and if they have a large coffee order, it then holds you up. Yeah, so there's something [ __ ] about that. Yeah, but you know—you know what—last time we talked about gratuitous perversity—a lot of the people in Gail's—the clientele—I like—I like the brand; I like the business—the clientele are some [ __ ] annoying people, you know? They're the kind of Audi drivers of the um—I—my—no one's [ __ ]. So you get a lot of the Chelsea footballers, and you get—looks like a sort of a Botox horse. Yeah, what's going on there? It's bizarre—is bizarre. But—one—they've done a couple of things well, so I—I think um—you know, we were talking last time about gratuitous perversity—so like doing something to kind of [ __ ] people off—but it—it does—psychologically—some reason—it does something well—they've—well, the interesting one—I—I don't know if I mentioned this last time—I've often thought it was an interesting idea—there's this fantastic place which is where Five Guys got the idea from—their fry—for their fries from—yeah, they went and studied this place called Thrashers in Ocean City, Maryland, which has three branches; it just sells fries; it sells them in a kind of pyramid. And the interesting thing—this is really weird if you think about it—for the US—they don't give you ketchup; you can have vinegar, and you can have salt, and that's it. Now that's not so weird to Brits—for Americans—saying no ketchup—that's—you know—that's a real kind of weirdness—doing these things that—so—so on the Gail's point is—they want to feel—so I've—I've interviewed the founder of Popp's Bakery, which is one of the best bakeries up in North London, but it's just two sites—two sites—and we were talking kind of before we hit record—should mention because—don't we—venture capital will take it over—open 400 sites and then ruin it. Last time we were talking about how scale kills magic; we—we'll get on to that again in a sec. But one of the things I said to me—you going to open any more sites? You've got three sites. He goes—no, we're going to keep our—we're going to keep these three bakeries, and we're going to do a brand bounce, which is—so—go into something completely different. So what they've done is they've leveraged—they've got the amazing [ __ ] uh—quasons and pastries and pasts—that again, due to scarcity, sells out perfectly on time at—at 1:00 p.m. every day, which means there's always queues—cues—status—blah blah blah blah blah—good concept—brand bounce, by the way—brand bounce. But then—what they—example of brand bounce is Caterpillar, which make heavy—we—last—moving equipment—moving into—but—but what they've done is they've gone into homeware because homeware is infinitely scalable; the Popp's brand is strong; people want a nice coffee uh cup to drink out of. And I was like—that's genius because you could—logic would say—go and open other 10 sites around London, and you could sell it online, which you can't do with B Goods—almost by definition—exactly. But then—so—so that was their point—but what he was saying about Gail's is their genius is that they feel outside of—

London again, opening one in—I think they opened one—where did I see them open one in? Uh, let's just say, and Chesham is not the best example, but but Seven Oaks, there's one Seven Oaks, yeah. So, so that Woking, there's one in Woking, that in in Woking, that feels like, oh my God, this is a neighborhood bakery.

So I think back to that gratuitous perversity point: it's like maybe the the kind of the the fact it's a bit cataclysmic, the queuing system versus a Starbucks, adds a sort of neighborhood to it, one. But then two, every single Gales looks different, so they they're not carbon copy. So the one I went to, the one in—I was in Finsbury Park uh last week—that is totally different; that's all pink and neon, the versus the one in, versus the one in Woking. So I think what they're trying to do is build this neighborhood feel. We have this thing because, of course, it's different outside London versus inside. We have this chain in Kent called Elite pubs, which is very similar, which is they're all uh there is no common branding; you have to go to the website to discover which is an elite pub and which isn't. You know, if you were really, really alert, you'd probably recognize similarities. I mean, they don't, you know, not everything is completely reinvented, but fundamentally they do quite a high degree of sort of customization to the individual building and the area, and so it's it's quite an interesting, it's quite an interesting concept because it is a it has the economies of scale of a chain pub, but it has the appearance to the consumer of a local.

Do you know who's done this really well is Honest Burgers? So actually I should introduce you to him. So he's he's now doing a degree in behavioral economics; he's a fascinating guy, and I—he's creating a piece of AI. They're very, very highly rated; they ex—I've never had one, actually. You never had an Honest Burger? No, they're so good. But what they've done, they've done, they've done a few things that is is again kind of I solved the scale kills magic conundrum. So first thing is they have the consistency of burgers; they have they have this kind of rule, which is 90% systems, so you have all the systems in place of a big um uh restaurant. Then they have this almost 10% rule, which allows for a bit of [ __ ] so they they'll let they will let employees in, even though they're not there, say in in Honest in Brighton or Honest in Totting, they a bit like Julie's meta's give away a um a free coffee when you like, is like they could they've got the agency to plop down a bottle of tequila and say, "Look, help yourselves, have a few shots." Keeps the magic again. It could [ __ ] up; it could [ __ ] up.

'Cause I remember always being, coming from a provincial background, I grew up and, you know, said a sort of small town in the Welsh borders. I went to university, and there was no university food on Sunday, Sunday lunchtime, and a group of us got into the ritual of always going to Pizza Express. I always had the fear, and Tina, I think um it was just every Sunday basically went to lunch and Pizza Express, and the one thing I did grumble about after doing this for practically two years—admittedly only during term time—and what I didn't realize, of course, is to the people working there, we're a bunch of students, here today, gone tomorrow, but at no point do they kind of recognize our regular custom by going, "Don't worry, you can have some free garlic bread." And I always thought, you know, on visit number 10, that's getting a bit weird, you know what I mean? It was always absolutely fine; you always got exactly what you wanted, but a kind of, you know, if you'd been there literally 10 weeks in a row, you something in the natural human perception of value exchange and fairness and relatedness expects the acknowledgment of your past custom. And so it's a very sensible way they could at Honest Burgers just effectively use that discretionary thing. Is if you have someone who comes back with their kids quite often, just give, you know, give the kids a balloon. They they do other funny things as well; they they they again, back to gratuitous diversity, is they they won't allow forks. So what what Phil and Tom was saying hit me with this: they won't allow forks. So so because again, there it it pisses customers off. They did a couple of things really well, so a bit they they they realize how do you eat your fries with your hands? That their whole point, one of their values is food. Oh, okay, food, food is connected; they believe when you eat something with your hands, it connects your food to your soul. And he was saying, do they give you wipes afterward? I think they would give you wipes, but they've got again, it's grous, but it doesn't really make sense, but they were saying there was absolute uproar when they opened in Chiswick. You can imagine all the uh the kind of the pushchair mums and the investment bankers on the weekend, where the [ __ ] fools, what I mean um so they do that, but then this is where it gets really interesting, 'cause that was my weird thing about opening bacon sandwich where you you would offer brown sauce but no ketchup—sheer willful perversity—exactly. And it's kind of it's a bit of a kind of mini Mario Puzo white, isn't it? Which is if people asked for salt or pepper, he'd have a you know he'd have an absolute wobbly, you see, exactly. And it's actually a little bit of saying uh it's a way of signaling that we have our own opinion about this food, and we're doing this for reasons other than simple naked capitalist greed; in other words, not being completely customer-focused in certain things does have, I mean, you know, I don't re I don't recommend it as a default position, you know, I don't recommend that you know uh organizations become willfully perverse all the time in everything; it would get really, really annoying. But it's something you can deploy, you know, in a very—you have to do it in a limited way. The well, the other thing they do is to keep the localization and keep the feeling of we are not a chain, even though they're at 50s, is every single uh Honest Burger site will have a unique burger, local to that. So Manchester will have cheese from Lancashire uh yeah uh the I like that, yeah, which is and he he said to me, goes, "Our accountant hates us because we we're doing for this [ __ ] one burger, which we may not sell part of," and I was like, and he was like, "But we don't care; we want—"

W does that actually? So in W is in Wales, not that there are many of them uh there's one in Mough. They have the little local produce AIS, which is really nice, and it actually got into private high because someone wasn't paying much attention to the shelf stacking; it it said local Welsh produce, and there were a load of bananas, which don't grow very well in Wales, to honest um but um I don't know where they got that idea from, but uh no, and those kind of little bits of um and actually you'll see that in in the design being adopted by Starbucks when they open new stores, what house? Well, they've gone from St in a sense, okay, if it's a bit like McDonald's making playing around with its logo by using it for directions, you know, first on the left, and then use the golden arch as just a kind of arrow um you when you're when you're very well established, you can afford and and in fact is beneficial to play around with your own sense of identity; in other words, you abandon the absolutely rigorous algorithmic attention to rule rules in design, and you uh you do variations on a theme. And so what Starbucks is doing is if they open a Starbucks in New Mexico now, it won't look like a Starbucks in Connecticut; you know, they'll deliberately add some local elements or some or some customization. Now it's worth noting that you probably you shouldn't be doing that in the early stages perhaps, but when you are established, you can afford to have that kind of, you know, to play fast and loose with your own kind of rules a little bit. That's so one thing I was going to ask you actually is have do you know Charlie Munger? Who's—he died recently—un one of the one of his rules that I absolutely love is this inversion rule. So basically, always invert, always invert, yeah. And I was writing about this in my newsletter. So he he he does the famous commencement speech at University of Southern California, and he basically says um he's asked to do a talk to a kind of bug-eyed wide-eyed American students, and he goes, "This is how to live a life of misery," and he I think the the five things he's like: inhale alcohol and chemicals, be resentful and envious, be unreliable uh and don't stand on the shoulders and and do not stand on the shoulders of others, I.E., learn from others. Do those five things, and you'll live a life of misery. So the whole point is is his famous quote is, "Wisdom, wisdom is prevention." So if you avoid those things, you will live a good life. And I I've been thinking about that, so like I've added some for myself: is I rush everywhere. So when I rush, I'm just like I'm not enjoying my life basically. So so one of my things, if I if I rush everywhere, but I would love to apply this to brand building in food, so like what would you say are like the if we're using the rule of inversion, what are the ways a brand could absolutely [ __ ] itself? So say say say we were trying to cannibal um take T—how how could Coca-Cola essentially dismantle themselves with the inversion rules? Like what were the things they'd have to do? This is similar to a game that was this was this is similar to a game that was invented by a guy called Jeremy Bulmore, I think, who is a great cre guy at the agency J. Walter Thompson, and he called this brand decide, which I love that in order to discover what a brand is, one useful mode of inquiry is what you might call to decide what the brand isn't. And all I can remember is you got to remember this was the 1980s, and you had After Eight Mints as a sort of premium after-dinner mint sold by Rowntree's in the little individual envelopes, you know, that you—I know, I love them, yeah—and the question was um what would you do if you wanted to kill the um After Eight brand, and the first suggestion was uh you introduce a um After Eight chewing gum. Okay, you move the brand in, and then someone decided they thought that actually an upmarket mint-flavored chewing gum might actually do quite well, and then someone else suggested After Eight bubble gum. Okay, and that's the kind of that that's the kind of piece of brand aside, you know, it's so totally inappropriate to what the brand is about um and what's interesting about McDonald's actually is that it's it it has innovated significantly, but it's always gone to the adjacent possible. So what the mistake that McDonald's hasn't made is it's introduced screen ordering, and it's introduced table service, but it hasn't removed face-to-face ordering, and it hasn't removed order at the counter. Now what a lot of supermarkets have done is they've gone, "God, it's cheaper to actually have self-service checkout, self-checkout than it is to have people, so we're going to have really few tills, and we're going to have loads and loads of self-service checkout." Okay, now I think okay, this is an example of where I think companies get it really badly wrong, which is their whole areas of company decision-making which are made by procurement or by the finance function with no input from marketing okay uh which are made entirely on the basis of financial expediency with no consideration given for the customer experience. So an example of this is when you park at my local M&S. Now M&S has got a lot of things right recently, and they're undoubtedly on a bit of a roll, the new chief executive who comes from a very strong lifetime retailer um uh you know, what do you think they've got right? Like because what yeah, what just—I know—quality of food, general, and the clothing; they they finally uh started to crack clothing. I think they they've still make a few mistakes. I think the uh the the way in which they decorate and lay out the clothing stores is fundamentally inimical to selling premium goods. Okay, there are certain rules in premium fashion, which is, you know, if you're paying um over the odds for something, you want carpets, and you don't want industrial lighting above your head. And when you pay your 80 quid, you want a rope handle bag. And I think I think Marks & Spencer's could learn from that; there are certain just heris rules, you know, that I mean you'll always notice this: the first rule of being an upmarket Turkish restaurant is you don't sell doner kebabs, which slightly annoys me because I really like the doner kebab, yeah. I think it's a great, great thing, yeah, but it it's now what happens at M&S in Seven Oaks is that someone, no one, no one with a marketing or customer-focused mindset has any say in this decision, and someone says, "Who are we going to get to run the car park because we can't make the car park free because if we do, people just park there all day and go shopping in Seven Oaks or work in Seven Oaks, and the car park will be full." So they obviously go to the person who is uh who offers the highest bid to manage the car park. Okay, if you let us collect the money, will um uh will'll pay you a certain amount of money to manage this car park. The person who offers the highest bid is almost certainly likely to be the person most ready to issue fines to people for overstaying or, in this case, what happens is uh bear in mind I am not criticizing M&S here; I'm simply showing it as an exemplar of what even really good brands do where they get it wrong by handing decisions out to people who are purely motivated by the financial side of the question and have no responsibility for the consumer experience. And that would be the people who who put in lots and lots of self-checkout tills okay, which is now led to an epidemic of shoplifting okay, but those people can lay claim to the financial saving, but they're not around to be responsible for the adverse consequences. Apart from anything else, in Waitrose Seven Oaks, quite a lot of people—it's a fairly minted area—do a whole weekly shop there. It's quite difficult to do a whole weekly shop in a self-checkout till. Have you seen—you need a trolley, you need a bloody—and I do the self-scanning, but there are a lot of people are over 60; they don't want to get an an app, and you know, and and and scanning your own groceries with a bloody mobile phone is a pain in the ass anyway because you need three hands. Okay, now in the M&S car park, you come in, there's a you pay, you use the app to pay for an hour, and the app says you have an hour left; you you drive out after precisely an hour, and then you get issued a fine through the post because number plate recognition, why? Because the number plate recognition system judges your duration of parking from entry to exit, not from the moment you pay. Now obviously, if you're a bit slow getting out of the car, you pay two or three minutes later than you actually enter the car park, right, yeah. Now in every single car park, whether it's pay and display, whether it's an app or whatever, which is normally policed by a human being, if you pay for an hour, you've got an hour from the moment you pay, right? They don't count the 4 minutes you were [ __ ] around finding the ticket machine or whatever it is, yeah. But in this system, because it's done by ANPR, that issue a fine if you if you arrive, pay 3 minutes later, and then leave 60 minutes later. Now locally, on my local Nextdoor, that's driving people apoplectic, that you know, for a long time, I think this is now—they finally got rid of it—now may still be the case in that same store; you needed a pound to have a trolley. Now nobody carries [ __ ] coins anymore, right? The I do not have a pound on my person at this moment; uh, I might have one in the car if I remember. Those are the kind of utterly ridiculous things that even great brands do, you know, utterly ridiculous. Because what you got to remember is that even if 95% of your customers, 95% of the time are really happy, if you enrage someone three times in a row, you lose a customer almost for life. And so that's another B; they're not looking at; they're not looking at the you know the the the long-term consequences of doing what they've done; they're simply looking at the short-term cost savings, and that's the real way to kill any brand, which is to focus so narrowly on short-term financial expediency that you forget the fact that you're in a relationship. So so that that would be a case where, for example, um uh you know, a a restaurant business—no nobody expects, you know, you know a personal welcome in a motorway service station; there are places like McDonald's which are relatively impersonal okay, but failing to recognize people and just failing to recognize the nature of a relationship so that each transaction basically starts from scratch—that's one really big failing, I think. You can I mean the other one is is you know simply by um uh anything you do that diminishes the—I'll go back to the SCARF model, okay? There's this great model, neuroscientist David Rock, and the model of hum things that humans care about that aren't really quantified and aren't well understood by economists; it's it's SCARF, which stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, Fairness, and okay, and people care about those things with to the depth of their being. If you do something in a restaurant which is an affront to someone's status effectively, that will that will arouse far more ey and likelihood of a boycott uh than uh having slightly bad food. What are the other ones? Status, certainty—mean by that's kind of like predictability—a good example of certainty would be um signs on the tube platform which say, "Next tube 7 minutes." Okay uh restaurants, we we'd rather okay if if we're at an airport and it says, "Flight delayed 47 minutes," we go, "Flight's delayed 47 minutes; I'll go find a go have a drink or I'll go to the lounge or whatever." Okay, if it just says delayed, we're in a state of uncertainty, and we find that inordinately more painful, yes, than we we you know. So quite often you can manage a downside in advance. I mean, there's a huge difference if you think about it between being handed a menu and being told that the hake's off okay, off the menu and then or versus ordering hake and then 10 minutes later they come back and say the hake's off the menu. Oh my God, I listen to I listen to a podcast with a Michelin-star chef, and one of they go through their food icks, and that's that's one of the icks in terms of managing expectations. It's totally fine; you hand someone a menu and say, "I'm terribly sorry, this," but why but but for some reason, apparently in loads of restaurants, they uh they say that they this the staff know from day dot that there's no [ __ ] hake, right? But they still go around the tables and say, "Order," the person orders, the expectation becomes, here, yeah, and then suddenly you go, "Go to the kitchen, come back." I mean, the brilliant book, you must have read the book by Will Goldfarb called—so I tried to get him on the podcast actually—and in terms of hospitality, CU—I asked—that that brilliant observation that the things you deliver that the person wasn't expecting yeah that you have in a sense the mind of a game theorist with the customer, not the mind of a you know of a kind of uh of a rule follower. You know, by what do you mean by the mind game theorists? I loved the way in which he went to you know one of the best restaurants in the world and said, "Okay, all of this was as you'd expect, absolutely amazing, but where could we do better than them? We can't do better than them with the food because their food is already topnotch," but he said, "When I ordered coffee at the end of the meal, it was just bog-standard coffee," and he went and appointed one—

Of his staff as kind of like the coffee smellier, basically. You know, and and you know, got into some massive, you know, pavon cappuccino machine. He also appointed, I think, one of the waiters as their beer guy, because he said that all these restaurants wank on about wine endlessly. Yeah, but 20% of people prefer beer. Yeah, we were talking about this last time. And so he, there were these sort of craft breweries who are literally so delighted, they were more sending them a free beer, I think, because they were so delighted that that are leading New York restaurant finally decided to take beer seriously.

But also I like about that book, he says he talks out the story, much rather have a conversation with a beer Samaria than the wine Samaria, because wine conversations are kind of wanky, aren't they? Whereas beer conversations, that's like the the status game in like all its Tom foery isn't it? You've never had um Joe ferini? He's coming on, he's coming on brilliant. Okay, so I will give a I will give a pre-plug here for someone I consider one of the greatest exponents of uh particularly of drink and Behavioral Science in that he's utterly brilliant in his knowledge of both. And so he's fascinating on either topic, but when the two topics overlap, it's absolutely pure magic. Yeah, well he's I think he lives in Stockholm now, so he was yeah, you're right. Yeah, he something in fact I'm going to message him after this so he to me on.

But the other thing I like about um what Will does is he talks about the story of the remembering something um about how uh like a significant fact and he realizes the story of the couple who've been in New York and they they're in these this Union Square Absolut and then he out someone goes around the back and brings around one of those shitty hot dogs from the hot dog stand, goes to them and says, "Oh, here's a hot dog," but they put on like a nice plate. It doesn't make sense. It's like a Jos of of a shitty hot dog for a burger stand with sweaty onions on a me star plate, but at that moment of magic you can't create again in terms back to the self checkout thing and the and sort of the perversity of it. Do you know Boo is a retailer up north? Yeah, in to bit like the coffee thing of like, "Hey, where what are our compet where what's the AIL heal and our competitors or like where are they what's their strength? It could be their weakness." So Boo, I think back in the last year got rid got rid of all self checkouts. And I interesting and I think that's they're only 30 they're about 20 stores all up north. They make their own um food cuz I I've got a vague memory that they sell to Amazon Fresh, is that right? That I think you get booths kind of what? Yeah, you they've got their own they've got their own brand of certain food stuff. Why why what sorry one more F, we'll go back to the can we just go back to the scarf thing? So so we've done we've done status consistency autonomy now an example of that would be people prefer a table they've chosen to a table that's imposed on them, even if it's the same table.

Okay, so one nice thing a restaurant can do is say, "Where would you rather sit? Or you can have any of these three tables." People are just happier with that, not because necessarily they get to choose the table, well sorry not because they wouldn't have chosen the table you wouldn't would have allocated them anyway, but simply because the act of making the choice makes you like something you've chosen more than something you that's imposed on you. Yeah, okay, even if it's the same thing. Okay, it's why we used to work with um Ford, and Ford always had lower um customer satisfaction figures than a few competitors, and we had to explain that, and they they got annoyed because they couldn't get this satisfaction figure above a certain amount, even though they'd made the cars better and better and better, and we had to explain it's because um so many of your customers are Fleet customers. They haven't chosen a Ford; they've been told they're driving a Ford, and it's not the same, even if you would have chosen a Ford, you won't like a car as much if your employer tells you that's the car you've got to drive versus if you've chosen that car. Um uh so that's autonomy. People people don't like being railroaded or tram railed. Um relatedness, you could actually a better phrase might be reciprocality or relationship, which is people don't like a series of Standalone transactions; they like an acknowledgment of their past custom um uh you know, and so treating regular customers differentially better than you treat in treat treat people who are just in off the street, and you know at scale that's a loyalty program perhaps, but in an in an independent restaurant simple recognition, simple as that. And then fairness is fairness uh you know, well okay, what really pisses people off is that those people got their food first, but they ordered after we did. Those kind of things really really upset people. Yes, now it might be that the thing you've ordered is a completely different thing, but again you can overcome that by pre-warning people in advance.

Perhaps one thing I want to ask you about is uh the Rick Rubin podcast. Yeah, CU I think you we we were here you were here like the day before you flew out to do that podcast in Italy. I thought it was amazing andu it when it was actually 5 hours edited down to about three and a half. Yeah, the conversation went on for ages. Yeah, yeah, he is I mean I think absolutely brilliant. Well, so few things on that, I suppose the first thing is um is yeah, he's got a quote which I just I I love and I think it's so applicable to marketing is is the audience comes last, and this is so applicable in music, right? So in music the audience comes last. It's like the the uh if if David bow or John lenon had done market research and and put the audience first, you wouldn't have you wouldn't have uh Ziggy Stardust. So yeah, yeah. And well, I think when the audience comes first, the the prime example of this and this is why it's shite is The X Factor, that other than maybe um that's when it's all like decision by committee isn't it? Really like it's voting that that's interesting because you you get two weirdly opposite things: you get the curse of averaging, yes, but you also sometimes also get I mean which you know let's face it the Beatles were beneficiaries of this, you also get kind of collective Insanity as well. And the Beatles undoubtedly, but you also get those weird effects where people are hugely influenced by everybody else around them, and you get the sort of fashionable effect. Um but the idea that more people collectively make better decisions is both true and wrong. It's complicated. So how you design decision making is a and and what you know one of the interesting things about the Dynamics of decisions, I always joke in he say, "Unless you're by the Sea, never open a fish restaurant," yes, because there's always somebody there who doesn't want to eat fish. Okay, and uh you know you have the that's the thing called minority rule where if everybody else is pretty indifferent but one person will only do B and won't do A, everybody ends up doing B. It's like why everything's kosher certified, that's why old soft drinks are Kosher are effectively kosher because it's not worth Coke maintaining a separate supply chain for kosher Coke. So I don't know what the mechanism so so because the quote that's um well not the quote it's just something I think about a lot which is the David famous David O ogy quote which is there's no statues of committees. Yeah, which is which is almost like the audience comes last. I mean if you're using a committee to bring out possible problems, if you're exploiting a good book by Matthew sad on this called Rebel ideas, if you're looking for dissenting opinion, if you're looking for um diversity of opinion and you're acknowledging that in your decision making process, then a group of people can be. Now David ogleby, for example, before he sent out any body copy for approval would show it to sort of 12 different people for their suggestions. So it isn't the idea that one person on their own without without a sounding board is necessarily perfect, and you shouldn't be influenced At All by the opinions of others, but at the same time average opinion for example bad, it can often be very very bad. You end up appealing to nobody because nobody's really that average. You know, yeah. So that CU I I think uh in your book and I uh it's like Innovation happens at extremes. So it's like you as you say it's the edges it's the edges. Yeah, the edges sorry is is I know it's it's absolutely true is is is kind of the the anthesis of that is the X X Factor which is outl as Harry Stars Etc, but the bulk of it is is this kind of move to the middle, move to average, move to kind of committee based decisions, when in terms of food I'm just trying to think of examples of like H how uh like new ideas can Bubble Up or how how people can go about thinking about creating new brands. So for example of an example of where the audience comes last could be kombucha. Kombucha Kucha is an example or or indeed or indeed of course the original McDonald's, because it had incredibly limited menu, it was effectively an imposition on the cuz the thing that it was replacing was American Dino culture where you had a huge menu with eggs over easy, everything was customized. Okay, and McDonald's effectively took the bet that people would actually sacrifice choice for Speed, and so they had a system which allowed you to prepare the food in advance of it being requested. That's crazy. And so when you think about it, it nothing seems remotely subversive about McDonald's now obviously because it's established it. Well, actually the KFC predates McDonald's. It's not the original Burger King, I think. No, hold on, the Whopper is older than the Big Mac, but I think McDonald's might be older than Burger King if I'm right. But but um but but at when when it first started, McDonald's was a deeply subversive; it was almost an example of beginner's mind that these people his mind that's a phrase in the Rick Rubin podcast. It's a Buddhist concept that sometimes you get remarkable Innovation from people who are new to a field and their ignorance is actually a strength not a weakness because they don't think to automatically do things the way that everybody else did them. Yes, you know, there were certain practices in uh restaurant management which were deeply enshrined, and of course McDonald's broke most of those rules, you know that you must be able to ask for your eggs to be made, they're made on demand, that you know, and McDonald's by effectively shrinking down the menu massively to about five items I think originally went completely in the opposite direction. Yeah, so the whole the opposite of a good idea is a good idea, good idea exactly that. Yeah, the so so with the Rick rubben podcast, what did you the Kucha is an interesting idea, and I have to confess that someone came to me about 10 years ago and thought there was a potential market for this fermented tea drink which was popular in I can't remember where it is Mongolia or something. It was China, it was China. Yeah, I remember thinking, "Yeah, good luck with that one," which crazy, but that's the a great example of like where where the audience comes last. And I'm trying to think almost so the the other one would be Little Moons, you know, the by the way I don't really understand those. Yeah, well, so so what's the appeal? I don't get it. I buy them, but and you know my kids seem to like them, but I don't really get the I don't really get the whole thing. What's it about? That's it's like bubble tea. I can't decide whether bubble tea is a valuable addition to my beverage repertoire or a load of old bollocks. I really can't. I've never had bubble seat that's never really it's worth a try. It's I mean in hot weather I me particularly I mean I can see the value of it actually having a kind of stimulant drink which is cold and it's it's is quite interesting. The thing I find weird is uh kimchi. Oh, I like that. Yeah, I love it, but like the actual the thought of like but then think about this. I mean, you know, I think quite a lot of food is the beneficiary of associations rather than the food itself. I've always thought about sushi. Okay, it comes from Japan. We know Japan has very ticated an eccentric food culture, and yet if Sushi didn't exist and you're watching TV and you're told that these poor people who are refugees in some African country were reduced to such poverty they're reduced to eating raw fish wrapped in rice with a bit of leaf around it, you wouldn't go, "What an exciting culinary opportunity," you go, "Poor sods, I hope that never happens to me." Yes. And so you know the other one that always baffles me is that that soup thing with a leaf in it that you get into Japanese restaurants. Miso soup, miso soup. You know, if someone if Hines brought that out, every go, "What the hell are they thinking?" The stupid Leaf in the thing doesn't really taste of anything. There are a few white lumps in the bottom cuz it's Japanese. What I don't get different rules apply on that association thing is when I was traveling is I met a lot of people who found the concept of an English breakfast utterly repugnant. And so these people like they were Canadians uh Canadians have a kind of English that's that's what I was basically saying, but they're like, "Canadian bacon is not bacon, a lie; it is not bacon; it's taken from a completely different part of the pig and it doesn't deserve you you guys have beans on your breakfast." Oh, that beans thing is uniquely it's very very weirdly the whole baked bean thing is a weird British outlier. So the beans thing would strike them as completely bizarre. And of course there are British there are full English breakfast purists in the UK who regard the beans as an aberration that you shouldn't have them. My view is that if they're in a separate pot, acceptable, and then you can you can merge them with a ho if you want to, but you shouldn't just put beans on a full English breakfast adjacent to the other items. That's an interesting thing back on the food hips, but then I went to Spain, and they have donuts for breakfast, and that struck me as the most repulsive thing I've ever seen because the idea of having something sweet for breakfast just doesn't in the British mindset doesn't feature at all, does it? I mean that's weird. Yeah, that's poptarts might have made a little bit of progress, but other than that I can't think of you know generally we want our breakfast to be Savory. Yeah, the the what I don't but but a lot of these hips is is almost like a weird status play here is like if you go to a posh have a posh full English with with the the tin and the beans in the little uh Ramin R yeah like that's suddenly not cool. It's like you've got to go to the the there's that whole thing now on on social media which is like going round to the best um uh kind of greasy Spooner like, "No, I'm glad you see I'm glad we've discovered that cuz you there's Nils just off the A2 not far from graves end uh M2 my nails it's a brilliant transport Cafe and and just in you know it's just just off the motorway in Kent uh really really I'm I'm really glad that the really good breakfast uh the British breakfast food has had a well-deserved Renaissance because you know I can't I think mean George bernon Shaw someone who said it's very easy to eat well in the UK you just have breakfast three times a day um and of course the two meals at which the British really excelled were breakfast and tea lunch and dinner we've got a you know we've got to you know effectively admit surrender to other Cuisines not for everything pies for example I mean that's a extraordinary the Brit the French for a pie is UNP they haven't they haven't got their own word for pie and so you know the fully enclosed pie that's a miraculous so I interviewed a guy who um the uh who had a pie restaurant in London at the Rosewood. Did you ever go the pie room? I I heard about it. I never went there. Fascinating guy so he he T me talked to me all about the history of Pies. Yeah, and he was saying pies were back in the day like like like now we've got chicken shops they were everywhere. Yeah, yeah, AB they absolutely everywhere how you know p and mash you would so you know the pie Mas gravy yeah you like the eagles and [ __ ] like that what how would if you were to be if I was to say to you right Rory you've got I'm going to you've got to kind of give pie and mash shops I'm talking about the East End ones like a Renaissance and like put them on on the same cuz how does they how do they come? I think that would succeed if you just gave it a Twist. Yeah, but that's what I'm trying to work I don't know what the twist is off hand, but I think you could actually um uh you you could revive that quite easily because again it's rather like my bacon sandwich idea if you just focus on one thing, people assume that if you only do one thing you're going to do it pretty well. Okay, you know uh and and therefore if you if you what you if you create the brand world of Pies as it were uh I think I think you could there are many many places where that could succeed. I need to think about the margin you'd have to do something really weird with the pricing like the pi cost 15 quid or you know I'm not maybe not that much, but the pi cost a lot of money, but then the mash is free. You do a whole lot of weird things with that. You know, you do weird things with the pricing. You could almost do some create a weird story around the the [ __ ] crust. Yeah, yeah, it's a bit like how how I always joke about this that Brit the British have very good food, but it all has to be portable. So we invented the sandwich, we invented the pie, we invented the Pasty. If you want your food to be portable, there's nothing to touch this country. You know, everything and of course the Cornish PTI was a mining device that you took it because you had to eat it with your hands and it had you had to take it down the mine. The sandwich was the 's sandwich. He was gambling; he was like gambling; he wanted something quick to eat um one so out of all the I loved it because there was a sandwich McDonald's has just opened outside sandwich in a kind of gas station complex, and they put up a big poster saying, you know uh hello sandwich welcome to your new restaurant, and I thought there's a beautiful circularity to this, which is the town which gave rise to the Earl which gave rise to the concept of the sandwich which effectively G you know essentially gave rise to the burger and then finally McDonald's comes back to sandwich. It's like you know is the Burger life going full circle is the burger from Germany hamburger uh god um the Frankfurter is are definitely German. In fact, they have a to be honest a slightly unhealthy affection for those slightly weird pork sausages, don't they? They're [ __ ] rank. Well, they there's a thing called curry verst in Germany which if you get it done well can be okay um who was it who wrote that absolutely scathing review of the German Donna Kebab um that was um was it Charles Corin? Charles Corin I read that and the one thing I entirely agree with him about is the [ __ ] Kebab is a lamb based meal right because the Germans don't seem to eat lamb at all. I don't know what lamb consumption is really weird okay cuz Americans don't eat lamb at all really. No, obviously New Zealanders and Australians unsurprisingly eat a lot of lamb, and I was at this quite sophisticated dinner with you know the odd Nobel Prize winner kicking around and the host was Lebanese and so one of the things they served were effectively Lebanese skewed kebabs of lamb abely fantastic and these Americans I mean these were seriously like professors at Ivy Le universities going, "I'm like eating a sheep here like I'm you know I'm actually consuming sheep."

I what the [ __ ] are these people in Wales right it's a staple meat, but the the Dona Kebab should be a [ __ ] lamb, you know, should be a lamb-based thing, right? Well, German Don cbab apparently is B for chicken. What the [ __ ] going on there? Yeah, that is crazy. So I went to Berlin once, and the kebabs there are extraordinary, because they have like a FIA uh bread, which is just out of this world. Um, they got a very clever gimmick, the GDK, which is the um waffle Brad, which is a clever gimmick. Yes, but chares Corin absolutely hated it, didn't he? He hated it too. Yeah, yeah, he he he has those those ways.

One thing, so with your book and um is this is more for like kind of our listeners who who analyze data to make decisions? I just need to before I do anything, I just need to check the timing. I'm sure said oh P when I saw 5:00 just in case, then I'm pretty yes Anna text me say it was six, and you're right, it's six. Okay, I relax. Sorry about that. Yeah, we'll probably wrap up about or if you want actually just so whil I wrap up, I you can go into that. Everyone will be gone now by now. Okay, super. I'll be fine. Whatever. Um, so the uh yeah, so so I've obviously read your book, is absolutely amazing, and I know I let me tell you why I find food so interesting. Okay, it's because comedy tends to be very good because there's very rapid feedback. Okay, you learn very quickly whether you're funny or not, and that's because of laughter. Okay, if people aren't laughing, or worse still are throwing things at you, you know very quickly you fail. Now imagine how difficult it is, let's say, to hone a comedic set in an imag with an imaginary audience, which is is very very slow, very poor sense of humor, so they laugh 5 minutes after you tell a joke, much more difficult to become good at comedy is you get slow feedback versus if you get fast feedback.

Now what's so interesting about the restaurant, the QSR category, the food category is it's a fast feedback category. You learn very quickly whether you've got something right, not immediately, it's not like comedy, but you learn very quickly whether you got something right or whether you got something wrong, and I think this is why I think will B gara's book is so important because I think he's learned lessons in the restaurant industry much faster than he would have done if he'd been in the banking industry, for example. You know, if you want to know what keeps your well, most people stay with their bank for 15 years, so when you do some customer service innovation in banking, it's literally kind of seven years before you really know whether it works or not, whereas the restaurant industry learns from its failures very very fast, and so as a result, in kind of Darwinian terms, I think it's really really interesting because it's an industry by the way, you know, bear in mind that on the site of most successful restaurants, five previous restaurants have failed, so so it's it's a very very Darwinian world, but what I think you could do if you're a bank is look at what the best restaurants do and copy it.

Cuz one thing I I loved on your Chris Williamson podcast is when you talked about how comedians are essentially um evolutionists or or like U, what did you say? Effectively you you there are very few bad ComEd there are comedians I don't like. Okay, they're obviously not bad comedians because they're filming they're filling stadia. Okay, there are comedians I don't find funny at all. I won't name them, but I mean uh um but nevertheless, okay, uh you know very quickly whether you you know generally um you you can practice and perfect and hone your comedic routine because you know when it's working and when it isn't. Yeah, but didn't you so it's a very Darwinian thing in the sense that you know the bad comedians either change what they're doing completely or they get out. Yes, there's a link to Evolution with that. What what would you say is the link to Evolution and food? Because another example of this, you could almost say Vegan meat is like a weird it's also because you are contending with really weird changing Fashions. If you think about it, I mean when I first ate sushi, bear in mind it would have been about 1990, 1991, I found the whole concept you know repellent, okay, and now it's a mainstream food, which you know the sabes in 7even Oaks has its own sushi bar, for example. Um uh you you have extraordinary changing Fashions. It's it's effectively an accelerated microcosm of the marketplace from which you can learn more precisely because change happens so quickly and because people respond so quickly. Also I I just find you know the whole um invention of things like Gusto for example fascinate me, you know.

Yes, because Gusto really really intrigues me because as I said when I first learned of the concept, it didn't really make any sense to me. I go well why would you do that when you can just get a cookbook, get a recipe, order the ingredients, make the food? What's Gusto doing that actually adds to that? Well, logically nothing, but it turns out that when the food arrives in exactly the ingredients arrive in exactly the same ratio, you do end up making it, and you do end up enjoying it a lot more than you would have done an equivalent ready meal for less money probably um uh with you know undoubtedly you know uh better taste, the on the individualistic level I think, and I I'm interviewing Seth Goen. Have you ever met Seth Goen? No, I've never met him. I'm I'm quite a big fan. I mean actually his book Purple Cow years ago, so good, was probably one of the sort of two or three books which kind of flipped my brain, you know, back in the this would have been the late '90s I guess. Yeah, so so so interviewing him next week after next, but he fantastic. Yeah, which I'm really looking forward to, but he he he's obsessed with cooking, and he says there's a lot of parallels between cooking and marketing and I think or or Alchemy. I mean there's literally Alchemy in [ __ ] cooking abely combinator combinatorial genius. Yeah, I believe I believe ra ra a bowl of ramen is a good um analogy for good or bad organizations, so you because it can be rubbish, can't it? Well, no, but essentially you have you have the egg, you have all the you have all the moving Parts which is the egg, the uh do you want to check that? No, no, no, I don't want that. I think that might have been the TV actually. Oh, you have the the egg, the the pork, the noodles, the veg individually they're okay, the culture the culture I believe the culture of an organization is is the broth you pour the broth on that [ __ ] and everything comes together, and those parts start moving, and I think broth it's orchestrated, it's orchestrated, so but I think the broth is the analogy of what culture is. It you can take these dear things, no broth, nothing Works, broth culture works, culture is almost like the broth brings that's a brilliant analogy, you're right, absolutely right, which is it enables what a culture does, enables people who are the of themselves not necessarily that remarkable and in some respects very different to come together in a cohesive hole. Yeah, like because if you don't have the egg, the egg I think the squidgy egg is I would if you gave me imagine I was to give you a squidgy egg which has been dunked in tea, like what the [ __ ] is that? Suddenly you put it with with the broth and it just all works. Yeah, there's a Korean thing dolot bibing Bob which is the the rice in the hot bowl, and that's an interesting thing cuz it arrives looking Immaculate and then you mess it all up with your chopsticks and add and the chili sauce is actually the unifying force there, which is absolutely remarkable thing, but what What's um what what Seth talks about is how um cooking on the most when you're cooking for yourself is this kind of this is you you approach this problem which is I need to cook a meal and you get that really far last feedback we were talking about which is I've got X in the cupboard um I need to put this together, does it work? Yes or no? How can it be improved? And it's that in terms of that's of course to my original point which is start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Yes. Yeah, but evolution you're like okay I put too much chili sauce in that yeah uh fajita for example, next time I'll do less, is that rapid rapid rapid feedback um but I think yeah the cooking cooking and and food I mean that's why endlessly fasc it's very interesting to look at the origins of things. I love the fact that there is actually he's dead now but there was actually a guy called nacho um after whom naos are named, so the guy was called I think Nao is the Spanish short form of igno and he was called ignio, he ran some just south of the Texas border in Mexico, some women I think might have been military wives came in who'd crossed the border for the day and they were hungry, but he'd run out of ingredients and he got some basically he got some cornbread and then cooked it to a crispiness covered it with cheese and whatever he had left over and he was actually the original so nachos are called nachos because of a guy called nacho amazing yeah right was somewhere some south of I think was place called Eagle Pass Texas and just south of the Mexican border I think I've got this right, there's this guy called ignio um Nao always known as Nao who effectively is the ab abolute Godfather of that and it came out of necessity as well, it came out of him not having enough food left over at the end of the day, but these people wanted something to eat so he effectively melts cheese and a few other things over these corn chips. It's yeah I love the stories in food as well, so what one thing Seth Goden has and I we we've talked about kind of evolution um and and and food and marketing. Seth had a background in kind of philosophy, what how would you say and he he's got a quote which I'm actually I'm going to ask him because marketing is Humanity, humanity is marketing. I was like I don't know what he means, that's a big claim. Yeah, yeah, that's no, but emphatically what you have to be preoccupied with as a marketer is the human Dimension, and you have to be disproportionately obsessed with it because those human factors whether they're psychological perceptual whatever tend to get um averaged out or lost in the process of running a larger and larger business. Now I always think you know if you if you grow up in a restaurant or a shop or a cafe it's like a free MBA right because you understand all the components of a business, you understand you know Supply Logistics, you understand pricing, you understand margins, but you also understand um the human factor. You can't afford to run a shop or a cafe, you know that's why Margaret it's only think it's coincidence that richy soon and Margaret Thatcher both grew up in shops um and uh because it gives you an understanding of how a complex system works in its entirety. Now what tends to happen is you get people who just go to school, go to university and then they get a job in finance or procurement or whatever, they understand the part that they're trying to optimize, but they don't understand how to optimize the whole, so so back to the honest Burg, but if you're running a cafe you realize that it doesn't matter how good the food is if you treat a consumer, I the example I always give jokingly is you know if you go out for the best meal of your life, but one of the the prongs on your fork is misaligned it'll ruin the meal 100% in the same way if you go out for a meal that's fantastic, but something's wrong about the I mean this is what bothers me about gals actually, there's something wrong with the queuing system, and I actually think that for the money you pay for a coffee and Gales they should [ __ ] will bring it to the table right rather than making you stand around like a dick waiting for someone to make you a coffee, they should say okay go and sit down I'll bring you the coffee because you're then holding up the queue which makes the queue longer and longer, is this a deliberate attempt to lengthen the queue so it creates social proof of demand? We don't know, but there's something there about the queuing system at gailes that really RS you could reverse engineer the success of gals, what is going I know lockdown you know lockdown in terms of things kicking off and lockdown and sticking around sourdough baking was was a huge Trend that I think yeah that's one thing I definitely that's part of it, but to have that scale and you know the chocolate I sent you yeah that is the mocker so that if you get hot chocolate from Gales they using Islands they yeah so I mean so they're like I don't work directly with them but like they they they're great but but what I don't understand because you never see something that that prolific and that premium part of it is that we're changing the way we shop in general so people tend to I mean it's worth noting okay that bakeries particularly you go up north well Gregs is a bakery right but if you go to most ordinary towns where they're Ordinary People there's a bakery with a massive great queue out the side okay it's not like the concept what they did was they took that and made it Posh actually you know the the I if you only got to go to any ordinary Town London doesn't really have much a bakery culture but you know and actually those bakeries have probably died in the towns where Gales is now successful but there used to be a bakery which sold cakes generally very sweet cakes often very pink covered in icing you know all that sort of stuff but it's a popular food you know that's not a you know there was there were ample proof points that people like that kind of food and if you look to be honest at an awful lot of Trends in food it's doing basic food really really well yeah I think it's doing you know it's doing a because and doing one thing yeah doing and that's the other trend is or or two things I love the Australian um uh business with there's a Serial entrepreneur who creates these restaurant businesses in Sydney and the latest one's wings and tins and you just have sell two things you sell wings and you sell Tinys so you have really interesting beers lots of variants of chicken wings that's it wings and Tings there I think of wings there's a wings and Tings wings and Tings in Brixton um where they're two separate things back back to the Rick Rubin thing just cuz I find him I think his book The creative act of a creative way whatever is is I think it's absolutely genius I think it's like a a way of being the creative act a way of being the full title yeah and I think I actually I interviewed a chef um called Thomas ster who's got a restaurant and he he what he he kind of touched upon Rick Ruben we didn't we kind of inadvertently went there but I was saying like how what's your approach to creativity I read the book and brick talks a lot about music producers and Tom was saying what you're doing is you're the being part is taking in every single restaurant you've ever eaten as a chef every interesting every um thing you've he he's from Herford which is on the Welsh border abely yeah uh taking in all of that and that all those things pulled in together and then put on the plate that is that's originality it's all your unique things yeah actually a lot of it is theft by which I mean is you take things and repurpose them yes the the idea of complete originality is probably um uh uh you know that most as I said it gets back to the adjacent possible yeah the an awful lot of what what what works is taking what works of something else and then repurposing it recontextualizing it reframing it and you know the great thing with chefs is they you know one of the reasons why I think think food has become much more interesting is that chefs have become more honest in that they are influenced by the food they themselves eat they become a little more selfish do you remember who who was the mishan St Chef who who said that he thought the best pizza was Marcus I'm interviewing his his head chef uh two weeks yeah I I find the parallels between marketing and cooking and and the creativity I think that sweet spot is so that fascinates me but also that business of setting the expectation is really interesting the whole business of how you design a restaurant you don't necessarily advertised not in the early days but the restaurant creates through everything from typography to Furniture to everything else it creates an expectation which then has a huge influence I think on how on what you experience and also uh what will G Guardia says or geria is uh service is black and white hospitality is color that was weirdly someone who applied for a job wasn't it what's the difference between service and hospitality and and the idea is that service can be reduced to an to an algorithm it can be reduced to component parts yes you see whereas Hospitality as color it's effectively a very different thing it's a beautiful answer to the question isn't it yeah so but what but what what do you think he means by the what what like that that second part I get the service cuz the service is repeatable it's consistency well it's the bit you're trying to repeat the bit you can kind kind of measure the bit where you know whether you got it right or you got it wrong you know it's in the realm of kind of have we met these certain criteria yeah and then hospitality is well um there's a Japanese concept called Caro Theory by a guy who's at the University of Tokyo who argued he did a lot of work in the Japanese consumer electronics field uh back in the day and he argued that products and you could apply this to Services as well had three attributes and they're they're very different okay there's table Stakes you have to not fail at anything marketly okay so that would be if you bought milk repeatedly and every time you bought this brand of milk the carton leaked right you wouldn't buy it again doesn't matter anything else you've done it's a waste of time because the carton leaks okay Y and that's what's called I think sort of you could call it table Stakes or basic attributes there what what what's required to be in the category in the first place then there are performance attributes which are how good are you at doing the thing that the thing is intended to do how good the milk is within the thing whether people can tell that it's good milk you know whether it you know it has reasonable shelf life all those things and generally yeah there's a linear return on Improvement there and then there's this third component of things which would be Delight attributes where they're things you weren't even expecting and as a consequence of not expecting them you really notice them and they create a kind of emotional effect which is out of all proportion to their cost but they're often quite tangential to the main function of the product so the example I always give is if if you're in consumer electronics you have a cassette player and obviously it has to play cassettes and it has to work and it mustn't mangle the tapes it mustn't catch fire it mustn't do any of those terrible things which would basically be you exit the gene pool at that point okay and then you have the performance attributes the cassette deck are things like battery life and sound quality and you know wattage through the speakers before they start distorting those are the basic performance attributes and then the Delight attribute in a cassette deck was the eject mechanism so if you you you you won't remember cassetes but you remember DVDs do you no no I don't what talking about when you you press eject and it goes it has like a counterbalance damping mechanism and it hisses in a beautiful hydraulic way you o that's lovely I'd really like that nice action as Alan Partridge once said on the other hand if you press eject it just goes clack functionally there's no difference between the two okay there's no reason to spend money on the eject

Mechanism, but precisely because you can make it lovely and people aren't expecting it, that's where you should spend your money.

Now, Will Gara's point was, I think, about the spoons he chose for the ice cream in the central Courtyard of a museum. He found these Italian spoons; everybody went crazy. CU, they were plastic, but they were particularly lovely, and they cost a fortune. Everyone saying, "Do we need to spend X cents per spoon?" But as he pointed out, he said, when everybody finished, they couldn't help going on about the spoons. That was the thing they noticed because it was an area of disproportionate. That's why it's called Hospitality Beyond Reason. Yes, you there's a certain amount to it which is service, which you can codify and reduce to an algorithm, and then there's the thing that you weren't expecting.

And but why I why I love restant and in McDonald's, by the way, that probably isn't anything to do with food. It's like handing the kids balloons, right? Or it's the toy and a Happy Meal, or whatever it may be. Yeah, I I actually think for my own personal I I when I'm drunk and I go to the service um I always go to the one the ones worth roundabout for that expectation. That's bizarre. That ones worth roundabout. It's like a little bit of Los Angeles has just descended on London. I don't understand. Completely bizarre thing. Why, you know, the archs are like totemic, they're like up like that. It is kind of like that Cathedral of consumption. I'm like I when I'm [ __ ] I'm like looking at it going, "Oh my God, it's like I feel like I'm like I'm getting pulled into the mothership of glutting."

Cuz you live in Sur, do you? So you drive out of-- I used to live in Fulham. He live in F? Yeah, and then all my mates live in um sort of B, so I'm always round that part of London, so it's like the the perfect uh place to go. But what I love, the surprise and delight, and I don't know if this is intentional or not, when the chips are in the bag and there's an O, it feels like there's an overflow of chips. I don't know. Five Guys are the is the extreme example. Extra scoop. Yeah, it's the extra scoop, but that feel, that does something to you. And also like I think the surprise and Delight is the the wonderful selection of sauces you can get. I I think McDonald's SAU are the best; the barbecue, the ketchup, curry sauce is fantastic. The KFC now does it with the extra hot one, doesn't it? So you've got a choice of those when you have chicken dips. Yes. Yeah, they they've got they've got an extreme one, and they've got barbecue, and they you typically get some sort of sort of sweet chili thing, don't you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But those things are exactly that; it's that you you know, and actually um you can have a meal that's ruined because they forget to put the sauces in the bag. Oh well, I've had that numerous times. It's rather like the most the most failed the most failed attempt to create a low-budget own brand version of a product was, I think, Sainsbury's in the 1980s produced their own version of the pot noodle, okay, which was called something like noodle pot or whatever it was, you know, and it was the same Packaging, but there was no sachet, and you just opened the lid of this thing, and it was just like you've been cheated, you know, you felt completely bereft, yeah, because the whole point of the pot noodle is that weird flavor sachet that you put on the top, cuz that creates the yin and the Yang of the whole thing. It's the it's the Alchemy. I never thought I'd be talking about the the Buddhist Union of opposites in a pot noodle, but um that's the Alchemy of the thing. If they had if the pot noodle had never had that sachet, it wouldn't have gone anywhere. The pot the sachet of the pop noodle is their kind of version of hospitality.

The other reason I love food is like there's there's there's basically every single every single touch Point; there's there's there's a unique story to tell. Yeah, but I think the thing I've seen you I've um listened to is how Guinness turn their uh their bug into a feature, the fact it takes ages to serve and is actually a bit of a, you know, bar staff don't like so but but the fact it takes longer psychologically, that is the way you say it, turn turn into a reward, turn into anticipation, to reframe, reframe you to deant tree yet. Have you heard the de-- Oh, don't everybody yesterday was talking about the Devon show which supposedly does the best Guinness in London, and of course it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because if you sell a lot of Guinness, it's really really fresh. All this stuff about wood taste. You've never had it until you've had it in Dublin is kind of contextual bollocks, but that's my argument, which is why why I said you can open a fish restaurant by the sea is because fish tastes better when you're by the Sea. Rosé wine tastes better when you're by the Sea. Don't ask me why, but there are a lot of foods which require context to be fully enjoyable. Oh, it's like yeah, food you have on H and you bring it back, it's just no no. This is the famous example of someone who who was in the Caribbean and bought the rights to a banana lure which while there in the Caribbean tasted and perno outside France tastes like [ __ ]. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. RAR perno, you you you drink them outside a French cafe, it's fantastic. You go buy a liter bottle to take home, you won't drink it for 5 years, and the same thing happened with with this person who bought the rights to this Bond cure. They they took it back and invited their friends ran to South London with great Fanfare saying, "You won't believe it, I bought the rights to this drink, I think it's the most magical thing," and they all basically sipped, said, "This is disgusting," yeah, because it doesn't work in London. Yes, you see, and that and and when I say that when you're by the Sea, and it would make sense if this were an evolutionary adaptation, though it might not be. Okay, so I asked the question, this is the question I was had as a question for business school students, why are there more fish restaurants by the Sea, and what you might call the black and white answer is, you know, low cost of distribution, access to raw materials, etc., but quite a lot of that stuff's probably come all gone all the way to Billingsgate and come all the way back again, right? Yeah, it's not really anything like, well, you know, we've got really wonderful supplies of fish necessarily. It's simply that when you're by the Sea, you feel fish and chips by the Sea just tastes a lot better than fish and chips in an inland park. Yeah, and that's just how it is. It's like it's like imagine having a Guinness in a Costa Coffee cup. It's the same like it's yeah, same thing. I mean, it's interesting they put a lot of attention into designing that pint glass, isn't it, the Guinness pint glass? Well, and also the have you seen that which I don't know if there a load of absolute bollocks. No, no, the ultrasonic p with the Guin nit. What's your take on that? Have I seen it? I've own one. I brought one. My my daughter who's 22, my proudest achievement as a parent, nothing to do with their educational attainment is the fact that both my daughters drink beer and they're really into beer because I'm not spending the rest of my life buying the little [ __ ] Rosé to get right. Okay, and um so I'm really proud of that, and one of my daughters actually is a major Guinness drinker, ably loves it the best, and I'm so proud of that, but I actually bought her a Nitro surge for Christmas, but as but what so that t ien actually it it's it first of all it makes pouring a joy, and it someone reviewed it and said it's as good as a bad pub pint. Now actually that's not bad actually at home. I think that's a bit unkind. I think it's better than that because it does recreate the whole tactile experience to within a fairly high degree of of of fidelity. I think Nitro surge, I'm a big fan. Why do you think so? Guinness have now become the most selling pint. I think it was last year. The other the other big what happened that what was why why did Guinness, it's been around years? Maybe maybe they've always wrestled with an interesting problem which is it's actually the least calorific beer, and yet because of its dense nature everybody assumes it's the most calorific. Yes, so it may be in part that that message has got through, but I you've also got the zero alcohol Guinness which is really really interesting. That's delicious. Now here's a good tip, the can of of Guinness zero alcohol okay is slightly less than a pound if you go to the Royal sank ports golf club or sink ports, no one knows how to pronounce it uh in Deal, and you ask for a pint of non-alcoholic Guinness cuz golf golf if you think about it, golf courses, most people drive to a golf club, so there's a limit how much you can drink if you don't want to wrap your car around a tree, and so they sell quite a lot of the zero alcohol Guinness, and then what they do is they pour the whole pint of zero alcohol Guinness and they say, "Do you want me to top that up from the tap?" So you get the full head, and that I I actually told Guinness about this because I said that's a really important Behavior because first of all the zero alcohol Guinness is a very very good approximation of the taste of a Guinness. What it is about zero alcohol beer that it's finally got good in the last few years? Absolutely fascinating. What I find interesting so Matt Ridley's got this thing which is um about two ideas having sex, you know, that have you-- I love that. I want to ask you. He's written the Red Queen, he's written the Rational Optimist, he's written evolutionary ideas. Yeah, uh sorry, he's written my friend, he written um what is it? How how Innovation Works or Happ, I think there's two IDE is having sex right now um yeah, which is the combinatorial genetics, yeah, but as in the the like profusion or the propulsion or the the increase I should say in proliferation. Proliferation, there you go, thank you, in uh wearable tech. Whoops. Yeah, is basically having sex with alcohol-free beer because what's happening is go on, hit me, is well basically what's happening is I hadn't connected those two. Well yeah, so so basic so the the fact that people are um are now due to podcasts like Chris's like Stephen Bartlett's wearing wearable tech, they are realizing now and they are tracking how much even two beers is completely [ __ ] their sleep, so they're now not looking to have to have beers. This is really interesting, and then and then obviously Lucky Saint as I'll pick that as a brand for example that kind of was the Chapel Down in terms of opening up the market wasn't it? Yeah, Lucky Saint. Yeah, so what they done is they've so they so these ideas are not meant meaning to have sex with each other, but they are right as and then what I mean by that is the nothing. You also have the the the huge reduction in alcohol. I mean, Gen Z doesn't drink much and doesn't have much sex. That's the weird things about Gen Z. Yes, that's another that's another kind of ancillary part to this I think, but then what Lucky Saint doing is start okay, well, so we solve this problem which means you get more sleep. By wearing when you track your sleep you have two Lucky Saints instead of two pints, you sleep better, you train better, right? Lucky Saint have then realized with their marketing is okay, let's not try and be um a beer, let's let's slide into this lifestyle, so they have run clubs, so they're by the way they're a beer brand that thinks I no one will ever make a success of alcohol-free wine in my opinion, and I always intrinsically think that a lot of people actually prefer beer to wine but pretend to prefer wine for reasons of looking sophisticated or because in a restaurant it served to you in a big bottle which everybody shares so you might as well tuck in, but I've always had this hunch that 30% of the population, particularly the male population but not exclusively, often end up drinking wine in circumstances where left to their own taste buds they'd be drinking beer, and I don't think I think I think it's proven now that you can get people enthusiastic about alcohol-free beers, but i' I I I'd be I'd be interested to see I'd be surprised to see alcohol-free wine making a success. I know a guy who's got a brand I think it could is more what the way you'd work is, I'd be happy to be proved wrong, you know, but so I think where it works again is that middle of the road, so he's actually called it Wednesday Domain which is you want that, so he basically says on Wednesday, yeah, you want to crack open a bottle of wine, got it, but you you're so he's owning that one day of the week. Thursday you'll go out for [ __ ], yeah, cuz Thursday's a new Friday. Friday blah blah blah. I think it could work there, but that goes back to what we said at the beginning, the middle of the road. There'll be people like may have one or two glasses. This I was in I was in Soho last Thursday, it was like [ __ ] Hogarth, you know, it was seriously, it was like Mayhem. Well, I was riding through it in a taxi mostly because I met some people at a restaurant there where very at man which was very very good. It's owned by the people who own the woie. Oh, nice, and it was really really good. I was very impressed actually, and um and there I had a vegetarian main course interestingly um uh it was a kind of nest of things, it was kind of vegetables um kind of temp por of vegetables with a kind of a really fantastic thing um but um but it it it was complete like you know, I mean it was um you know it was kind of drunken Mayhem on a Thursday. Friday I imagine is now quite quiet, is it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the whole working from home thing. What are some of your favorit-- Yes, so about just closing that loop, so I I think I think whether they're meant or not, I think whether they're having sex or it really does booze really does [ __ ] with your sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I don't wear those those woods um I go through periods where I don't drink and then when I get absolutely hammered most days it's like I'm quite extreme, but that's how I work uh there's an argument that that's actually a better way to be that actually giving your liver a rest. In other words, also if you have long periods where you don't drink it's much harder to to develop a dependency. Well, that's that's the thing, so there is an argument that's what we we called it three total. We never got off the ground. It was our branding idea which was the idea that people should be three total which is you don't drink for three days in a row every week. Yeah, it's much easier than counting units, and also for obvious reasons it's much more practical because well that's basically what I do when when I'm drinking. I when you Dr drink a lot I like I like it but I also like periods but I think those two those two those two completely different uh Industries are helping each other out um massively. What um if you could have like two food ideas to have sex, that's quite a withth way of saying or like two-- That's a great question. You got you got to be careful because the general idea of fusion runs up against a mental thing called the Jack of all trades heuristic, right, which is if you just do Malaysian food you're going to do pretty good Malaysian food. If you do like Malaysian Mexican Fusion, people tend to assume that you're a not very good Mexican restaurant combined with a not very good Malaysian restaurant, so you got to be very careful, but in ideas having sex okay in food or or to opposing things that could help each other out like Lucky Saint and Whoop essentially kind of having an affair, maybe not having sex, yeah, cuz actually technology and this this is where the adjacent possible comes in, technology is often dependent for its adoption on something else, so I made this point which I've never heard made before but I think it's worth making which is that you couldn't really have had the growth in the railways in Britain in the 1850s if you had had the penny post being invented in 1840, cuz you can't just turn up at someone's house 70 miles away and say, "Hi, I'm here, I'm here to stay for three days," if you hadn't had the invention of the post so people could actually make arrangements with each other economically, then the railways might not have worked. Now maybe maybe that's bollock, someone will tell me, "No, no, we had no," but but fundamentally quite often you need one thing to be invented and then adopted for another thing uh to actually come of you. It's rather like we asked the question why is it the wheel suit? They they put wheels on suitcases after they'd put a man on the moon. You know, one of them seems comparatively simple, the other one is obviously unbelievably complicated engineering Endeavor. Why did nobody think of putting wheels on suitcases before 1975 or whatever? Well, actually it turns out that things like skateboarding led to huge improvements in inline wheel technology which just made the whole thing much much easier to do. Yeah, and obviously the electric car is contingent on battery improvements that were made for mobile phones. Yeah, so there's a lot of ideas having sex uh what would be a really okay one thing I think okay, this is a really weird Theory, okay, and it probably not true, but my theory is that Elon Musk's grand plan is to combine Starlink with electric vehicles with solar panels with battery storage okay to enable people to live off the grid, and you therefore solve The World's housing crisis because once Tesla produces a motor home, the Tesla Winnebago, right, you don't need to worry about buying a house in London, you can just go and live in one of those, and you now you'll need a base, now you'll need a big shed somewhere out you know outside the M25 where you keep all your shed right, but you can go and buy you know 15 Acres of Woodland for like 30 or 40,000 not far from a railway station, you keep an electric bicycle, you charge that thing up with a bit of solar and the occasional trip to the BP Pulse charging station, right, you can run your espresso machine, your oven, your microwave, your big telly off that 200 kilowatt hour battery that's underneath your Tesla Willago Wago, you've got your your Starlink thing connecting you to the phone network. All he needs to do is produce a sort of microwave toilet that deals with your waist and your alium, and actually you could tank the world's property Market by allowing people to go nomadic. That's my weird theory that actually a bit like you remember in Goldfinger the guy had that plan which is buy up a lot of gold and then nuke Fort Knox, so all of the world's gold, 90% of the world's Golds would be radioactive for 70 years, so his gold would now become 10 times as valuable. That was Goldfinger's plan in the film anyway. Can't remember what the plan was in the book. Now my my secret dream is that that that Elon Musk has actually done a massive short on the world's residential and Commercial property Market okay on the basis that if once once you're on Wheels you don't need planning permission, so you can buy your little Woodland with your little road going in and you can go and park your Winnebago there and you can go and live there for a fraction of the cost that you're spending on rent for some shitty bedsit in Clap. Yes, yeah, yeah. No, I think it's it's almost like the EXT dream version of what we of like so yeah so motor homes and electric vehicles strip me as really really interesting as as as an idea as having sex because the fully electrified motor home is a serious you know you don't have all that problem with generators and all that [ __ ]. Um, final final thing makes I know you've got you got your okay, I'm just trying to think about-- No, don't worry, I've got a bit of time. I'm just thinking about ideas having sex. I'm wondering in a food--

Context: Is there something that's fundamentally missing? This is not necessarily missing, but whilst you think there's a restaurant called Not Jolene Angelina, which I highly recommend going to in Dwon. Which is a fusion that should not work, but works [__] charm; Italian and Japanese. So you will have, they will do a like the most fresh uh, Italian West—West called B's Bites, which is Jamaican Italian. Wow. And as she describes it, he's Italian, she—his wife is Jamaican. So what do they have on that? That's a wild, actually um, she said he's the culinary genius; I just add the requisite amount of spice. But she's doing herself an injustice because the various patties and things are really fantastic. Yeah, I think it's uh, I think the I think where it gets interesting in terms of having sex is, is how or what's had sex already is technology and food. So self-service um is an example where, okay, the there's something missing; Indian food, the greatest food in the history of the world, by, you know, Jim Car—got two stars. Now it's got two stars; no [__] I won't be able to get in now um, but I used to go there; the set lunch was AB. Need get there. Yeah. Um, there's something with Indian food in now obviously at the high end; D's done it. Yeah, in scaling it, there's something that has to be possible in terms of scaling Indian food. Didn't they have Bombay B Club, which was the version of that? Well, that only got to about three or four outlets, didn't it? I thought, yeah, I don't I don't I don't know the weirdly I went to something called Bombay Bicycle Club in the United States once, but I don't know whether that was a whether they'd bought the brand or something.

But do you think, do do you think psych deep deep down psychologically the story and that almost that consistency of the promise, you know what we're talking about earlier is we're so used to our local Curry House, a bit like we—I know I know—become part of a chain. Yeah, whereas that's genius of Dum but Dum, what D do I love IND in food from the fact that you can be anywhere in Britain or indeed in F Ventura, as I was last week and have a fantastic Indian meal. I think, you know, the fact that you're only, you know, with a bit of er or whatever, the fact that you're only eight miles away from somewhere fantastic is just joyous. Yeah, I think uh, okay, so let's abandon that then and say that it's a fundamentally localized Artisan food. Okay, I'll keep thinking about this 'cause it's it's really interesting question. But also are there new technologies? So I think the business of uh, so I was talking to some people at Berkeley who are food scientists and they say that actually a lot of the work in preserving food was done by NASA. Okay, in other words, space meals, and a lot of it's been done by the military, which is MREs—meals ready to eat—which is the military category, and you can actually have really really good food that's preserved with a really long shelf life um and it tastes delicious. The problem you face is the problem you face with frozen food with Iceland, which is because it's more efficient, it's cheaper, and therefore people think it's down market. I've got an idea that two things that could have sex; this is the this can, so long preserved very high quality food is a really interesting. So that's that's that's um that's person one or idea one. Idea two, and this is this Canadian couple I met out in uh in Costa Rica, they actually own one of these stores, is why frozen fruit in the UK has such a stigma with it, right? Yes, where is not in France. Picard in France, which you can also buy on a cardo, is the French Mark and Spencer ready meal; it's it's a traitor, but it's all frozen. Yes, and the French—so my French colleagues when I told them they could buy Picard food on a cardo, they practically all hugged me. It's like Brits missing Marks and Spencer's. Okay, and so but it's frozen, and the French—sele frozen food doesn't have the stigma, and it it it does in the UK, and it's it's a huge tragedy because in many ways you preserve the nutrients better. This is it; Jamie Oliver has badgered on like frozen fruit is better. Yeah, the actual quality is better, and it's flash frozen. So two ideas, I I'm just thinking why is someone—The Ivy does that thing, doesn't it, which is the frozen fruit with um white chocolate, hot white chocolate sauce poured over it, which is one of their sort of staple puddings, which is just magically good 'cause it's all the yin and the Yan thing going on. Yes. Um, but no, I I I'm a big fan of frozen fruit, and I think that there's a there are a lot of foods which freeze really really well, and I think we've vilified the freezer. Well, Iceland's—Iceland in terms of and we've got we've got a chain at the bottom raising the—well, not raising the floor, just you've got Cook, of course, which is an interesting chain that's frozen food. Yeah, that's a K comp, that's more like—so that's more like frozen ready meals. What I'm—the idea I think is almost you have like you walk walk into like a Planet Organic in a Whole Foods, so you have the premiumization, almost like a tra—a frozen Trader Joe's or a frozen Planet Organic, no food waste, probably cheaper for the consumer, it's like problem that would absolutely win. Um, I don't know why that's not in the UK, but I think we're so—we actually worked with a company called Rap, and one of the things we did was we actually had loaves of bread where the packaging was half: Eat me, freeze me. Oh, 'cause nobody knows, particularly—young people don't have a clue. One of the things you got to realize is that, and I'll defend the advertising industry and the importance of it in that way is that there's extraordinary widespread ignorance about all kinds of things. Okay, yeah, and so I remember someone—this is someone with a degree—getting really pissed off because someone came and stayed the night with them without asking permission, charged their mobile phone off the plug. Okay, now that's not 0.5p. Okay, right, there are a lot of people who don't know that heat uses a lot of electricity and light doesn't use very much, so they'll go around turning off light absolutely furiously, but then they'll leave a three-bar electric heater on. Okay, you know, or they don't worry about the oven or the kettle or any of that stuff. People haven't got a clue about this stuff um and you know you have problems like things like heat pumps where it doesn't seem to make sense that it's five times more efficient to heat a home with a heat pump than it is with a boiler, and so you get this and and nobody knows what food freezes genuinely, you know I mean it's a tragedy that when you buy a freezer there isn't a bloody book in it which says this is the stuff you can freeze and actually it's a you know extraordinary way of minimizing food waste um probably we're also too paranoid because you have this freeze on day of purchase, best before nonsense, which is actually—nobody knows the difference between a best before date and a used by date, by the way, and they're completely different. You know, best before date on a can. Yeah, that's—so one of one of the things I tried to propose—I had a very very good friend who said um um you could improve you could reduce food waste—who was it? Colleague of mine—by just putting the day of the week on the best on the used by date: Used by Wednesday, and people would look at it on Friday and go, yeah, that's okay. You know, your friend—you're that restaurant—I don't know the [__] day. I don't know what today is. Is it the 6th of March? Is it the fourth? Fourth of March. Okay, right, you're going to have to go—no, no, I I I've got two more minutes, I'll be fine. And then you have you have the thing where what it should say is best before—it should actually say best before June the 24th, right? Because if you say best before June the 24th, that suggests a of specificity where somehow on June the 25th the thing becomes unedible and will give you botulism, but I mean you'd be fine in July, fine in August. Right? And so by not giving a margin of error around the best before date, people are throwing things out shouldn't last longer. I don't know why. Just quickly, to on the ideas thing is why more restaurants don't—they've got the brand, they've got the credentials, why they don't freeze like—like I would buy from Jim Car—yeah, a frozen Jim Car does its own range of Curry sources—bu—Curry sources, but I would buy a frozen curry from them, a bit like your your—well, well this is what you—this is the theory that you could do this with meals ready to eat, you could actually have the authentic thing, and they now know how to preserve it. The problem is a marketing problem; it's not—it's like Jamie Oliver and the frozen food; it's a marketing problem; it's not a technological problem, and that is often the case. There are lots of things which technology have solved—has solved—like Zoom in video conferencing. Right, Zoom basically solved the technology problem, but it took a pandemic to actually create the behavior. And so I think with an awful lot of food tech, the problem is actually gaining widespread acceptance and adoption; it's not actually coming up with the bloody technology. Frozen food in the UK, unlike say France, is rarely seen—Cook being an exception—as a premium form of food, but it but actually it's probably the best way to preserve really good food. Yeah, it's the statest thing. Ultimately, ultimately it comes down to what do people think of me for doing this, and I must stop now because I've been [Music] [Applause] [Music] good [Music] yeah