Espresso: Rory Sutherland, Why Lucky Saint and Whoop Are Having Sex

0:06What I find interesting, so Matt Ridley's got this thing which is about two ideas having sex, you know that have you got a lot of the red queen he's written the rational optimist he's written evolutionary ideas yeah uh sorry he's written that so i think he's written um what is it how how innovation works or how i think there's two ideas 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 proliferation proliferation there you go thank you in uh wearable tech whoops is basically having sex with alcohol-free beer.

0:49Because what's happening is... Go on, hit me with this. Well, basically what's happening is... I hadn't connected those two. Well, yeah. So the fact that people are now, due to podcasts like Chris's, like Stephen Bartlett's, wearing wearable tech, they are realising now, and they are tracking, how much even two beers is completely fucking their sleep. So they're now not looking to have beers. This is really interesting. And then obviously Lucky Saint, 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've done is they've, so these ideas are not meaning to have sex with each other, but they are, right?

1:32And then what I mean by that is... But you also have 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 kind of ancillary part to this, I think. But then what Lucky Saint are doing is, okay, 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 a beer. Let's slide into this lifestyle. So they have run clubs.

2:10So they're a beer brand that thinks like, 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's 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'd 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 it's more the way you'd work i'd be happy to be proved wrong 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 so he basically says on wednesday yeah you want to crack open a bottle of wine got it but you're you're so he's owning that one day over the week thursday you'll go out for fucking yeah because thursday's a new friday blah blah i think it could work there but that goes back to what was in the beginning the middle of the road there'll be people who like may have one or two glasses i was in i was in soho last thursday it was like fucking hogarth you know it was seriously it was like total mayhem Well, I was riding through it in a taxi mostly because I'd met some people at a restaurant there.

3:39Where did you go? At Manzi's, which was very, very good. It's owned by the people who own the Wolsey. Oh, nice. And it was really, really good. I was very impressed, actually. And there I had a vegetarian main course, interestingly. What did you have? It was a kind of nest of things. It was kind of vegetables, kind of tempura vegetables with a kind of really fantastic thing. um but um but 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 it's the whole working from home thing what are some of your favorites oh yes so there's a back just closing that loop so i i think i think whether they're mental or not i think whether having sex it really does booze really does fuck with your sleep yes yeah yeah yeah i mean i don't wear those those no woots 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 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 it 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 i'm drinking when you drink you drink a lot and then yeah yeah 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 weird way of saying it or like two that's a great question you've 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 not very good mexican restaurant combined with a not very good malaysian restaurant so you've got to be very careful but in ideas having sex okay and 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 because 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 hadn't had the penny post being invented in 1840 because you can't just turn up at someone's 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 bollocks 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 up it's rather like we asked the question why is it the wheeled suit they put wheels on suitcases after they 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 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's probably not true but my theory is that enon 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 motorhome 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 outside you know outside the m25 where you keep all your shit right but you can go and buy you know 15 acres of woodland for like 30 or 40 000 pounds 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 winnebago winnebago 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 waste and your effluvium and actually you could tank the world's property market by allowing people to go nomadic

9:04that'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 bed sit in clapham yes yeah yeah no i think it's almost like the extreme version of what we of like so yeah so motorhomes and electric vehicles strike me as really really interesting yes as an idea as having sex because the fully electrified motorhome is a serious you know you don't have all that problem with generators and all that shit um final final thing makes i know you've got you've 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 Well, so this is not necessarily missing, but whilst you think, there's a restaurant called, not Jolene, Angelina, which I highly recommend going to in Dorsten, which is a fusion that should not work, but works a fucking charm.

10:42Italian and Japanese. So you will have, they will do a, like the most fresh Italian. There's a restaurant in Westrum called Bissy's Bites, which is Jamaican Italian. wow and as she describes it he's italian she his wife is jamaican so what would they have on that that's a wild actually um she said he's the culinary genius i just added the requisite amount of spice but she's doing herself an injustice because the various patties and things are really fantastic quick one guys espressos have got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use Unleashed daily at Ireland I bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it?

11:26save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins know where your stock is don't miss availability look your favourite brands literally use Unleashed as their backbone Candy Kids Tiny Rebel trip all these religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with Josh he's a wonderful sales team at Unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you yeah i think it's uh i think the i think where it gets interesting in terms of having sex is how or what's had sex already is technology and food so self-service um is an example where okay there's something missing indian food the greatest food in the history of world yeah you know jim khan got two stars now it's got two stars oh fuck i won't be able to get in now um but i used to go there the set lunch i need to get there yeah um there's something with indian food in now obviously at the high end to shoom'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 bicycle club which was the version of that well that only got to about three or four outlets to knitter i thought yeah i don't i don't i don't know 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 bought the brand or something but do you think do you do you think like deep deep down psychologically the story and 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're so i know i know you don't want to become part of a chain yeah well that's the genius of dishoom but dishoom what dishoom I actually love Indian food from the fact that you could be anywhere in Britain, or indeed in Fuerteventura, as I was last week, and have a fantastic Indian meal.

13:20I think, you know, the fact that you're only, you know, with a bit of trimmer, or whatever, the fact that you're only eight miles away from somewhere fantastic is just joyous. Yeah, I think... Okay, so let's abandon that then, and say that it's a fundamentally localized artisan food. Okay, I'll keep thinking about this, because it's a really interesting question. but also are there new technologies so i think the business of uh so i was talking to 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 mre 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 this this can be 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 whereas not in france picar in france which you can also buy on a cardo is the french marks and spencers 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 picar food on a cardo they practically all hugged me because it's like brits missing marks and spencers okay and so but it's frozen and the french sir gelée frozen food doesn't have the stigma and it it does in the uk and 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 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 pulled over it yes which is one of their sort of staple puddings which is just magically good because it's all the yin and the yang 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 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 kent space company again that's more like i say that's more like frozen ready meals what i'm the idea i think is almost you have like you walk into like a planet organic and a whole foods so you have the premiumization was like a trade a frozen trader joe's or a frozen planet organic no food waste probably cheaper for the consumer yeah yeah yeah it's like no problems that absolutely win um i don't know why that's not in the uk but i think we're worked with a company called wrap and one of the things we did was we actually had loaves of bread where the packaging was half eat me freeze me because nobody knows particularly young people don't have a clue one of the things you've 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 0.5 p okay right there are a lot of people who don't know that heat uses a lot of electricity and lights doesn't use very much so they'll go around turning off lights 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 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 one of the one of the things i tried to propose I had a very good friend who said you could reduce food waste, what was it, a colleague of mine, by just putting the day of the week on the use-by date, use-by Wednesday, and people would look at it on Friday and go, yeah, that's okay.

18:23You know your friend, that restaurant? I don't know the fucking day. I don't know what today is. Is it the 6th of March? 4th of March. 4th of March, okay, right. You're going to have to go. No, no, 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 24 right because if you say best before june the 24th that suggests a degree of specificity where somehow on june the 25th the thing becomes unedible and will give you botulism but i mean you'll be fine in july fine in august thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day Let's be having ya If you want the full episode It will be in the show notes Thank you so much Please say friends as well It means the world to me