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

37:33Important though it was, it was huge. What do Hitler and Nazis and then Churchill and the Britons teach us about marketing, do you think? If you're really mischievous, you'd say that from an advertising standpoint Hitler was an art director and Churchill was a copywriter Go into that more please Well Hitler was undoubtedly an artist and actually not terrible by the way Wasn't he a failed artist? Yeah, the whole of world history would have been different if he'd got into art school but I think he was turned down and patently was very interested in architecture, design grandiose designs for cities, et cetera.

38:17Very, and you could, I mean, you can find in slightly dodgy secondhand bookshops, I'm not making this up, I mean, Nazi design manuals on the precise proportions of swastikas, flags, colours, you know, I don't know if they had Pantone references back then, but they were absolutely, it was a visual brand for the most part, okay? Yeah. Whereas Churchill was undoubtedly, you know, principally persuasive through the medium of words and writing copywriter. By the way, I don't know where I read this, but I think Hitler's only paid employment in his entire life because he didn't actually get paid a salary as chancellor, was two weeks working in an advertising agency on a brief something like a deodorant or antiperspirant.

39:02So he actually worked as an art director in an ad agency for a couple of weeks. Wow. But, I mean, it is interesting because, you know, in a sense, it's horrible to admit it, but they were really rather good at branding. Yeah. I mean, in terms of, you know, visual consistency. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. I think it's as egregious and heinous as it was, like, to create some sort of movement. There's, in the most repugnant things, there's lessons. In the most beautiful things, there's lessons. It's worth remembering that there probably, I don't know about this, it'll be interesting to debate it, there probably was a period in history where you had mass access to mass media.

39:49Mass access to mass media. In other words, everybody had a radio, lots of people went to the cinema and watched propaganda newsreels or the Nini Riefenstahl film or whatever, and where also people hadn't quite acquired, And first of all, they had no alternative set. You know, if you think about it, newspaper, cinema newsreel, radio broadcast. OK, that is, you know, and word of mouth. OK, but word of mouth is kind of slow, particularly in, you know, less densely populated areas. OK, so those are your sources of information. And they're all controlled by the government. And people had not yet acquired a degree of immunity to communication.

40:30Now, let me just explain. if people went to the cinema in the very early days of the cinema and you had the cinema screen would show something, which is a train shooting directly towards the screen or a man firing a gun out of the screen. What is this cinema? This would be in the silent era, 1910, 15, that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. Okay. The audience would actually duck below the seat, okay, in terror. Now, that's interesting because obviously now, you know, I mean, children might do that very, very early on. I don't know. But nobody would do that now. If you went to an adult cinema performance and they had a shot of a train heading straight towards you, nobody would go, ah, right?

41:14Yeah, yeah, yeah. You'd look ridiculous. But there was a time when people absolutely did that. Now, OK, what that suggests is that there was a time when moving pictures were, I mean, just disproportionately potent and persuasive. and also people hadn't acquired a kind of skepticism. So they were extraordinarily kind of susceptible, I think, to mass manipulation because you only had mass media. You know, there wasn't the arsehole on Twitter giving them, you know, you didn't even have Joe Rogan inviting guests who thought this Nazism might be not altogether a good thing. You didn't have any kind of real dissent and society was fundamentally pretty conformist, particularly in Germany, particularly at a certain time, you know, at that period in history.

42:01And so, you know, there was undoubtedly, you know, you could argue that it was going to happen somewhere. That kind of collective insanity would happen somewhere because, I mean, I'm not suggesting, there are lots of reasons for these things, but it was a very unusual media environment. Yeah, but the state, because Germany lost all their status at the end of World War I, and Hitler's whole promise was, Will Saw talks about this in the status game as how they're going to bring up he was the sort of the promised land of bringing back Germany's status on a global scale and people humans desire for status I mean there was some economic evidence that it was undoubtedly in a resurgence but undoubtedly making them feel good about themselves again and also selling the narrative that they'd been sold down the river at the Paris Peace Conference or whatever which they kind of had been Actually, if we'll be honest, okay.

42:55What happened to the Paris Peace Corps? I mean, the, okay, so the reparations and general punitive damages imposed on Germany after World War I, if one's being honest, largely at the behest of the, probably of the French, more than the British and the Americans,

43:22turned, effectively created a sense of justifiable grievance. Justifiable grievance. It all happened. It's all my cousin Woodrow's fault. He's bizarrely like my fourth cousin twice removed or something. You always say that. No, no, no, no. I mean, weirdly. But he got ill. He got Spanish. How did you find that out? Very strange thing. Somebody wrote to us from Canada who was obsessed with tracing our ancestry back to almost interminable Calvinist ministers in Scotland. And I was reading this going, and then they were descended from so-and-so, and the guy in a painting in the Stirling Art Gallery called the Covenant as Baptism.

43:58The guy doing the baptism is apparently a sort of distant ancestor of mine, I think called Williamson. Okay. And anyway, in this sort of footnote, you know, he goes, and da-da-da-da-da, Anne is also the ancestor of Woodrow Wilson. I was going, kind of, it's a bit more interesting than a bloody Calvinist minister, isn't it? But she seemed absolutely fixated on an awful lot of Calvinist ministers. But he probably got Spanish flu during that peace conference where terms were negotiated. Who did? Woodrow Wilson. Right. And to an extent went slightly doolally. Right. But how did that affect back to what?

44:34How did that affect? Well, there were various unfortunate decisions taken with the benefit of hindsight, one of which was insulting the Japanese by not fully acknowledging them as, and that was under pressure from, I think, the Australians in the Commonwealth delegation, or the Empire delegation, it would have been called then, and also imposing costs on the Germans of an extent and duration that allowed them to feel, with some reasonable justification, that they'd been sold out. Okay, so therefore it I mean by the way this is a sort of bit of a standard narrative And I might add that there are lots of other explanations for what's going on.

45:19Okay I mentioned the media environment as well You know the power of moving image, you know one thing they were pretty good at was propaganda It's not just branding. They were pretty good when they when you say the power There are sections. I've never read the bloody thing, but I've been told there are sections of Mein Kampf where Hitler... What's mine, that? So that's Hitler's own book where he describes effectively the best-selling book in Germany for about 10 or so years. I think it was mandatory in schools. But he describes what makes a good poster, what makes for good persuasion. Really? And then he also had, I suppose, work of people like...

45:54So the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was accompanied by Bernays, who was often considered the kind of, you know, a relation of Freud, who's kind of the godfather of mass persuasion techniques, PR, really. More than advertising. What was his name, sorry? Edward Benace. Yeah. He was the extraordinarily influential person who effectively, mostly for commercial purposes in the United States advertising. But it was interesting that the extent to which persuasion was taken seriously at that time is evidenced by the fact that the president of the United States took a kind of PR guy, an expert in, you know, persuasion and public opinion, took him across the Atlantic with him to the Paris Peace Conference.

46:38Yeah, that is mental. So, I mean, by the way, I mean, it's a bit boring history to go, God, they were nasty to the Germans, therefore they made possible, you know, resurgence of da-di-da-di-da. But, I mean, it's part of the truth. I mean, like everything. I mean, there are narratives and there are, you know, generally we like narratives because they simplify. Yeah. And but but it is I mean, I do find it fundamentally interesting that, you know, the question is Some of those people who are natural dissenters conspiracy theorists and nutters They can be a general pain, but there You need them around because sometimes they're right.

47:21Yeah, okay Most of them I mean the people who kind of annoy me are the people who believe every conspiracy theory OK, because you go, OK, look, some of this stuff, you know, some of this stuff succumbs to a simpler explanation. Maybe they did land on the moon. Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK. OK, however, it's highly unlikely that conspiracy theorists are wrong about everything. Or at least their conspiracy may be wrong, but their doubting of the official narrative may be perfectly healthy at some point. Yeah, that's... A great phrase, by the way, just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's true.

47:58Just because it makes sense doesn't mean it's true. So, you know, quite often we explain something with something and we go, yeah, that makes sense. And therefore we stop asking questions. Yeah. OK. What are some of those questions linking this back to dumb, smart answers, lying dumb questions? Because I know in your book, Alchemy, you've got that list of like nine things. It's like you can't solve solving problems with logic is like trying to play golf with one golf club or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I would argue you need... What are some of your favourite dumb questions, Ori? I mean, some of them would be simply,

48:36what are we trying to do here, really? It's really the operative word. So the point I'm making about defining something, which is it is considered in engineering and economics circles perfectly acceptable to define a a train journey between London and Manchester say in the case of HS2 by capacity speed time an entirely economic model around time savings and the value of you know the connections you create I would argue that you know if you went to Disney they'd ask a different question which is actually what we're trying to do here is to get more people to travel of Manchester, ideally, or from London, possibly less, vice versa.

49:21We can all debate that. We want to connect the two major cities. But in order to do that, what we want people to do is to prefer to go by train than by car. And the Disney question would be how do... Wait, so where's Disney? So the Disney question would not be how fast does the train need to be, how many people does it need to carry, what does it need to cost. The Disney question would be, how do we make the train journey between London and Manchester so enjoyable that people feel stupid going by car? OK, now that's a much more open ended question, which is why bureaucrats don't like it. Because solving that problem requires imagination and it presents you with a list of different options and a large solution set from which you have to make decisions, often involving incommensurable variables, which therefore means you can't use a model, you've got to actually use subjective judgment.

50:12And bureaucrats are terrified of using subjective judgment, so they'll fall back on a bad, decisive model with a single right answer rather than an interesting creative model, which gives rise to multiple answers, multiple interesting answers. And then another question might be, well, if the entire purpose of our£120 billion investment is to get people from the centre of London to the centre of Manchester, then yes, a train is probably the right answer. But is there a way in which we could spend£120 billion on transport infrastructure, which actually creates far more economic value for far more people because it is only a small percentage.

50:57in any one day in London, it is a tiny percentage of people who want to get to Manchester fast. And in any day in Manchester, it is a tiny percentage of people who want to get from central Manchester to London fast. In fact, it's slightly stupid because most of the people who actually live, sorry, most of the people who work in Manchester, okay, actually live south of Manchester. Yeah. Okay. So currently, they don't board the train in Manchester. They board the train in... It's probably Southport, is it? No, Southport's one. Stockport, Stockport, Stockport. Yeah. Sorry, Stockport. So they drive south to Stockport and board the train there because you're not going to go into the office and then take a train to London.

51:36You're probably going to get on the train first thing in the morning. So it's very annoying travelling in the wrong direction. This is why I go nuts that bloody Eurostar doesn't stop at Ebsfleet and Ashford, because every time I go to Paris, I'm going to go to Ebsfleet, travel 17 minutes in the wrong direction, then spend 40 minutes being corralled in a hideous waiting area. okay now ironically this is a classic example okay they are really worried about how crowded the Eurostar waiting area is at St Pancras and it's an obstacle it's hideous it's an obstacle so they claim I mean even the lounge is ridiculous that'd be a bottleneck okay that's a bottleneck okay now okay right and they claim perhaps conveniently that it's an obstacle to running more services so we would like to add services obviously to German Germany there's a potential of an overnight service somewhere.

52:28But we'd like to add more services to more destinations, to the Eurostar, certainly including... They've done Amsterdam, admittedly, but you could certainly include some other places in Germany. I don't know, where would we... I would guess Cologne. We've got a podcast in Amsterdam. We're trying to work out whether we fly. Or take the train. Or take the train. That's another thing from just whether... You could drive, actually, interestingly. But the interesting thing about that, OK, is that hold on hold on okay so what you're going to try and do is take over more space from some pancreas station or do enormously expensive building work there is a solution that probably costs about 20 000 pounds to implement which is you do a deal with high speed one which simply says if you're if you're a leisure traveler particularly uh and you're traveling to paris or brussels you can save 10 quid okay if you take the high speed one to ebbs fleet and bought the Eurostar Ebsfleet, where there is an enormous great waiting area and a really cushy lounge, or indeed Ashford.

53:31Can you actually go from there? If you got 20 % to 30%, 20 % of the people, you'd have to stop the trains there. Okay, but that's physically possible. Or if you simply educated people and made it possible to board an Ebsfleet. I had friends who lived in Greenwich who always went to Ebsfleet to board the Eurostar. Ebsfleet's in Kent. Ebsfleet's in Kent. It's just south of the Thames, just outside the M25, basically. Now, just to be clear, the population of Essex is 1.8 million. The population of Kent is 1.8 million. East Sussex is probably 600 ,000. Surrey is probably 600 ,000. OK, a lot of those, and East London would be another million.

54:10OK, a lot of those people, and South East London as well, a lot of those people would much prefer to go to Ebsfleet, park the car and take the train, than they would go into St Pancras and then travel in the wrong direction and then go through a ludicrous sort of one man and his dog kept in the holding pen boarding procedure. Why they don't, by the way, let you board the train a bit earlier rather than holding you back and then forcing you all to board at the last minute. There are lots and lots of ways you could solve that problem of overcrowding without making the space bigger. You change behavior instead.

54:41Engineering solutions are calculable and deterministic and therefore appeal to the human left brain. okay psychological and behavioral uh interventions are much much cheaper but they are to some extent probabilistic and harder to predict yeah and that's where you've got to ask the dumb questions because those left-sided brain people they'll they'll think what the fuck is this dumb question but that's where the weird answers lie and the problems are solved it would be perfectly sensible to allow people to take the high speed one trains uh to ebb's fleet and wait 25 minutes half an hour there in a state of complete comfort and luxury okay or even i mean even allow people one day to board at um uh what is it uh stratford which i think that's that's a way off that's building work okay it's called stratford international it's a wholly erroneous name for the station because there are no international services it's a bit like north kensington you know it's it's it's a marketing name not yeah i was going to ask you who came up with the um because i was speaking to a guide of the week uh um mark palmer basically because i went to new york and you know everything's like l1 like the tubes basically or the subway shit they're like well i actually think that the the one of our greatest brands or greatest yeah basically greatest brands is our tube map and like but who came up with the names and i'm going back in time then also it got me thinking who came up with the fucking road names like who did that the how was that come around enough I never met him because he died my wife knew him she knew the guy called Schlotzer Felix who was responsible for numbering and naming the German Autobahns he wasn't a Nazi but he was a senior civil servant there is actually an intelligence to road names which is that roughly speaking they go clockwise from the A1 all the way round and then the A41 is an offshoot typically the way it works is the a40x is an offshoot of the a4 and the a what about the road what about the road names in london so for example the a21 is sort of an offshoot of the a2 okay it's it's it's far from being exact okay but essentially the shorter the fewer the numbers the number of numbers the the more significant a road it is a roads are more significant than b roads And so...

57:08What's M3's more significant? So the A1, I think, is Wattling Street, which is largely originally on the path of a Roman road. The A4, by the way, I mean, Piccadilly is technically the A4, and the Bayswater Road and Oxford Street is technically the A4. Well, the A3 goes all the way into London Bridge, into Southwark. Into Southwark, you're obviously right. The A3 is where I take you. So, I mean, no one ever referred to Selfridges, OK, as being on the A40. But technically it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. what about the other roads in terms of like by the way I have no idea who the people are who do this but practically every road in Britain has a Wikipedia entry really?

57:45which is extraordinary and literally it will go into the history of the road the fact that sometimes roads actually overlap so you actually have a case where two roads actually become one and then separate again I think that happens down in Sussex which is the road to Eastbourne and the A272 or something they actually become maybe the A26 and the A20. This is turning into an unbelievably tedious podcast for the 99 % of people. But I mean, it is the gift of Wikipedia to people who are mildly on the spectrum, like me, okay, is absolutely limitless because I have no sense of proportion about the value of knowledge.

58:26I don't really evaluate knowledge by how valuable it is. It's just knowledge and I value it for its own sake. and so I will literally spend time sitting down and reading the Wikipedia entry on the A26. What about the actual road names in like in London? The A272 by the way there is a road I'm going to plug this because it's a great book by a Dutch author called A272 Ode to a Road and it's a Dutch tourist the just technically the A272 The A272 goes all the way from Maresfield in, I assume it's East Sussex, all the way to Winchester. And so it's a road that goes right across southern England, and it's spectacularly interesting and beautiful.

59:10But this, I mean, not all of it, but this Dutch guy has actually written, you can buy it on Abbas, A272, Ode to a Road, a Dutch tourist basically homage to an A-Road. Yeah, not to make this a road podcast. No, no, let's. No, no, but it's interesting. Well, we can talk about roadside food. We can always segue into the... Oh, my God. So we were down in Cornwall last week. Yeah. Doing a podcast. And, well, a couple of things. Are there any happy eaters left? We stopped at a restaurant called Nice Baps. Or Little Chefs. Nice Baps. Go on. Which is... Good name. Yeah, really good name. So Nice Baps got a pair of bacon sarnies on the roadside.

59:47I mean, I was... Where is Cornwall? On the way to Cornwall. But... A303 or did you go down the M5? Well, this is the thing. This is the thing. This is the thing. Sorry, we all get off the roads. You know that Monty Python sketch, which is the Mindhead by-election, where it starts with a Brummie doing this whole, how was your journey? And he recounts the entire thing, including the fact that they actually, you know, had an extra 15 minutes to stretch our legs at Frampton Cotterell. And tragically, I actually went to Frampton Cotterell and had a little bit of a walk just as an homage to that Monty Python sketch.

1:00:22Well, this would think so. There is a place. By the way, the entire sketch is completely accurate in its description of the road network at that time. That's mad. Well, yeah, but one of the things, so I was listening to a podcaster the other week who was saying, basically, if you've got a car in the UK versus the US, and or Europe, actually, your enjoyment levels in Europe are, like, through the roof compared to the US, because the US road systems are just grids, whereas here you can properly fucking drive. And he was basically saying, I've got cars in both countries. So curves are, to some extent...

1:00:54You see curves, country roads. I've got American family friends. They came round and they were like, they're like, what the fuck? Like, we're going through these roads. They're from L.A. They're like, what the fuck? Oh, the other thing I didn't realise, in the U.S., a speed limit is not just a restriction. It's also advisory, which is if you have a 60-mile-an-hour speed limit, it means that on that road it is safe to drive at 60 miles an hour. And so Americans come here. This is why my automatic cruise control goes slightly wacko, OK? Yeah. Because it's American. My car's American. and it's made in Mexico.

1:01:24It's a Mustang Mach-E. And it sees a 60 sign and immediately automatically accelerates to 60. And Americans don't understand it because they come out of a small village, you know, in Kent. And there's a sign that basically says no restriction, 60. Now, what that means to a Brit is use your own judgment, but technically it's not illegal to hit 60 on this stretch of road where conditions allow. In the United States, that 60 sign means it is safe from now on to drive at 60 miles an hour. And so Americans go, are you people insane? Who the hell would drive on this winding road at 60 miles an hour?

1:01:58And the answer, of course, you wouldn't, because you exercise your own judgment according to the conditions of the road. So road signs in America just fundamentally mean something different. But also our roads, as in that drive down to Cornwall, is fucking idyllic. Whereas in America, it's not always, but a lot of the time it's just basically these fucking straight roads. Of course, Londoners, interestingly, Interestingly, Londoners don't enjoy driving because they don't drive very often. If you don't drive very often, you don't enjoy driving. And then, so you know what it is when you first hire a car, right?

1:02:28It's an unfamiliar car. For the first 20 minutes or so, you don't really enjoy it until you get into a flow state. You're familiar with the controls and the indicators and everything else. If you drive your car very infrequently, as a lot of Londoners who own cars do, or Londoners who rent cars, and they make the mistake of renting a car in central London, So the first 40 minutes is driving through central London in appalling traffic. OK, then Londoners are going to disparage cars completely unfairly because they've never experienced how great it is to own a car in pleasant driving conditions where there isn't too much traffic, where you're familiar with the car.

1:03:05Now, there's one exception to that, by the way. Driving in London between about one o 'clock in the morning and three o 'clock in the morning, OK, is one of the greatest experiences you can have. So we do. It's a total late night driving. There was actually a Volkswagen ad. One of my favourite ads of all time was just night driving by Volkswagen. Yeah. Based on the insight that particularly for smaller Volkswagen cars often bought in cities. There is this extraordinary moment where everybody understands why they have a car, which is rumbling down, you know, rumbling through Shooters Hill. You know, at kind of two o 'clock in the morning or taking the A217 down towards whatever it's called.

1:03:44Some of those drives in London at the right time, it used to be before they put speed cameras on the elevated section of the Westway. You could hit 80 on the west way on the elevated section. that was a total bloody joy and a lot of the fun of london driving like james bond driving oh no no you used to be able to drive through paddington station so i used to have friends who come into paddington and they say i'll pick you up and amazingly you could drive in through a ramp they got rid of it for the heathrow express and you drove right down into the middle of the station and you drove out the other end onto parade street that's porn that's another yeah that's another thing that's wrong with i think what winds me up about sat navs or like not sat navs but sometimes ways is it will take you the fastest route.

1:04:26Not the most enjoyable. Not the most enjoyable. So it's like the traffic so the traffic can sometimes be an absolute fucking nightmare and I'm not going to, I'd rather go. Well the philosophical question is I'd rather go an extra ten minutes and actually enjoy and be moving. There's a difference between moving. My sat-nav doesn't like going out on the A13 crossing the Queen Elizabeth Bridge down to Kent. Okay. It prefers to take you through the Blackwall Tunnel. It may change it a bit because partly it has a bit of a toler version and there's a one pound one at 50 charge to go across the bridge now of course there's now a four pound charge to go through the blackwall tunnel so i don't know what's gonna how it's gonna respond to that um but also i would rather keep moving for 45 minutes yes okay than being stop go traffic for 35 minutes and it doesn't really understand that concept i think that's fair if you're a challenger brand that's absolutely killing it in d2c but you're struggling to crack retail, then you've got to listen to this.

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1:06:42Highly, highly recommend that. And thank me later. That's something. Rick Rubin loves to drive. From what I've read and listened to him, he says drive. I've seen his car, but I won't reveal. I'll respect Rick's privacy. Because you did a podcast with him, didn't you? Yeah. I think I was trying to persuade him to go electric because it's the future. Right. By the way, there would be almost more adoption of electric cars if the government hadn't been so eager to persuade people to buy them because they are intrinsically better. Yes. I mean, I'm sorry, but there's a certain sort of car lover. In religion, you get some people who aren't very interested in God or Jesus or the Bible, but they get really obsessed with things like chasubles, investments and liturgy.

1:07:25OK, they're like nerd religions. You know, high church Anglicans occasionally go that way. Right. They're almost more interested in the accoutrement than they are in the core purpose of the religion. Right. OK. Now, in the same way, there are car people who aren't principally interested in cars as a form of transportation. They're principally interested in things like, you know, I don't know, engine design or V8s or, you know, in other words, the means is more interesting than the ends to those people. And I think I sympathize with them because I will die in a ditch over the beauty of a steam locomotive.

1:07:59I think the steam engine was inherently, you know, a really magnificent steam locomotive. Nothing else touches that. Why? Well, first of all, the steam engine is incredibly elegant in its simplicity in that it's a multi-fuel thing. So as long as you can provide a source of heat, you can turn that into traction and to locomotion. So what used to happen in the United States, by the way, is the trains used to set off to the west and they'd start off by burning coal. And then as they got further west towards the Rockies, coal became less abundant and wood became more abundant and they switched to burning wood.

1:08:35Wasn't it the trains that properly set the time? Yes, that required us. I was listening to the Tyler Cohen podcast. It says the train lines are what actually set before different states. There was no real Gredditch meantime, except in shipping. In fairness, in fairness. It was the trains that created actually where everyone was on the same clock. You might, you would have needed a reliable time clock for setting your chronometer, for navigation, if you're a ship setting out on an oceanic voyage. Yeah. So there are time balls. Deal has a time ball. There's a time ball somewhere over Greenwich, weirdly.

1:09:10What's a time ball? It's a ball that drops at a specific time every day to allow ships to synchronise their chronometers. Right. So that their navigation is accurate in terms of, I mean, it's right, longitude. Right. However, I mean, I think there was a court case that drove it in the UK because different towns would literally be on a different time zone. You might have one that was six minutes later than another. In the UK? And the church clocked. So time was set locally rather than centrally. And someone turned up late for a court case, I think, which was the thing because they said, well, you know, as far as I'm concerned, it's a 40-minute journey and I left my railway station at 9am, which means I should get into Frampton-Cotterell.

1:09:56I don't think that has a station. I should get into Frampton Cottrell at 40 minutes past nine, 20 to 10. But when I got to Frampton Cottrell, I discovered it was actually, you know, 10.05 because Frampton Cottrell sets its clocks 15 minutes or 25, whatever it is, you know, faster than, you know, Eastern Ingordano, right? I don't know why I'm choosing West Country places. That's a service station in any case. um uh but um the the that i think basically required people to coordinate centrally because you couldn't have people and actually there's a really weird problem which is portugal spain should really be on the same time zone as portugal why are they not uh because this is the weirdest reason in the world uh effectively the spanish are so far west they should they should emphatically be in London time, which indeed the Canary Islands are.

1:10:49And Madeira, okay. At the same time as Portugal. And Hitler, sorry, Hitler visited Franco and Franco is a weird gesture to... Franco... The fascist dictator of Spain, 1930-something or other to 1970-something or other. I can remember him dying. I'm that old. There was a dictator of Spain? There was a dictator of Spain in my childhood. Spain was a complete dictatorship in my childhood. No. Really? Really? I know. By the way, it's worth noting that modern language teaching should really have started teaching Spanish rather than French a long time ago. But it's worth noting, well, it's a much more valuable language in terms of the widespread use.

1:11:33One of the reasons, well, I suppose, A, two reasons. One, bear in mind we didn't have cheap air travel, so everybody could go to France, but not everybody could go to Spain. But the other reason was that the majority, perhaps all of spanish-speaking countries in my childhood were either communist or fascist dictatorships of one shape or another so french it was but um so to impress hitler he just announced that spain was going to be taken on to effectively central european time which is the same time zone as berlin which is miles and miles to the east the decision is completely whack it causes all kinds of problems one of the reasons why the spanish have to um eat ridiculously late at night is they all go out to eat at nine o 'clock and we go that's so weird what they're actually doing is going out to eat at eight o 'clock in anyone portuguese time or london time and the reason they're going out late is because it's too bastard hot at seven o 'clock to go out and eat so effectively the whole of spain gets up too early and okay who are we speaking to this about we were speaking to Storm about this who's going to we were saying it's proper whack but also you can't get a good the cafe culture over there is shite because you can't get good breakfast nothing opens to I agree that the Spanish have not cracked breakfast however in other culinary matters I think the Spanish have actually performed spectacularly in the last 20 years I mean to a point of view where you could make the case that it's as interesting or possibly even more interesting a place to eat, depending on what you like, than, say, you know, France or Italy.

1:13:12Now, I will agree with you that paella is, or paella, is actually a failed biryani. Yeah. So certain of the things that are considered Spanish staples, I consider remarkably unexciting. You know, there's almost like a text mexification of paella, because actual paella is from Valencia, which is a rabbit. so the stuff we get with chicken and seafood and prawns and chorizo is basically our text mexican so it was rabbit biryani basically it's gone off the rails if you go to Valencia there's no fish, you can't get seafood well you can now but the Valencian, Valencia how do they fit that? Valencia paella is fucking rabbit you can't get anything else and it's vegetables which is weird because it's by the sea so Valencians regard other paellas It's the Hawaiian pizza.

1:13:59It's basically, yeah. Okay, got it. But it's weird how these foods have these sort of, these adaptive sort of moments to become mass market. It is something I just sort of think about quite a lot. It's like, it's almost like a theory of evolution to food that happens. Someone dug deep into Italian cuisine and discovered that all the Italian classics basically date back to the sort of 40s and 50s. Yeah. You know, the whole thing of lasagna, many of the basic sort of things which are... The narrative is always that it's been passed down by generation after generation of grandmothers. Yeah. Apparently that's not...

1:14:37If you dig into it, not really true. Yeah. Well, also it's... Again, it's an adaptive thing. It's Italian-American. That's basically what... The Italian food we have is... Yeah, there's a sort of debate. The mass market is all that stuff with people going over to the States. No, no. I mean fat I mean that's undoubtedly Indian food in the UK is not necessary not all of it But some of its unrepresentative. Yeah, you'd find in India And of course, it's you know, it's historically a lot less vegetarian than Indian food as well One thing I want to ask you about Rory is Nassim Taleb's book anti-fragile I think last time we talked about thinking Thinking fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman.

1:15:20I'd love to know about anti-fragile what are the lessons the big lessons from there the first principles you take from that you think you can apply to it's it's really really marketing specifically which is the statistical assumptions that we overlay on real world observed behavior okay yeah now full by randomness was an earlier book which is perhaps more of a behavioral science book less mathematical white how so it's the extent that we actually that we will often extract patterns out of random events that aren't really there or we will extrapolate we underestimate we underestimate i mean there's a great book by brian class called fluke we underestimate the role of randomness okay uh in uh everyday life uh and probably we have a kind of and that i think the book was partly inspired by a meeting between Taleb and Kahneman actually.

1:16:18They were... Called by randomness was. Yeah, I think I'm right. I think I've got the order right there. No, yes. I mean, it was before Kahneman had written his book, but I think Kahneman and Nassim knew each other quite some time before either of them became a published author, I think. Okay. Because Taleb obviously is very interested in the sort of inherent biases that happen in trading, for example. And so one of the points he makes is that we tend to conflate the likelihood of something happening with what we should necessarily do. So a poker player will understand that you occasionally place a bet, which has a very low chance of success, but in the event of success, you make a fortune.

1:17:02So Nassim would occasionally take a counterintuitive bet on what the market was going to do. And he'd say, we're almost certainly going to lose money today. But if we make money, we'll make so much money that actually these are the kind of bets which we should be making. The contrary bet, which is known as picking up, known in financial circles as picking up pennies in front of a steamroller, is where you take a whole series of small gains, congratulate yourself for your financial acuity, only to find out that you're making those small and continued gains at the price of a monumental risk, which is the steamroller.

1:17:40Okay. So picking up a load of gains from something, which in other words, if you climb, an example would be if you climb very tall trees to go and get extra cherries, but one time in 150, you're going to fall off the tree and die. Okay. You can congratulate yourself on days 100 to 149, that you're the best cherry picker in the forest. But on day 150, you exit the gene pool okay so what talib is looking for is a much more nuanced appreciation of statistics and our interpretation of statistics and our interpretation of probability likelihood so for example we often assume things are gaussian gaussian okay this is getting nerdy okay we often assume the normal distribution to events okay when in fact they're fat-tailed uh okay And the fat tails of the graph are that, okay, so height, human height, I'm not the best person to do this, but I'll do my best.

1:18:37Human height is basically Gaussian in that you're never going to get a working adult human who's one foot high, almost certainly, and you certainly aren't going to get an adult human who's 15 feet high. Okay. Yeah. So it's distributed on a kind of normal distribution, okay, where tail events are unbelievably rare and most people are somewhere around the middle. Is that like a bell curve? It's exactly that. It's a bell curve. You got it, okay. A lot of things in life actually... He's looking at the tail ends to the side. He's talking about mediocristan, which is human height, and he's contrasting that with something called extremistan, which is human wealth.

1:19:20yeah so to give an example there is nobody so tall that they could walk into a packed wembley stadium and meaningfully change the average height of everybody on the stadium simply by their presence yeah but if bill gates walked into wembley stadium or if elon walked into wembley stadium the average person in that stadium would now be a millionaire okay and so not all things are distributed by a bell curve distribution a lot of things actually uh there is far more extremity And by the way, the poorest person in the world is also likely to be extremely, you know, someone who's literally a billion dollars in debt, for example.

1:19:56OK, the poorest person in the world would meaningfully affect the average wealth of people in the stadium, potentially the other direction. And so his idea is that lots and lots of risk models in banking assumed bell curve probability where, you know, people referred to, I think, in the run up to the financial crisis, they'd say things like, we've had five, six sigma events on five consecutive days, to which you go, literally, okay, what you're suggesting there is that something that's a one in a billion probability as a standalone event has happened on five consecutive days, it's much more likely that your maths is wrong than you've just experienced literally an event that shouldn't happen in the entire lifetime of the universe.

1:20:41Okay, so what's happening there is that, And in full by randomness, he also makes the point that organic or living systems are not optimized around an average. They're often optimized around a desired level of variance. So in other words, and I would argue this also applies in things like creativity. OK, so I think that marketing is fat tailed in the to the extent that the most successful things you do will be so successful. okay in other words 20 percent of everything you do in marketing will probably deliver 80 percent of the value i wouldn't be surprised if one percent of what you do in marketing delivers 50 percent of the value and therefore asking for marketing to always wash its face same would be true of r &d demanding that every piece of marketing you do to be matched to a corresponding quantum of profit is a fool's errand okay and yet that's how we measure marketing effectiveness I'd also argue that sometimes in marketing...

1:21:45By the way, I think bottlenecks explain fat-tailedness. But sometimes by accident, you intervene in a way that... So a bottleneck to ordering a taxi before the Uber map came along was the unpleasant anticipation of the uncertain 20 minutes you spent waiting for that taxi. We had this in Cornwall. See, Cornwall, you can't get an Uber. There is a weird Cornish Uber substitute, which I did download. I wish we found it. Because I called the guy and I was like, going back, going to Cornwall was interesting because you kind of, I mean, it's beautiful down there. But I called a cab driver and they're like, hello, love.

1:22:20And I was like, oh, have you got someone? He goes, no, but I'll pass you on to my friend. Next fucking cab, next cab. They're all helping each other out. I called the guy. I was like, will you be at this pub? It was in Padstow Harbor. He's like, yeah, mate, I'll be there. Don't you worry about that. And I was like, what time? He's like, 1130. All right. And I was like, I had this insane anxiety attack. and be like, is this fucking guy going to be there? So I called him up back again. I was like, look, and I was like, are you actually going to be there? And he was like, mate, stop taking the piss, otherwise I won't be there.

1:22:48Because you've been Uberised. I've been Uberised to fuck. By expecting, yeah. And then, yeah, we go to this bar in the harbour having a few whiskeys, funnily enough. And then he was there, and it was like, but that Uberification of, it's mad how that happens. Oh, the level of uncertainty. Yes. Yeah. But, you know, and we probably have had our level of uncertainty sort of recalibrated in that in the pre-internet age, we were used to sending a letter to a company and waiting three, four days for a response. And we were just happy spending four minutes not knowing. Four days. So we're happy spending four days not knowing.

1:23:28Now we're not really that comfortable when we email a company with a customer complaint. okay and we don't get a reply you know because we go oh god they're going to reply in the next working day that's monday it's now sunday i can't cope with this level of kind of being on tenterhooks for 24 hours what does um yeah so what does turn back to sort of um so you're undoubtedly right that yeah a londoner in cornwall is a fucking nightmare in the same way that um when you go to the caribbean and you order a drink you've just got to recalibrate yourself to bajan time or Caribbean time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:24:02Because... It takes three days to customize, doesn't it? And you eventually just compensate. You would just order every drink an hour before you actually want it, and everything works really, really well. Yeah, yeah. Okay. But I quite like that in a way. I mean, in a way, you know, I mean, in a way we've lost something as well as gaining something. I mean, you know, one of the problems undoubtedly that the NHS faces is that people have waiting times now calibrated by pizza delivery. Yeah. My father explained this to me partly because it was wartime he grew up in world war ii whereabouts he said so he was at school in cheltenham and he said that uh if you wanted a nice new fountain pen you went into probably cavendish house which is the cheltenham department store and you saw a pen that you liked i'm not making this up okay and they would say right we don't have that in stock this is a display model however we will order a pen for you and four days later or maybe a week later at school sometimes three weeks later a postcard would arrive at school saying the pen you have ordered is now in stock Wow okay I mean a whole load of things totally weird that my father told me which is he bought a vacuum cleaner in Abergavenny and drove it home to recall I promise I'm not making this up okay Hoover vac now bear in mind in 1950 whatever it was 3 55 how old have you been at this point he was then 25.

1:25:25He was actually quite rich in his 20s because his father had died and he'd inherited a load of property. My grandfather was a GP who'd bought a load of houses. So he was driving around in my grandfather's Humber Super Snipe. And he buys this vacuum cleaner in Abergavenny, he potters around in Abergavenny for a bit, drives it back to Krakow. Okay? And when he gets back to Krakow, I'm not making this up, there's a local, Krakow is sort of five or six miles from abba yeah okay abogavenny of course now is a food mecca absolute culinary mecca the angel hotel there's the walnut tree at the new east gear in there's the abogaveney food festival um cracao also is is i mean both of those places if you lived in monmouth when i was a kid was seen as a bit of a dump um but they're now they've actually they are now actually in danger of outshining Monmouth they've had a kind of really complete complete a kind of Deification Deservedly so and all credit to them.

1:26:29You know a few really major entrepreneurs have done that it literally a food scene in a town That size can be changed by five or six people. Yeah, totally Yeah, you know the actual size of the ecosystem you need to actually make something a foodie It's same things happen actually in ox did not far from me in across the border in Surrey And but but when he got home to Cal, there was a representative from Hoover, the vacuum cleaner company, asking him if he needed any help sort of setting up the machine or learning how to use it. So labor was so comparatively cheap and mass manufactured goods were so comparatively expensive.

1:27:06Bear in mind, in modern money, the vacuum cleaner had probably cost him, I don't know, 500 quid or something. It would have been several, several weeks work, certainly for a working man. And you could then provide levels of service which were totally insane. I mean, imagine even if you found Dyson, right? You don't expect to get home and find a Dyson consultant coming around and pointing out the different settings for the brush. But admittedly, even in 1955, my father thought that was a bit weird and probably going a bit too far in terms of providing service. But you had a completely different ratio of how expensive goods were versus how expensive service or indeed servants.

1:27:47were okay so you could employ people for relatively little but manufactured goods were insanely expensive that's something that that when we look at gen z and we think god they're really weird in their behavior a lot of it is that in my parents generation housing was comparatively cheap and trips to australia were insanely unaffordable and now you get 20 how many of you have been to australia just out of interest how many of you've flown long haul you you haven't flown long haul actually yeah actually that's quite good because you've got something to look forward to because actually my kid i didn't fly long haul until i was 29 my grandfather who's quite a rich doctor okay never flew long haul in his life neither my grandmother okay my parents did it once okay now my kids don't know how often they've been on a long haul flight and there's a bit of me which goes actually i first did it when i was 29 flew into the united states in 19 children would have been 27.

1:28:47Actually, was I? 93. Would have been 27, okay? First flew long haul when I was 27. And it was really effing exciting. You flew into Minneapolis airport and you looked down and you saw America and you thought, shit, this is fucking amazing, right? Now, my parents-in-law, I did have to kind of slightly berate them because someone they knew got married and they said, we don't understand it. They said, they've actually been on honeymoon to Australia, but they're planning to rent a house. And I had to explain to them that when they were 27 or whatever it was, you could buy a house for bugger all, you know, particularly out of London.

1:29:23OK. But going to Australia was absolutely impossible. I mean, actually, I mean, for a lot of people, you know, even short haul air travel was pretty damn exotic in my childhood. OK. And long haul travel was it certainly wasn't something you treated as routine. Whereas, by contrast, buying houses is totally unaffordable. So an awful lot of Gen Z behavior is just driven by finding themselves in completely different economic conditions. My father always had a theory, which I think is interesting, that property was underpriced for a long time in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Partly because things that really mattered to you in terms of consumer goods, which would include buying a car, buying a washing machine, buying a television.

1:30:11those things were really really expensive so by the time you'd actually bought those things you didn't have that much money to spend on the house yeah okay and the thing that worries me about the economy as a georgist is that every gain we have in buying in manufacturing for example enormous flat screen tvs that cost almost nothing almost every gain we brought to consumers in the shape of easy jet or ryanair every game we bought to consumers in the fact that actually don't buy If you buy a second-hand car, don't buy a second-hand car for 300 or 400 quid. You'll get a piece of shit, right? But if you can cobble together 1 ,500, actually it's gone up a bit recently, but if you can cobble together just a few thousand, you can now get a pretty good car.

1:30:54If you bought a car of equivalent cheapness in my childhood, it was a piece of shit. Yeah. Right? It was awful. It wouldn't start on a cold day, you know, every goddamn problem. And it was just an awful car. Yeah, that's matters. So my worry is that all we've done in consumer capitalism to give people more and more disposable income has not manifested itself in a better quality of life. It simply manifested itself in higher property prices, either rent, higher rents or higher mortgages. OK, which simply means that the young are now working basically to pay for the retirements of the old. Now, that doesn't matter so much if your parents own expensive property.

1:31:37you will have banker friends bear in mind okay you said you hang out with a lot of bankers I have no idea why you choose to do that they're wankers I loved it when that guy murdered two people in Hong Kong the rumour got out that he was a member of Shoreditch House and they get in touch the evening stander got in touch with Shoreditch House and said so there was a banker who went completely insane in Hong Kong and actually murdered two people in his apartment and then kept them. This is about five years ago. Right. Maybe a bit more. Pre-COVID actually, it might have been seven or eight years ago.

1:32:13And the rumour was that he was a member of Shoreditch House in London. They contacted Shoreditch House and they said no. They weren't remotely interested in the possibility that one of their members might be a murderer, but they said no, our membership tend to be drawn from the creative industries. We're not very keen on having people from financial service in our club. As if the greatest sin he could have committed to Shoreditch House wasn't actually... Murdering two women and keeping them in a suitcase. It was being a banker. But the property they can buy, even if they're doing really, really well, okay, compared to the property you could buy if you were reasonably successful in advertising, never mind banking, in the 1980s or 90s is dismal.

1:32:54Okay. And the only reason they're not more angry is they never knew what it was like beforehand. They'd never realized the extent to which the older generation have managed to surf a wave of rising property prices Yeah, that's another thing in is I think is an anti-fragile where Taleb talks about like there's almost it's interesting Because actually my mates aren't there's sort of bank wankers sort of ex-oxbridge And then there's stockbrokers and stockbrokers are kind of like that. They're the that's boring and safe You know and in in anti-fragile Taleb talks about is it Tony that you know the fuck are you money the fact Tony the fact Tony is basically the guy who doesn't look like he probably hasn't been to Oxford hasn't been to Cambridge in our in our in our case it probably be someone from Essex um or the East which is if you if you're trying to get into it yeah if you get to choose between two surgeons choose the one who doesn't look the part yeah because he's had to be a much better surgeon to get where he is yes there's a surgeon who looks like a surgeon from central casting right absolutely he said choose a surgeon who says d's and does and that's trouble and that is that that's almost the same in banking as well then because or like not in because some because i think i've heard you talk about this as well as like how we there's discrimination in terms of people's accents as well oh if we're talking about um discrimination it needs to be vastly more nuanced than the kind of DEI debate that we've had so far, which is about gender and ethnicity.

1:34:21Yeah. In the sense that... It's like a Scal CEO in a bank firm. There are many... You wouldn't get that. Scott Galloway says we should have positive discrimination and affirmative action, and it should be based on colour, and the colour is green, by which he means money. In other words, you should fundamentally accept the fact that people with a wealthy upbringing, regardless of other variables, have an advantage over people who don't. I would also argue people growing up in London have a huge advantage over people who don't, simply because the opportunities of employment. If you can live at home with your mum in London.

1:34:55Well, I got lucky. Yeah, that's what happened to me. OK, so you totally. OK. Now, had you been living in, you could have been living in idyllic circumstances in Borton on the water, right? But getting in, which even has a model village, by the way. But which means that, but getting into the podcasting world would have been inordinately more difficult. Well, this is the thing is I take it for... So doing this more traditionally food and drink podcast, I could only do this in London, and it's actually easier than in America because everything... Austin would be where you went if you went... Yeah, I would go to Austin for a definite...

1:35:30to absolutely do some food restaurants over there. But in terms of, like, this city, I don't think any other city may... Well, obviously not Paris, I don't speak fucking French, but, like... I think we probably have the... I mean, one reason... The best food. One reason I would argue in favor of living here. A few arguments I'd make. So, funnily enough, Rick Rubin asked me this. Why have you never lived in the United States? And actually, one of the problems is that in advertising, you'd have to work in New York. And the cities, New York, L.A., D.C. and San Francisco are annoyingly, I think, industry towns.

1:36:05One's all about finance. One's all about government. One's all about software. One's all about entertainment. Now, London is at least variegated in that a friend of mine, actually, who I'm meeting this afternoon, interestingly said that Silicon Valley dinner parties are unbelievably boring because everybody just talks about tech. London dinner party, you'd have somebody, you'd have a journalist, you'd have a mix of people who are not talking about tech. They might be talking about education policy or architecture or something different. Yeah, so that I think is a bit of a problem. Whereas I love American cities like Chicago or indeed I was in San Antonio for a week.

1:36:42I think it's magnificent place Yeah, but though I wouldn't want to be in one of those kind of industry towns The other thing is that the good stuff of the US tends to make it across the Atlantic to the east eventually Whereas you can't say the same of say cathedrals or You know, you know, you know or medieval towns, okay? They tend not to make it over to the West So there's a sort of asymmetry there. On the other hand, the entrepreneurialism and inventiveness there is absolutely magnificent. It's, you know, they're a huge accomplishment. Well, it's because they're immigrants and they're naturally curious, aren't they?

1:37:13And they've got space, actually. You've got space to experiment. Oh, that you don't everything, I think, in London. OK, so what I'm starting to notice is that the Kent eating scene is becoming every bit as interesting and easier to access than a London eating scene. Because you can, in London, if you add the rates to the rent, okay, can you take risks if your restaurant has to make half a million pounds in revenue to cover the rate of rents before it even starts to break even and make you money? Well, that's why I think we talked about this in the first part. Now, by contrast, in Kent, you could go and buy some derelict pub somewhere.

1:37:57And if you're good enough at your food, OK, you're a destination. You're not paying very much rent. You may even own the place outright. And you've got people flocking to you. And your landlord, which may well be you, but even if it's landlord, doesn't have the same power to extract most of the value of what you create. Effectively, most of the value you create through the sweat of your arm and your brow ends up in the pockets of the landowner, not in the pockets of you. And that's the fundamental Georgist argument, which I think we have to take seriously. That's what I think someone was saying to me is, I think we were saying when we went for lunch, mate, is that the centre of gravity of London has now moved from West London to East London in terms of like...

1:38:39Certainly it's just sort of shifted East. Yeah, and I think... That's probably because the extent to which you... I mean, what's weird is that expensive London streets tend to have pretty formulaic restaurants. And the idea is you can't take any risks. Well, that's, yes, that's who I think, I can't remember who it was telling me. I think we talked about this in our first podcast, is that basically, like, it got to a point where to do anything innovative in West London was prohibitively expensive, because it was so fucking, as you say, to cover the rent. I would argue we've now run out of East London.

1:39:09That's exactly, that's why we're going to Margate. You're going to find Margate or somewhere. Yeah, yeah. But actually also, a large part of the innovation, which I think is wonderful. I mean one thing having grown up in a small provincial I'm being unfair to it. It was great town But having grown up in it around Monmouth It was fantastically interesting town given its size that Monmouth coffee Well, funny enough, but with that same named after Monmouth Street in Covent Garden Which I assume is named after the Duke of Monmouth who I assume is named after Monmouth Right, but in the end Yeah, but but Monmouth was very very interesting place but of Of necessity a town of 10 20 30 ,000.

1:39:48Okay could only see 20 that the 20 ,000 is a bit of a threshold But you can only support so much interesting retail and so much interesting restoration One of the really interesting things is internet businesses like Gusto and you know, you could include HelloFresh You would include you be chef, which is a Michelin star chef on the Isle of Wight who sends out We talked about that before. Ready to heat rather than ready to eat food of a sensational standard. You could also include, I suppose, I'm intrigued by the fact that somebody bought Dispatch, didn't they? Now, who was that? Was it Waitrose who bought it?

1:40:27It might have been, actually. As in Brought. Bought, yeah, the company. But actually, and also, let's be grateful to, no one ever says, hey, isn't it great, there's Tesco. But actually we always had mr. Rudge in Monmouth a very good delicatessen Abigavenny had Vin Sullivan a fantastic sort of fishmonger You always had a few pockets of extraordinary in us, but the ability to eat really really interesting food anywhere and the internet has been an incredible geographic leveler in the sense that London's advantage is business connections undoubtedly Whether you need to be there five days a week to make those connections is interesting debatable undoubtedly if you're into nightclubs dating theater museums um uh then it has still a supreme advantage over anything else well it used to have a supreme advantage in terms of food well i only need so many restaurants within 30 miles radius because don't forget when you move to the country your radius of operations because you can drive and the restaurant has a bloody car park okay Your radius of...

1:41:34I was going to say your zone of interest, but I think that's been... That's not the phrase we want to... Your zone of interest commercially, okay? It's a Holocaust film. Sorry, sorry. Expands massively. So in London, it's inconvenience just for leisure purposes to travel more than a few miles. In Kent, you might travel 25... I recently went 25 miles to go to the cinema, okay? Because it's a cute cinema in Hawkehurst, and I just liked it. He's got a nice cafe. You've been to the pig? The pig in Bridge near Canterbury. Yeah, so I was speaking to Anne about this. They're also taking over a new one in Kent.

1:42:10So that's that business. They're going to have two Kent pigs. We've always talked about how scale... Seth Godin says scale kills magic, right? Scale kills magic. By that, your daughter... They haven't scaled beyond the realm of... No, they've got quite a few. They've got like 15 pig sites now. But the genius of it is, it is. So you know how the ubiquity of five guys make your daughter like it less because it's everywhere what they've done so genius is they've it's almost it's the paradox of how do you scale and how do you keep the magic alive and i went there the other week so i actually i didn't message you you can do that i mean there was a guy who runs the customer service wing for a long time for shopify who and actually i think octopus energy does something similar you have teams of about 10 people uh and you devolve extraordinary amount to power down to the smaller team.

1:43:00And his argument with Shopify, so in other words, I think I'm right here. Octopus Energy has a customer service team, which is given a certain number of customers. And they're only bonused on two things, how many customers they look after in that team, and what their customer satisfaction levels are in terms of resolution of complaints and problems. And the reason for that is that if you have a call center, which is just dealing with everybody okay you have no continuity no one can shout across the room hey i've got dave on the phone again he's got that problem with his meter okay every single phone call basically starts from scratch but the uh toby the guy is called toby shannon and his insight was that all sports teams are around 10 or 15 people you don't get sports which have teams of 30 or 40 people normally okay and his argument is that just as you have the dunbar number which is 150 So it's a theoretical kind of maximum to the size of a human functioning unit.

1:44:00It varies for different primates, but the size of a unit in which it actually operates fully, because everybody understands everybody else. Everybody knows everybody else, and everybody understands how everybody interacts with everybody else. That's 150. And Dunbar's theory is that the number is somewhere around 150, which recurs in all sorts of things, like the size of units in the military and so forth. and an interesting definition of someone who's within your Dunbar group okay so you're probably within my Dunbar group to the extent that if you were talking to someone else in a pub I could come up and join the conversation without it seeming weird okay that's one definition of your Dunbar group which is the number of friends you have where you could just wander up to them and go hi how are you even though they're talking to a complete stranger without your interruption if you like seeming slightly needy weird or unnatural yeah and that's only one definition of it the whole thing is that you arguably don't just understand your friends but you understand how your friends get on with your other friends within a dunbar group yeah beyond that it would get impossible yeah okay and it's i mean it's so tell me how the pig did it so the the so it's interesting so you know what you're talking about sort of um physical availability and mental availability i think what you're talking about is physical how you keep magic on a literal physical level of how many people looking after the customer complaints i think there's also a mental block where um in fit west scale can kill magic i.e the ubiquity of fucking of of um five guys makes it like let's call it the status of it goes down you could argue that the pig um but the pig the pig do they each menu is 25 miles so basically you go to the one in bridgeford the cider is from kent i know absolutely and but then you go down to the one in the cotswolds completely different menu so even though it's the same same operation same hotel the kitchen will have a completely different completely different menu yeah and i think that's how you keep the magic because you can basically put a pig anywhere as well you know you probably couldn't put it in the center of birmingham places open next year but it's um it's yeah that i think that's one of the great places i've seen do it another one's honest burger so every burger place every burger they open up, they will have a bespoke, specific to that town burger.

1:46:25Supplier? Beef supplier? No, not beef supplier, but they'll do... Oh, you see, they'll do their own individual localised burger. Yeah, localised burger. So that's another way to do it. I just want to go back to... In-N-Out refuses to expand where it can't have fresh beef supplies. Yeah. So it limits itself to Texas, New Mexico, California and Arizona. I think um fire now interestingly chick-fil-a They're a franchise operation. I don't think that's fucking bollocks But everyone says chick-fil-a is is the is like the in and out is in and out burger of KFC Yeah, I mean you've also got another very interesting entity is wing stop, which is fascinating.

1:47:07Yeah the but the what fascination about? the focus on one thing yeah i think is genius and also the really really interesting and there's some sort of it all right it's like chipotle and honey glaze which i haven't tried crazy flavors which the flavors apparently are insane so i'm intrigued by that i'm going to give that a try and i think they do they do one because i've had it on delivery before i think they do they do some flavors that are like um i think we've talked about gratuicis perversity before yeah it's flavors that are actually kind of rank but they're a talking point like there's this one which is mango which i have a food that's designed for sharing that's interesting yeah but i talked about it i'm talking about it now exactly yeah and it's um it's interesting yeah there's one i think i think it's honey honey and chipotle or whatever it is there's another one or chipotle i never quite know how to pronounce um the um uh the other one that's interesting with chick-fil-a i think they're very very keen to franchise to families so quite a lot of the restaurants although they're a franchise are effectively a family-run business so you get that extent to which people are part of a small team where everybody stands in for everybody else okay so one of the reasons toby shannon did this thing with shopify which is splitting the business into it appeared very inefficient split the business so effectively every call center team was 10 people and they had a team leader now the standard way the standard way would minimize on management cost because you'd have one supervisor and there'd be 150 people all banning the phones.

1:48:34And he wouldn't really understand them as people. Instead, he'd be looking at various metrics for how quickly they're answering a call because that team is now too big for the relationship to be properly two-way. So you start using proxy metrics to manage your team rather than actually listening in on their calls. And it looked inefficient and he got quite a lot of grief. But he had the highest satisfaction levels in the company in terms of employees from people who are paid a lot less than say the software engineers within Shopify Very very high levels of retention and customer attention But also you get that weird thing where people step into the breach step into the breach So what that would be would be if someone's ill someone else picks up their work, you know, you know what I mean?

1:49:18Okay, they almost run it like a big chef ten people you'd say I've got your back yeah okay and if someone you know if someone someone's mother was ill people would understand the reason and they trust them but someone will feel a massive level of shame for claiming falsely that their mother was ill because they're actually lying to their cohort and their friends not just lying to senior management who are a remote load of bastards who don't understand what they really do anyway so so you create these kind of reciprocal bonds in smaller teams uh which are generally beneficial at the cost of not quite enjoying gains to scale efficiencies that you would do from having larger teams but the upside in many many areas of operation including i would argue customer service probably outweigh the downside costs i want to go back to nasim taleb and what that and what those books teach us about marketing like um i know we sort of touched on the problem I'm just paranoid about my time.

1:50:15No, you've got time. Do you know what my end time is? Anna's going to come in at 1.15. What time is it now? We've got a half hour. Oh, fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then your cab's at 1.30. Okay, that should be okay. That should be okay. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. You've got a conference or something. I have no idea what the time is because there's no clock in here. Yeah. Yeah, it's weird how... Yeah, so because you're like an acquaintance of... Oh, no, no, no. Well, yeah, I like him a lot. Yeah, so because I... His insight is that fundamentally... What other lessons can we take from him? Oh, there's a very, very big lesson you can take from what Nassim's done, which is that it doesn't matter how good a mathematician thinks they are.

1:50:53If they're using the wrong maths, they're dangerous. So you can build an extraordinary edifice of seemingly logical decision making on the back of a single wrong assumption in mathematics. What would that be in food? What's the equivalent of food? Well, one of the things would be in food. Yeah.

1:51:16OK. One of the wrong assumptions in food might be around what people claim to like and want over what they actually eat. So if you research people, they will always say, I want a healthy option. In the event they don't buy the healthy option. And the reason they don't buy the healthy option. By the way, the McDonald's salad is quite a good idea because it means mums can take children there or dads can take children there for a treat. If they themselves don't want to eat McDonald's, but you know the kids can have the happy meal etc etc You know, I'm not saying these things are a total waste of time And there will be occasions where that happens, but most of the time when you're sitting in a research group First of all, you're trying to look responsible sensible and good and middle-class so you'll say yeah healthy option As people say they have three drinks a week Of course they do My mom gets that so I'm bothered Also, when you go to Often not always sometimes you're going to McDonald's or KFC for a cheap lunch You know, you don't want to break into the six quid barrier or whatever it may be, and you want a hot meal.

1:52:15But sometimes you're going for a treat and a salad isn't a treat. So, you know, a large part of the food business is that it's completely wrong to look at the popularity of a fast food restaurant and assume that everybody who eats in a fast food restaurant eats unhealthily. They might be eating quite healthily at home, but every now and then it's Friday evening, whatever, they just let go. and now Nassim might argue incidentally that um the healthiest diet is not a constant diet of the same kind of stuff that actually you will I mean he would argue that the Mediterranean diet is partly a product of the fact that older Mediterranean's particularly in Greece follow the dietary precepts of the Greek Orthodox Church and therefore they would be vegan for a third you know vegan for two days a week vegetarian for two days a week on one day a week they'd pig out.

1:53:06And Nassim might make the case, in fact I think he does in the book, that the best, to optimize a complex system, there is sometimes an optimal amount of variation. You should optimize for variance, not optimize for consistency. So an example would be in things like artificial lung machines or ventilators okay a kind of someone with a Newtonian mindset would say okay or given this patient's condition we're going to set it to a five whatever the power level is okay and then a seam would say actually to encourage real human health human health is anti-fragile it thrives on variation yeah okay actually the correct thing is not to set it on five it's to set it on three then boost it up to five then boost it up to seven then knock it down to three again then put it up to five because it's actually healthier for a human to be exposed to a level of variance as they would encounter in the natural environment yeah versus so he he used to be some ways brands can become anti-fragile anti-fragile brands well i mean i mean to some extent uh of course uh a brand a lot patently gives you a certain degree of benefit of the doubt with the consumer.

1:54:27But undoubtedly, you can argue the other thing is that I've often said that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. And there are occasions with a brand where you optimize for predictability, and there are occasions with a brand where you optimize for pleasant surprise. So there are elements to a brand experience where the consumer basically wants it to be same as it ever was, nothing to see here, the glorious familiarity of the Amazon website okay and there are certain occasions where what you want to do is make people go wow that's good I never expected that mmm and and consequently you might argue that Nassim's barbell approach which is you know it well that's I've talked about this a lot yeah a lot yeah yeah that yeah two extremes I've talked about this a lot on the podcast as with guests you know James what about the barbell theory and he'd read a lot of Nassim's work and we you know because I think it goes you cannot almost apply that barbell theory to everything it's almost kind of holding two opposing things at once I think one one question to ask is like You know, what's one thing you'll never change your mind about as a founder?

1:55:33But then what's what was the last thing you change radically change your mind about like I think those that's quite a good place to play I love the fact that will Godara in his book. I'm talking about this this afternoon funnily enough Practice what I call reverse benchmarking you go to your best competitors and instead of asking what do they do? well that we can copy you ask what do they do slightly disappointingly that we can hit out of the park yes so in his case it was the coffee and the beer yeah so that's um it's the guy we interviewed in cornwall have you seen the grenade protein bar yes of course yes we did the founder of that al barrett he's an absolute i mean he's a fucking genius they sold it to mondelez um was unbelievable podcast but that is mondelez has also bought that thing called cliff is that am i right yes the cliff the cliff mondelez have only brought two brands in the uk cabris and gorilla and and grenade great sorry great um his whole his whole thing is do you know i think everyone looks his whole thing was most people look at their competition and saying okay what are they how are they what are they strong at where can we copy them and his whole thing if you look at real breakthrough innovation it nearly all follows what you might call reverse benchmarking so if you look at apple okay um everybody was a bunch of nerds competing for processing power ram all the usual objective metrics of performance okay and steve comes along and goes yeah in your process in your gathering haste to uh produce the world's most um high performing pc yeah you've completely forgotten aesthetics and usability how does it feel to use this thing rather than what is this thing and so uh emphatically what he did was he he matched you know none of those things had bad performance but he changed the question and made things which were within the ballpark area of acceptable performance but in terms of aesthetic now literally before there were apple computers actually to some extent the iMac was a genius breakthrough which deserves to be given more credit actually for weaning people onto the onto the platform Um if you put a computer in any room of your house you turn it into an office was that i was generally they were all gray they all had these horrible keyboards if you walked into anybody's home and there was a computer anywhere in their kind of living room you basically thought why have i walked into the study you might as well put a photocopier in the corner and a fax machine a filing cabinet because you just turned that room into an office and effectively what apple did was they actually thought about how the things looked and equally important how they felt to use which is why they'll give anally retentive attention to things like packaging which would have been completely neglected as beneath the dignity of someone working at you know the ibm pc division at the time the the other thing i don't know if it's i think it is taleb who says we need more books like there's so many how-to books and so many biographies of people who've been successful we need to almost reverse that and say how not to books or books of biography or biographies of people who have failed oh i think the number of things that failed because of one or two bad decisions, and sometimes not even product decisions or design decisions, sometimes marketing decisions.

1:58:49I think looking at a really good failure where you can identify one or two reasons why they failed and then you can come back with the same idea and effectively remove those two constraints. The director who was just on Rogue and Robert Rodriguez, he did Spy Kids, his creative approach is wonderful. But he says you've got to study the ashes of your failure. So applying that to marketing, like how not to books, what are some of the marketing campaigns? It doesn't have to be in food, it can be in food. Nuclear power undoubtedly chose the worst two terrible marketing decisions, one of which is using the word nuclear.

1:59:25Yeah. And the second one, less so in France but more in the UK, is the design and location of nuclear power stations, which make them look as sinister as fuck. If you had actually put them in fairly mainstream locations and you designed a mock Tudor nuclear power station. Our entire reaction to nuclear power would have been entirely different, whereas at the moment they look like Dr. Evil's headquarters and they're always in some remote coastal area, usually shrouded in fog. Yeah. So they look deeply sinister. Other examples would be another great marketing failure is The Shawshank Redemption, which you've seen it, presumably.

2:00:04Okay, most people agree it's one of their favourite films. Didn't it bomb at first? It absolutely bombed. And you would have thought that word of mouth might have rescued it. But one, they timed the launch badly. So it coincided with the launch of some other blockbuster. But why the hell do they call it that? Okay, because now it's one of the world's most popular films, we can all remember the name of the Shawshank Redemption. now Morgan Freeman himself was livid about the title of the film because he said the original title of the Stephen King short story was Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption and Morgan Freeman's observation was you've got Rita Hayworth you've got the Shawshank Redemption why the hell would you go with Shawshank not Rita Hayworth okay Rita Hayworth that was the poster if you remember the film the reason it was called Rita Hayworth a famous actress extraordinary so it went from Rita Hayworth to Raquel Raquel Welsh to show how long he'd been in the prison okay um Andy Dufresne um but um that was an interesting case there are really really interesting cases where the reason for marketing failure may well be just lack of patience and that new significant new ideas the other thing that's interesting to me is quite often in order to do a Will Godara which is what I call reverse benchmarking, okay, you do what everybody else does, not quite as well, but you invest your resources into doing what they've neglected brilliantly well, okay.

2:01:35A friend of mine made the point that that was how you invented Brazilian jiu-jitsu, okay. McDonald's did that, okay. Okay, so a diner did choice, McDonald's did speed, okay. Very simply, diners, you'd have it over easy, you could have it sunny side up, you could have substitutions, You can have link sausages. You have this huge great menu. McDonald's did absolutely the opposite, which said we're going to cut down on choice and we're going to deliver on speed and instantaneousness because everybody likes, you know, everybody likes a burger, basically. Okay? Brazilian jiu-jitsu was that every other martial arts had got really, really good at how to fight when you're standing up.

2:02:14And the guy who was not coincidentally Brazilian, who invented Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Roger Gracie or something. I can't remember his name. his whole insight was in every other martial art once you're on the ground you're kind of lost so nobody's actually given any thought to what happens to fighting when you're actually at ground level so that's how he invented the martial art there's a great meme of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu takes on not a Veeam like a little video takes on like London mobs and basically the guy's got these like balaclavas on and fucking baseball bats and he's walking around and goes oi oi brav oi oi brav and the guy goes come on then and he gets on the floor and obviously they're standing up with baseball bats but the whole point is like is basically like once they're on the floor however the interesting thing is that it's unlikely you'll come up with a brilliant new idea for a um uh i mean you know it's unlikely you'll come up with a brilliant new idea for a martial arts given that millions of people in the orient have been perfecting how to fight while standing up for a thousand years whereas is how to fight while lying down.

2:03:17That's terra incognita. Yeah. So Uber, everybody would focus on aspects of the taxi. I would argue the magic with Uber was the map. The certainty that, we mentioned this already with your time in Cornwall. I interviewed, who's Chris Williamson's business partner in Utonic, James Smith. I don't know if you've met him. And he practices jiu-jitsu. He does it like three, four times. Brazilian or standing up? Brazilian, Brazilian. and um i was and he's a like a really interesting marketeer as well his whole thing is like honest marketing and we can i want to talk about that as well about almost i think you've talked about robert c ardini's seventh weapon of influence which is basically negative selling which is saying it's actually a bit david abbott uh brilliantly what's fascinating is that before anybody to come up with a pratfall effect there was an advertising guy uh i mean famously david Abbott said confession works well in the church and also works well in the sale room or something to that effect.

2:04:16There is a certain admission where there is a downside to this product, but it's more than made up for. Now, an interesting example of a product that was effectively unlike any previous product and markedly worse than the preceding products in one dimension was the original iPhone, which we've forgotten this now to an extent. The original iPhone had dismal battery life. I mean, it was really appalling. Now, it happened that people loved its other attributes so much. They were happy to do workarounds. You'd either buy an absurdly bulbous case with a battery in it. You did that. Or you'd take a plug and a cable into work with you.

2:04:53Barely made it through to lunchtime. But you were sitting there on the desk and you'd plug in your iPhone somewhere and charge it up. OK. Now, quite often, I would argue the same is of the electric car. The electric motor is a vastly more suited device to converting energy into transportation than the internal combustion engine. It has only one negative, okay, which is that charging is a bit more problematic. It takes a bit longer, and you may need to do it a little more frequently, okay? My argument would be that that is often the case with innovation. And that's, By the way, one of the reasons B2B innovation is slower than consumer innovation is that the iPhone would never have made it as a B2B product because procurement would have set out a specification for the desired mobile phone, which would have included a battery life of 26 hours.

2:05:44And the iPhone at that stage would have been completely impossible, OK, to attain that kind of battery life with that kind of screen. So B2B would have awarded the contract to BlackBerry or Motorola or awarded the contract to Nokia. Okay, consumers are prepared, just as consumers in dating or consumers in buying a house, are prepared to trade off two indifferent negatives for one massive positive. It's very common in B2B purchasing that the metrics around which optimality is defined are basically the metrics determined by the brand leader in a particular category, which means that anyone with an innovative solution is at a disadvantage compared to the incumbent or the typically the dominant player in the category.

2:06:32So, for example, IBM would have set the category parameters as processing speed. Apple would have come along and said, yeah, yeah, processing speed is a bit worse, but look at the usability. And the procurement people would have said usability doesn't factor in our key performance indicators or our, you know, our balanced scorecard of values. So I'm afraid we're going with the incumbent. And so procurement and what my friend Blair Enns calls inefficiency, i.e. that the cult of efficiency as defined prevents innovation. OK, those act effectively as a massive drug drag on potential innovation because the innovative solution is almost certainly an outlier on quite a few measures.

2:07:19the incumbent solution is generally optimized towards the existing measures in the marketplace yeah that sort of links what i was going where i was going with james smith in terms of brazilian jiu-jitsu and we'll get on to sort of the seventh rule of robert chialdini in a sec but one of the things he taught me i was like what are the parallels between jiu-jitsu one of my favorite things is to look at two completely opposite things and what can you learn at the sweets box because I believe for everything, you learn something in the crux of two random things. I was like, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and marketing.

2:07:50And he was like, his, he was basically saying his biggest learning that he'd apply from Jiu-Jitsu to marketing is putting yourself constantly in a disadvantaged position. Because that is in almost like a weird position that you don't want to be in. Because that is where, one, you'll get better at Jiu-Jitsu because you're like, instead of, it's almost like. Oh, so you learn how to recover. Learn how to recover, but also learn insights. I suppose maybe analogous way of doing this is like say you're skiing down a mountain and you go down the same route it would be going like that way kind of thing failure often contains valuable information including at the simplest level the information that if we did the opposite of failure it might succeed what have been some of your failures do you think oh lots of i mean i've been wrong i mean you know i look back on my time and uh one of them is i think endemic to the advertising industry which is a failure to walk away and say no, which is a little too desperate to please.

2:08:43And on a few occasions, I've been involved in pitches where I didn't believe in the strategy. I didn't believe what they were doing was in any way beneficial to the brand or that it respected the brand that they'd built over the previous 20 years. And I wish I'd had the balls looking back to, you know, on two or three occasions, just say, we're not pitching this because we don't agree with what you're doing. That's one example of a failure, which is a failure of over-optimism. Other things are lots of things I've got wrong. I've predicted lots of things completely wrongly which are I I met the guy who originally came up with the phrase podcast Who in the very very early days of podcasting was introducing this concept was his name?

2:09:24I can't remember his name. I got a big idea. He was Israeli, but I'm just trying to remember And really nice guy. I remember thinking yeah This will really work in the you in the US because they have a lot of drive time But I don't really see it working in the UK. But of course, I failed to anticipate air pods I was literally about to say that yeah, because the air the air pods are what gave you what it became about What is weird which all of us would have been wrong about I think okay Is that when I go on a long drive? I am vastly more likely to listen to an audio book or a podcast than to listen to music Yeah Now again when I was a kid one advantage of being 59 is there are changes of which you are aware that young people have never seen because they didn't actually exist in the status quo ante.

2:10:10So, you know, the fact that going to Australia on holiday would have made you the absolute centre of attention among all your friends for fucking week. How much was it to fly then, do you reckon? It would have cost, I mean, in my young childhood, it was like the price of a car. Certainly taking, OK, maybe not the most exotic car, but taking your family to Australia would have been, you know, I mean, I had a friend who literally went back to Barbados for the school holidays only in the summer because the other holidays were too short to make it worth going back. And his parents, he flew. He was older than me.

2:10:44He must be in his 70s now or late 60s. He flew to Gander. Then I think flew to New York, then flew to Miami, then flew to Barbados. So it was a four leg flight. And his parents basically paid every year the price of a new car to get him home for the school holidays from the UK to Barbados That's mad. Okay, right now. I don't know you could do it now. What 500 return if it was offseason. Yeah, okay Admittedly, it's a school holiday. So it's a bit more expensive. But you know The but the interesting thing there is you have this kind of chronological context which you don't have if you're 30 Yeah.

2:11:22Like you knew what the world was like before the Internet where you wrote to somebody and waited. I mean, I used to buy things off the pre-Internet, which was mail order ads in newspapers. And they typically took 28 days to arrive. They would always say on the coupon, allow 28 days for delivery. And so you order a clock radio from an ad, you know, on TV or typically in the Sunday Times Colour magazine. And about a month later, your clock radio would arrive, maybe three weeks if you're lucky. of course nobody realizes these things and of course we grow up thinking that the the the contemporary world is the normal and everything else is new but to anybody my age large parts of the contemporary world are deeply abnormal still um in terms of what things cost uh in terms of uh what you can do with technology uh i told the story about i was on the tarmac at sydney airport and i just laughed because i was dicking around with my phone because it was before takeoff how long ago was it this is about i can date it actually about seven or eight no nine years ago yeah and i laughed at my daughter said what's so funny and i said it all just for 20 seconds back there i turned on the central heating at home she said dan you're such an idiot and i suddenly realized to her there was nothing particularly interesting about controlling your central heating from the other side of the world yes but to me the idea that you know 25 5 ,000 miles away a boiler went click and turned on At the behest of me sitting on a phone with a handheld device.

2:12:51It was still completely magical because if I if you told me I could do that at the age of 15, I would have told you to piss off It wasn't gonna happen Ironically, it was actually more technologically some of what we now have with the internet Was more technologically possible then than we thought Okay, so you could actually have controlled your boiler, but you would have needed a second phone line Which would have been really expensive or you would have needed a special device to answer your telephone line It would be technologically possible. I think, you know Even in the 70s if you were a really super nerd and you had a bank of nine phone lines Yeah to actually achieve something like a connected home to a very, you know trivial extent And I always wondered why one of the things that always bothered me is before mobile phones came along Why we didn't have message services where so if you wanted to meet someone in the pub in 1989 Okay You could have a mobile phone then but none of your friends did because they were pretty expensive and they were the size of a brick You'd have to say okay I'll meet you in the pub at one o 'clock and then if they didn't turn up at one You were in a complete funk.

2:13:59You had no means of getting home. This is mental right? So I was talking to Yeah, but but but what's interesting is someone could have invented BT could have invented them Tell you what my message number if I'm running late Okay, I'll leave a message on my message number and you can call that number from a payphone and you can pick up a message Or we could have had I don't know why the public didn't have cheap pages alphanumeric pages Why nobody tried to consumerize that maybe there wasn't enough And maybe there wasn't enough kind of freak spectrum in the airwaves to carry that number of pages But partly I think the reason was because nobody had them nobody realized they wanted them.

2:14:39Okay So if if let's say the world's mobile phone network crashed, okay, you would go insane to buy a pager, right? Because you know you now have an expectation of ready connectivity, which you didn't have in 1989. And so because you didn't have an expectation of it, everybody found a load of useless workarounds. Like, I suppose you could eventually phone the pub and they go, is Dave in? Has that ever happened? I mean, it happened to me, actually, in a pub where I was out of mobile range, where my PA actually called the pub to remind me to leave to my next meeting. That was the first time I'd been summoned to the telephone by a barman since 1987.

2:15:21This is what I can't... By the way, the old joke was to ring up and ask, could you put me... I need to get in touch with Mike Hunt. And then the barmaid would shout out, has anybody seen Mike Hunt? And everybody would burst out laughing. And we found that hysterically funny because it was 1987, OK? Now, that is a joke you can't really play on a mobile phone network. I mean, it's worth noting, OK, that we go to Gen Z. I always take the piss out of Gen Z because they seem... You people, you're obsessed with photographing your own genitals, aren't you? And then it occurred to me that had we wanted to photograph our own genitals, okay, in 1987, this is what you would have to do, okay?

2:16:01I thought you were going to get your genitals done, right? Okay, no, no, I was not going to get my genitals done, right? Right, right, right. I don't want to see your only fans today, mate. You would have to get a camera pointed at your genitals with no idea whether they were in focus or whether it was any kind of decent photograph, okay? then you'd have to wait until your 36 roll of kodak what was it called ektachrome or whatever it's called kodachrome yeah until you'd use all all 36 non-genital photographs okay right uh you don't have to wait until you've taken five photographs of your next birthday party and your mum and then you'd have to go down to snappy snaps to get them developed but you couldn't go to snappy snaps in monmouth because the person who worked behind the counter almost certainly was like the sister of someone who went to school with you and they'd probably get to see the photograph of your genitals and you'd be exposed to widespread uh ribaldry so you don't have to go to snappy snaps in kumbran okay get the photograph developed under a false name come home retrieve the photograph of your own genitals okay yeah then you would have to ring up your girlfriend from a phone box and say i was thinking of sending you a photograph of my own genitals okay then you'd have to get an envelope if your girlfriend was so willing you'd have to go and get an envelope and a stamp okay and you'd have to then put it in the envelope write to your girlfriend at her home address and say here with a photograph of my genitals and you then put it in the post hoping that her mum didn't open the letter okay so when boomers say you young people are weird sending photographs of your genitals to each other it's worth noting that at the age at which it were possible we might conceive of such an idea it wasn't really practically possible so that's that's my point which is there are a lot of behaviors among the young which old people go god young people they're doing these weird things well you couldn't get fucking avocados and we loved them okay it was called an avocado pear in 1980 i can remember the date exactly because i first had an avocado pear speech day punch house monmouth upstairs restaurant 19 probably 79 80 okay and it was called an avocado pear and it was a starter on its own with a spoon and a bit of vinaigrette and that constituted a starter because you didn't buy them in the shops they were kind of an exotic thing and restaurants would occasionally have orange juice as a starter and you got a small glass of orange juice and you drank it and that constituted a starter okay i mean the food world was unbelievably bad then in some senses but the reason young people eat avocados is because avocados are available everywhere they're cheap and abundant and actually quite easy to farm apparently okay just turn a tap on in the morning and then go to the pub now I may be doing a massive injustice to the world's avocado farmers here it may be a deeply demanding science which requires long laborious work but an awful lot of the behavior of Gen Z which baffles the old is partly because young people are fundamentally different to old people, not because they're a different generation or that their genetics is somehow weirdly different, simply because they're young rather than old.

2:19:10And secondly, because they find themselves in a completely different context. And a large part of human behavior is driven by context. It's not driven by, you know, in other words, we have innate urges like status signaling, but the channels by which we will use to status. Now when I went to Cambridge in 1989, so it's a rich, it's a fucking rich, I mean, I know it's all meritocratic and we're all really clever and everything else. But the thing that really, the thing that really characterized a lot of people is that most of the people were middle class. The number of people who are, you know, who are working class, they were fascinating, but they were rare, okay?

2:19:47They were the most interesting people in many ways. But the number of people who'd actually flown anywhere long haul, okay, at the age of 1920 was, I mean, I'm just thinking, it was about, I mean, there were overseas students who'd obviously flown long haul to get there, they were Americans and so forth. But the number of people in my cohort who'd actually flown long haul already was way below 50%. And it occurs to me that travel has become a status signal among young people, and that you would find yourself at a massive social disadvantage if you're, in fact, one of the things of the in-betweeners actually basically paradigm parodies that yeah which is you know the guy who's met a shaman and you know done all this bullshit stuff yeah well over the to be honest you'd learn as much a lot of these middle-class some people in something that would learn more going to fucking Blackpool for a woman than they would go into bloody Nepal yeah absolutely honest and if that would be much healthier for them to go to Blackpool I asked a question of ask this question any audience 200 people okay how many of you in the audience have been to Machu Picchu?

2:20:53And then you ask the next question, how many of you have been to Lincoln Cathedral? It's so interesting. Now, Lincoln Cathedral is a fucking day trip from London on the train. It's a lot more impressive architecturally than a load of fucking stones, you know, 15 ,000 feet up in the bloody, you know, Andes. And I'm sorry, you know, that suggests that difficulty of access has become a status signal in travel much more than the intrinsic value of the actual place itself well the other how many minutes now immediately okay we'll finish up there yeah yeah so the the um on that note like there's loads of um founders like they who are creating these brands they're like they're latched into la and what's on instagram and so house in london so they're creating these products for sainsbury's or waitrose whatever but they're actually only ever going to sell in the sainsbury's and waitrose and Tesco's in London.

2:21:46So one of the things I say is if you're going to have your NPD meeting, your new product development meeting, go and sit in a Sainsbury's car park in Hull and you'll see how it works. All fairness to your general Brit, okay? I'll give a lot of credit. Just as Americans are very good consumers because they'll try new things. Americans fundamentally believe that life is capable of continual improvement and consequently when you offer them a new way of doing something, they'll give it a try. They're an adventurous consumer group. Brits are very good like that with food, okay? in that the number of people who go, I don't eat curry, you know, I don't eat foreign food, the number of people who are unadventurous with food is quite small.

2:22:21What you speak of, there's actually a name for, and this is probably a very good point at which to end. It's called the Boston Market Effect. And it's a stock market phrase because a load of people working on Wall Street used to be going home really late, and there was a place called Boston Market where you could buy very good rotisserie chicken for quite a lot of money. And they all thought, wow, all my friends are going to Boston Market, I go to Boston Market all the time. Boston Market's great. And they bid the stock price up and up and up, OK? Until someone finally realized that, yes, in New York, when you've got a Wall Street, Goldman Sachs audience, Boston Market's always going to be a massive success.

2:22:56But the market for it in Peoria, Illinois, isn't quite so exciting, OK? That's when you realize that everybody, you are not everybody. Rory, as always. It's been an absolute joy. Thank you very much indeed. Yeah, let's wrap it up because I know you've got to run, mate.

2:23:17thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if you like that episode only if you liked it please do give it five stars subscribe tell all your friends families foes next door but one cat dog whatever please tell everyone about this podcast it means the world to me and i really want to understand what your pain points are as the new wave of of challenger food and drink brands please do hit me up on linkedin search Dan Pope and hopefully we can together create a more meaningful and powerful podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands thank you so much