Henry Dimbleby: How I Built LEON, Business Scars To Avoid & Solving the Obesity Crisis

In short

Podcast Summary: HUNGRY Episode with Henry Dimbleby

Episode Overview Title: Henry Dimbleby: How I Built LEON, Business Scars To Avoid & Solving the Obesity Crisis Description: In this episode, Daniel Pope interviews Henry Dimbleby, founder of LEON and author of "Ravenous." They discuss complex topics such as the obesity crisis in the UK, the food system, and the journey of building LEON. Dimbleby simplifies intricate ideas and provides insightful perspectives, making this episode a treasure trove of knowledge for food and drink brands.

Key Themes and Concepts

The Obesity Crisis
UK's Obesity Rates: The UK is the most obese country in Europe, prompting urgent discussions about food systems and health.
Feedback Loops: Dimbleby emphasizes the concept of feedback loops in the food system, highlighting how unhealthy eating habits are reinforced by commercial incentives.

Systems Thinking
Understanding Systems: Dimbleby discusses how understanding the complexities of food systems can lead to more effective interventions. He draws parallels with kitchens as microcosms of larger systems.
Escalating Feedback Loops: The conversation includes examples of escalating feedback loops, particularly the "junk food cycle," where the appetite drives the production of unhealthy food.

The Role of Business Leaders
Empathy for CEOs: Dimbleby discusses the challenges CEOs face within the food industry and advocates for empathy, acknowledging that they often operate within a flawed system.
Stress Types: He categorizes founder stress into three types: reality lagging behind vision, internal self-doubt, and external stressors, with insights on managing these pressures.

The Importance of Change
Innovations and Interventions: Highlighting successful examples from various countries, Dimbleby explains how comprehensive strategies involving multiple interventions can create meaningful change in food systems.
The Role of Youth: He believes that educating younger generations about cooking and healthy eating is essential for reversing current trends.

Cultural Reflections through Food
Food as a Lens: Dimbleby shares insights on how different cuisines reflect their culture, geography, and history. For example, he discusses the unique fusion of cultures in Mauritius and the influence of French cuisine on Laos.
Historical Reflections: He links the evolution of food systems in the UK to historical events like the Industrial Revolution and the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Memorable Quotes

"In business, you often don’t actually understand what’s working; don’t risk changing what you’ve lucked upon."
"Expect to get punched in the face. Use external stresses as a source of creativity."
"Our appetite is largely driven by hormones, giving us an illusion of free will."

Key Takeaways

Complexity Simplified: Dimbleby's ability to distill complex issues into understandable concepts provides valuable insights into tackling the obesity crisis and the food system.
Actionable Strategies: Effective change requires understanding feedback loops and implementing multi-faceted interventions that address the root causes of health issues.
Cultural Understanding: Cooking and food are essential cultural touchpoints that shape identities and foster community.

Conclusion This episode of HUNGRY offers a rich exploration of the challenges facing the food industry and the potential for change through understanding, empathy, and effective strategy. Henry Dimbleby's insights and experiences provide a roadmap for both established and challenger food brands seeking to navigate the complexities of today's food system.

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Transcript

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0:00When you talk to the CEOs behind the scenes, they're like, If I don't do this, two things happen. One is I get fired. I have my growth targets. And the second is because it's a system. If I stop doing it, someone else will just take my place. Being a barista in the morning was both the highest skill element of Lyon. You had to serve really good coffee really fast and also the most stressful because you've got a queue of people waiting for you. And so he did this thing of doing the barista training with people wearing heart rate monitors. It was to speed you up, but also to lower your heart rate.

0:30You may get political unrest in Egypt because they import 50 % of their waste from Ukraine. You'll get farmers in the UK planting more wheat because it's a high price for the next year. Chemicals companies or gene companies, as that increases, developing forms of drought-resistant wheat. So all of these things, the prices, how we consume, they're all interconnected.

0:59Henry thank you so much for doing this as I said before I think your book Ravenous is stonkingly good it's got kind of the lightness and sort of brevity of Hemingway but you've kind of applied that to business and I think as I said to you it's such a big complex issue but it does just read with such kind of easy pace and you're talking about these massive ideas I'm like it's just that sort of brutal simplicity of thought that you've applied to your writing and it really really comes through um so thank you I'm very grateful and very excited right it's incredibly flattering of you I'm funnily enough we wrote it for my son uh like we thought if we couldn't get my son George who was 14 at the time to understand it that it probably meant we didn't understand it uh um ourselves and i was we came in on the tube this morning together and he was reading hemingway i'm not sure i think that's so weird he's now 16 he's now i think he would probably i'm not sure he would agree with the comparison but he did what was what hemingway was he reading what book uh a collection of short stories right Right.

2:08Yeah. Yeah. Cause I mean, I, I, I do, but I do think, I think with business books is it's, there's the curse of complexity and it's like, you can, it's so easy to take a complex issue and add lots of sort of complex words, you know, it's, it's sort of traditional kind of papers you read at university and stuff. They have all this complicated, kind of discombobulatingly cute, confusing words. And it makes it even more complicated. And I think you've just sliced through it with just like, keep it simple keep it simple my my my wife who wrote it with me uh jemima lewis she we worked together on the food strategy well she she edited the food strategy and she there was so much stuff that we read that was just incredibly hard to unpick and because it was so written in such complex way and often when you unpicked it it kind of didn't say very much or or actually maybe you thought they didn't really understand what they were saying themselves and that was that was hidden because of the language and my wife she said it's she once said that she thinks it's it's rude to write in a confusing way it's rude it really is like you shouldn't expect someone to have to decipher your book so that was I'm really glad that you that you thought well but also I love the I love I love the way you framed it as in terms of um we've got to write this thing for our 14 year old son to understand it.

3:34You know, I did a podcast, I don't know if you know Giles Brook the other day, with Giles Brook the other day. And we were talking a lot about how brands can exit and stuff. And I was just saying, look, pretend I'm a three-year-old. Like I'm gonna ask some really dumb questions here, but I think it's the only way to get to that simplicity of thought and sort of the brutal truths. One thing I wanna start with is the word system. And I think you cover it. We have to sort of understand the system then we can really get into the weeds of how we can begin to change the system. But I think one of the things you say in the book, which is really good, is that a lot of us don't even realize we're in a system.

4:10And I think that's just a really nuanced point. And I think I was speaking to Seth Godin the other day, who's written a book about his new book, Strategies, all about how you've got to understand the system to know how to change the system. And his two things are like, you know, like the solar system is a system. We don't even think, we don't even, the analogy he uses, we don't even realize we're in it, but we are. And the other system is kitchens. And I know you worked under, is it Chef Bruno? Bruno Lube. Yeah, Bruno Lube at the Four Seasons. And I think a kitchen is a system. And Rory Sutherland says the best MBA is a kitchen porter.

4:53because a kitchen porter allows you to see the full system, kind of see the kitchen and all its moving parts, the link between the, almost be that sort of middleman between the dining room and the kitchen. Whereas if you're sort of siloed in source, you know, if you're just on the sources, you just see that section. He goes, a kitchen's a great way to understand how everything interlinks and moves. And in your book, there's that diagram which sort of shows the food system. and it is just like fuck like it's so confusing so confusing but i would love to know what under your time working in that kitchen under bruno and that understanding that system like what are some lessons you took from that time in your life that you think have helped you understand the systems of this food uh crisis we're currently facing well so it's so really interesting question.

5:51I think that what I began to realize was during the work on the National Food Strategy, so I was working for government, I had a government team, and basically you could ring anyone in the world up and you could ask them for advice. And we spent a long time talking to systems experts about what everyone says you need to do systems thinking. What does that actually mean? How do you do it? like as you said you know like what do i do on monday morning like treat treat me like a child tell me what to do and there's a lot of that diagram that was in the book which looks a bit like there's um there's a whole uh uh kind of um side a kind of field of scientific endeavor which involves giving spiders drugs and then seeing what kind of webs they make and that web that diagram looks a bit like you can look at in the in the wall street the washington post i think there's an online quiz still on where you have to guess what drug the spider was on when it made the web and that diagram that you talk about looks a bit like the the web that uh a spider on speed uh would make it's kind of unbelievably complicated and actually it kind of makes you think i'm never going to be able to change this at all and and and what the kind of good people say about systems is It's just about feedback loops, understanding how different parts affect other parts of the system.

7:17And so you see that in any system. So if you look at a kitchen, it's all about communication. And the communication starts even before the customer with the brand, the kind of menu you're going to do. that feeds back into what kind of prices what kind of things you're going to order what kind of uh you know people you need to hire what capabilities you need what training you need to do all of that stuff is all in the system and i think that like working i mean i worked in that kitchen with bruno when i was just out of university i studied physics and philosophy i'd forgotten to get a job and I've met Bruno at a party and we got on like a house on fire.

8:04And actually while I was doing my finals, I used to go up and do shifts in the kitchen just for fun. And he offered me a job. And really what I kind of, what was revealed to me in that was in a microcosm, all of the effort that goes into creating a kind of wonderful place of food for someone. And I remember I worked New Year's Eve and we had done this tasting menu and it would be, you know, I'd been making things like mini, I had to make these mini moussakas, which involved a little metal cylinder and you cut a bit of aubergine and fried it and you put that in the bottom of the cylinder. You made a whole load of mince, which was perfectly seasoned with onion and garlic and coriander and a bit of cinnamon and some cumin.

8:59And then you put around the side of the cylinder, you put a courgette that you'd just gently poached as the outside. You put the mince inside that. You put some garlic cream, which had taken another, you know, which boiled down, reduced garlic, reduced cream, double cream with garlic, blitzed it up, put that on top, grilled it, served it as just one element on the main course of this dish, which also had lamb chops. I was just making that one element. And I remember going out, we kind of popped our head round at about, when we were at four courses down into the dining room, and looked at the dining room, and everyone was completely smashed, and no one was eating the food that we'd spent the best part of two days making.

9:41That's so funny. It did kind of make me realize how much goes into the production of food right from the ordering, because you start the day, once you end the night looking through the fridge and ordering for the next day and that really is a microcosm of the food system that we're in but that is that is even more intricately linked so if you take you know if you just if you look at wheat for example say there's a dry spell and you've got wheat plant. The wheat plant, there'll be a chemical that comes up from the roots that will close the stoma, the little holes on the back of the wheat, which is where the carbon dioxide comes out when it's photosynthesizing.

10:29And it does that because it can't afford to lose water. It stops the growth of the plant. That's why in dry conditions, the plant stops growing. That means you'll have a lower harvest. That means the price of wheat will go up. That means that you'll get potentially, that will then exhibit itself in the world in all sorts of ways. You may get political unrest in Egypt because they import 50 % of their waste from Ukraine. You'll get farmers in the uk planting more weeks it's a high price for the next year you'll get um chemicals companies or gene companies as that increases developing uh forms of uh you know drought resistant wheat so all of these things the prices how we consume they're all interconnected and really the job that we were trying to do in in the food strategy around was say okay it's all connected but what are the big things like what are the really fundamental things that need to change and that that is when you kind of work on the simplification like yes there are all these feedback loops which are the dominant ones that are misfiring to to cause the harms that the food system causes and how do we fix those the yeah the feedback loop just let's just again i'm going to be a three rolled here but you said there was a kind of a link between your time in bruno and there's there's similar or analogous feedback looks to uh loops to the kitchen and to the food strategy what can we just define what those feedback loops are loops are because i think there's positive ones and there's yeah again yeah because i think there are different kind of feedback loops and there are i'll pick the two that are going particularly badly wrong so feedback loop is literally just a bit of information so for example um if someone orders lots of the lamb dish in a restaurant, then there's less lamb in the fridge at the end of the night.

12:33And the feedback loop is then, I order more lamb from the butcher for the next morning. So that's a fear. It's literally just a communication. There are different forms of feedback loop. And one is called an escalating feedback loop. and that is when uh the feedback loop causes uh an arms race so if you for example if you and me are having an argument and i talk a bit louder you talk a bit louder to so you can be heard i talk louder you talk louder and we start yelling at each other that is known as an escalating feedback loop it's a reinforcing feedback loop and it leads to runaway systems and the runaway systems well so it leads to like runaway so for example you know um nuclear a nuclear bomb that's also an escalating feedback loop like the more right the more the more particles that split the more particles hit other particles which cause them to split and you get a nuclear explosion it's when the feedback loop just uh accelerates the current behavior there's one in the food in the food system that is going wrong it basically explains why the food system is the biggest cause of avoidable ill health um globally and causes 100 billion pounds of damage in the uk every year and that is what we call the junk food cycle so that is simply the fact that it's a it's a feedback loop interestingly between our evolved appetite so our appetite that evolved this very ancient system it's controlled by the amygdala uh the amygdala in your brain evolved before we split from lugworms which uh you know uh those little blighters that exist in mud all around the uk coast so it's very ancient it drives our fundamental behavior and that appetite evolved in a time of calorie scarceness and so if we get food that is high in salt sugar and fat it tastes delicious that's why you know we are if if you come across a beehive you are incentivized to really do some quite risky things to try and get it because it's a really rare source of calories that in a calorie short world you want.

14:57So there are certain kinds of food that we think are absolutely delicious. When they have certain characteristics that they're soft, they're low in insoluble fiber, they fill us up less quickly. And so we eat more of those foods. So if we are presented with a trifle or with a bowl of kale, we'll eat more of the trifle because of our evolved appetite. Yeah. It builds us up less quickly. It's more delicious. We should expend our effort hunting down the trifle rather than hunting down the kale. now the feedback loop here is that food companies then as they begin as as the food production becomes a big industry in the late 60s early 70s they notice that there are certain kinds of foods that are easier to sell that if they market them people respond more to that marketing that if they do bog offs on them buy one get one free people are more likely to get the bog on them.

16:05And those foods are the foods that share the characteristic I've just described. So what do they do, those companies? They develop more of those foods. They market them more. They find ways of making them even more appealing to our ancient evolved appetite. And that then sends a signal to us, and we eat more of those foods. And as we eat more of those foods. We send a feedback loop to the company that incentivizes them to spend more money developing those foods. And this carries on. We eat more, they spend more, we eat more, they spend more, and we get sick. That is a classic reinforcing, escalating feedback loop.

16:47And it has taken over the food system completely. So if you look at the portfolios of the top 15 or so fast-moving consumer goods companies, 85 % of those products are deemed too unhealthy to market to children. So this stuff, that feedback loop has completely dominated the food system. And so if you're thinking about health and how do we carry a food system that restores our health rather than damages it, you have to think, well, how am I going to break that feedback loop? That fundamentally is what you think. So if you're thinking about interventions and you say, well, what we need to do is we need to educate people.

17:38And you say, well, hold on a second, people know what they should be eating actually, pretty much. Is educating people going to break that food back loop. Well, actually, if you're educating them to cook, if you're giving them skills, you are enabling them to produce foods that are delicious that don't have that effect, but that's quite tangential. So we argue that actually you need to, well, you need to do one of two things there. You either need to change the commercial incentives of the companies, or you need to change your ancient evolved appetite. Now, the first of those, you can think of ways of doing that you can restrict advertising you can put in sugary drinks taxes etc but interestingly over the last five years it might be that we do it the other way so we now have these appetite suppressing drugs that are fundamentally changing the way that our appetite works and so that is what we meant by a system which is it's made up of feedback loops and then how do you work out how to fix it you work out what the dominant feedback loops are and then you think about how you address those the i think the bit of nuance i love in the book is is how you kind of you detail how we don't realize we're in we're in this what basically i think you've just explained that we don't some we don't even realize we're in the system it's kind of like it's almost like the fish doesn't know it's in water i was driving around yesterday as you know i was reading the book in the morning i was actually you know driving is kind of like you just get in your car you don't even think about it but like the the lines on the road the signs that's all some massive system if you think about it humans driving along at like 17 miles per hour in these metal boxes there's literally a line there but it's a system we don't even realize we just think we're getting the bloody car and going somewhere and it's the same with the food system in terms of as you just detailed there like the evolutionary perspective we want food we want fat sugar stuff that keeps is alive it's adaptive and then you get to a state down the line so well the companies need to make more money and it's it's this yeah this constant thing we don't even realize we're in it you said so so we've got this escalating reinforcing feedback loop and then you said you go for the dominating feedback loop to that's where you can sort of flick the switch and change it like define the dominating feedback loop so in any system there are there are going to be multiple different things at work so if you look at um you know what might be causing us to put on weight we know for example that exercise is part of that but it's a relatively small part of it it's quite when you exercise a few things happen your body responds to make you burn fewer calories um your body makes you more hungry etc etc so you try and focus on one dominant feedback loop and you try and tackle that first funny enough this all comes from it's one of the few it was kind of introduced to me um quite a lot of discussion i had on this with a guy called ian boyd who was the chief scientific officer at defra and he was a biologist who who studied energy transfer in biological systems.

20:56So he literally looked at, for example, how sun hits a rock pool, is turned into seaweed, and then how all of the creatures in that rock pool rotate the energy of the sun between them by eating each other, basically, and how that can cascade, how those systems can go wrong and how they can go be healthy, how they can break down. And he's he said uh it's one of the few bits of science that's gone from business to uh to biology and that it was started by jay forrester at mit in the 50s looking at ordering systems so jay forrester was looking at like inventory systems of companies and was noticing that if they got if certain things happen so if they got too tight or if there were delays that they'd break down and he created of maths around that using computer modeling, which is now used in biology.

21:56But fundamentally, there is, you have to, you know, the only way that you can kind of find the dominant system is to think about, at feedback loop, is to think about what all of the potential ones are, and then take a hypothesis and then act on it and see what happens. But if you talk to, the reason that we settled on the geography cycle was, first of all, if you talk to the scientists, it made sense but secondly when you talk to the CEOs behind the scenes they're like well if I don't do this someone else either either someone well if I don't do this two things happen one is I get fired I have my growth targets and I can tell you that is the stuff that that that can make money and get the growth and the second is someone else just comes and does it anyway because it's a system so if i stop doing it someone else will just take my place sure and so you start off with a hypothesis the you know to give the example the other big again dominant feedback loop that's going wrong in the food system on the is on the environment and that is actually the absence of a feedback loop so um when you look at nature uh and climate the food system uh there's there's no has no way of measuring the costs that are wrapped up into its products that are related to to nature and climate so if you look at like the you know the the contents of my wallet i can't count nature or climate in there if you look at the balance sheets of these companies nature and climate isn't in there although interestingly there's a lot of work being done to try and get in there.

23:43And if you look at the GDP of countries, it's not there. And Parthadas Gupta, Sir Parthadas Gupta, the economist, in his bioeconomics of biodiversity, pointed out that we shouldn't be surprised. If there is no feedback loop to show you as a company to cost the nature that you are mining to produce your food, we shouldn't be surprised that we're destroying nature at unprecedented rate because it is a free resource that you're being given to produce your product. Is that the invisibility of nature? Yeah, he called it the invisibility of nature. So he said, he actually said it's worse now. He said, we pay companies$500 billion a year in subsidies to destroy nature.

24:31So of course, you're destroying nature at a great rate. And there, actually, there are both oncoming regulatory, but also quasi-regulatory attempts to change that. So there's a thing called the Task Force for Nature-Related Disclosure. sounds very, very geeky, but literally, this is a group of companies who say, we will try and measure the nature that we create and destroy in doing our business, and we will report that alongside the numbers. And we will say, that has to be zero. We cannot be destroying numbers to create profit. And at that point, if you could do that, then theoretically, that problem should go away.

25:28Now, in the end, you'll need government regulation because someone else will just come along who's less benevolent and will make more money producing those same products because they're doing it destroying nature. So you do, in the end, need government to act. But those two feedback loops, the increasing shouting, the escalating feedback loop of ancient appetite and the commercial incentives of companies, and then this lack of our ability to count nature and anything that we measure success, the invisibility of nature and the junk food cycle, those are the two feedback loops that we posited are the ones that need to be fixed before you can fix anything else.

26:07And then because it's a system, that has all sorts of repercussions in terms of how do you actually, once you've got those feedback loops in place, what happens? And I think we're still up in terms of the health. I think that the nature one, the director of travel is pretty clear. in terms of the health policy. I think it's still really unclear whether we will end up drugging our way out of the problem or whether we'll end up regulating our way out of the problem, probably some combination of the two. Yeah, I think that's the other interesting part of the book is the nudging theory in that place in Finland.

26:48Is it Pekapussa? I'm very bad at pronouncing things, Henry. But yeah, I think it's the bit I love in that section of the book is it's like it's not one thing it's this nudging theory trying lots of things and it's like they put mushrooms in the sausages it's just like that sounds like quite an inane thing but like doing that and you do that plus getting people to smoke less yeah and it's that sort of that nudging theory and all these little things that you can add together and as you said there it's probably going to be a combination of getting us to eat healthier and potentially some drug intervention um and i think yeah i also think that but i love is like you it's the first time I've seen a book where you actually have empathy for the CEO it's so easy to lambast these big CEOs um and you know say oh it's your fault you're force feeding these kids junk food all these people junk food and it's like actually well look this this he she or he has probably got a family they need to look out for it and you sort of link this this this evolutionary perspective which is what we've talked about that almost that survival thing it's like that that person has got to think about their family and the way and deliver those profits to keep themselves safe and it's actually having a bit of empathy towards them and as you say it's like if if they fart if he if he or she buggers off there'll be another one person to keep keep keep doing it do you know what i mean yeah i mean so food company ceos they are stuck in the system right as i said they're there and also personally when you know most of them are you know late 50s early 60s they've been in this business for 40 years.

28:24It was, like this stuff wasn't even known at that stage. Like, you know, when I was a kid, a finger of fudge was just enough to give a kid a treat. No, this was like guiltless pleasure, a little bit of fun. And they had no idea that it was going to completely take over the food system. They had no idea that they were going to become the new kind of smoking. That that was, some had a whiff of it earlier than others. So I remember Justin King, who used to be the CEO of Sainsbury's, who was on my advisory board for the National Food Strategy. He was like, I've been telling them for a while that we're going to be the new smoking.

29:00So some people press him, but others just like, how did I become the bad guy? You know, I was just like giving food that people wanted and doing it cheaply. Fish as a nose in water. Making available a better array of food than has ever been. know our grandparents my grandparents you know would find the the food system today kind of completely uh amazing compared to their what was available in their youth so so we're all in the system i think that the you know you come on to like how do you fix it and i think the peka pasca thing is really interesting so yeah for listeners just so the story of that's fascinating actually yeah so if you want to detail that quickly then we'll jump in who i was lucky enough to to interview a few times actually because amazing he did quite a lot quite a lot on school food and before the national food strategy i'd done a previous bit work for government on school food back in 2013 finland at the time in the 70s had the highest rates of coronary heart disease and early both male and female mortality in the world and pekka paska was a young doctor in finland and And the head of, at the time, Pekka Paschka went on to become the head of the Finnish health system.

30:18But at the time, the head of the Finnish health system said he got so fed up with people, scientists, coming to Finland to stick needles in them and try and work out why they were so unhealthy that he decided that they had to do something about it. And he selected this young doctor, Pekka Paschka. and he joked about that one of the reasons that he selected a young doctor was that it was going to take so long to to sort out that they needed someone started young to try and work out what to do and they started in north Keralia which is up in the north country and you know there in that kind of in that place uh you had very high incidence of smoking um vegetables were thought of as things that you gave to your animals so like the most the most common the most common you was like you know just basically butter and pork and salt and water you know this was yeah yeah yeah really bad diet it was uh long periods of the year when it was dark a lot of physical inactivity and what pasca decided he talked about he people criticized him after saying we can't tell what you did like you did so many different things i'll talk about what he did in a second that we can't tell what worked because you can't isolate them and get evidence on each one And he was like, that is completely to misunderstand the system.

31:57If I had done that, first of all, you probably wouldn't have got change because you need to hit the system from all angles to get it to change. And secondly, we'd still be here today. We wouldn't have time to do all of those things. So he did what he called, what he said is boots deep in the mud. He called it. You've got to get boots. So in North Kralia, and then they rolled it out to the whole of Finland, they did everything they could think of. They literally created new cookbooks with stews with vegetables in them. And they trained a big training program across the whole population. We trained them what to cook.

32:42They, as you said, they took salt out of sausages and put less fat and mushrooms in. They actually turned out to be more popular than the other sausages. They created a cooperative that took berries in the summer and froze them so people could eat berries during the winter. They lit snow paths so people could exercise more. They gave older people snowshoes so they could get out. They even created a television show where villages would compete against each other like X Factor, but with villages for who could be the healthiest. And it was the most watched, at its peak, it was the most watched TV show for Finnish men.

33:28So they did all of this stuff. And as a result, they managed to get their coronary heart rate diseases way, way down. And it's one of the few really successful public health interventions. And so the argument that we used in terms of intervention is you've got this broken feedback loop. You genuinely don't know how the system is going to respond to intervention because the system fights back against interventions. And so you have to hit it hard from multiple directions to get it to shift. and so you know it's so it's it's it's fascinating and link linking this back to almost back to what we started about a restaurant being a system and that sort of nudging theory uh i interviewed osher rogers who's i don't know have you been to the devonshire yeah i know osher yeah i haven't been to the devonshire but i've known osher for years oh he's he's brilliant and um yeah i'm going going for lunch actually with him next week but we were talking about the one percent he was saying we do all these little things like so it could be their equivalent of mushrooms sausages could be the the the bar menu on the on the beer mat right it's a tiny little thing no one thinks about another little thing he does is we've we'll never you know when you go to a pub and it's like they run out of glasses in the summer and stuff like that it's really annoying you've got to have a guinness and a plastic it's just a horror yes horrible they've got loads of glasses up the back so they're prepared that's another little thing they've got a medicine cabinet upstairs which has to be used which is basically if someone comes in being a bit of an arsehole or in a mood they'll they'll give him a nice little shot or something but what osh was saying is all these little things that add up you nudge as you say i love that henry attack it from all angles and then you get this this kind of this change and that's what he was saying at the definition he's constantly trying to think about those little one percent things funny enough in business what's interesting is because obviously that was with leon which was uh the business i set up with john vincent um the other thing about that is you you which is similar to systems is you actually don't know what combinations of things you do works so i think you know one of the one of the common mistakes people make with the business is they think that they actually understand exactly what it is they're doing that works and very often that's not the case so you often see people think well, I can take this restaurant, I can do it, instead of doing it in a 5 ,000 square foot, I'll do it in 1 ,800, I'll do the small version.

36:08Absolutely bombs, because what you didn't realize was a thing that people really loved about it was the scale or the vibe, or, you know, the other way around. So I think, you know, the system that you create in this, you know, it's a very closed system, a restaurant, you're basically pretty much in control of everything that comes in and everything that goes out but you still don't really know how it works you have a guess yeah yeah you post-rationalize it don't you be like that that's exactly why it was going to work and yeah but it's all it's all it's all i always say people who are rolling out restaurants come and ask for advice to say like just do it until you really have run out of spaces that you can go to that are the same just do it the same don't risk changing it because you it's not that you're a genius it's that you are talented and you've somehow lucked upon a formula that people really like and it works and so don't assume what was what are those equip yeah let's let's go into the leon journey then and uh what would you say were some of those those successes that you you were getting right that you could only understand retrospectively you know and there's in that sort of that early early period between i don't know i don't know how quickly you scaled up but maybe the the two to ten sites we made loads we started in 2004 and we made loads and loads of mistakes such as um but most of those i i really learned that with with sites so you know a 1.5 okay well sorry a kind of 800 square meter site is different in fundamental ways for a 1.5 thousand square meter site these sites are very different and we made lots of mistakes where we thought oh we can squeeze it into there we can do you know we can move from kind of dense city location to brompton road because leon's great and the menu is great and there are enough people who work there you know but actually everything is uh you know we made a lot of mistakes where we thought we could stretch it and it couldn't stretch it and then we did other things where we stretched it and it was a success you know so like so um you know you just you have to the difference between a government beating a system and trying things and hitting it from and a business is in a business you can experiment so you can try and fail quickly try and fail whereas in a in government actually it's it's much harder if you look at for example the sugary drinks levy which is whatever it is 15 years old i can't remember very old you know it was done once in a business you would have changed it three or four times you would have tweaked it at the moment you've got these weird tiers where drinks are backing up behind levels of tax and there are all sorts of weird things about it that you would have ironed out but it's just very difficult with laws to yeah yeah this nimble yeah the speed of it's almost like i'm exploring is like nature as a system business as a system and then yeah government legislation as a system it's almost the speed the speed in in the latter is the metabolic rate that i think that's a really point like the metabolic rate of government yeah is compared with nature and business It's unbelievably slow.

39:38And that's why if you look at some of the government interventions, like if you don't get them right, the system will, like people will work around very quickly. If you look at ILNs, one of the things that the government has said now is that you can't advertise junk food on ILNs. You know, you used to go to the ILN and it was just like a rack of chocolate on discount or sugary cereals, whatever it is, because people buy those and they'll buy more than they need and a good money. So the government said, we'll block those. Now you go to a supermarket, if you know this has happened, what do you see happen there?

40:16Two things have happened. The RLNs are full of booze because that's the other thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the other thing. Yeah, that's an escalating feedback loop, right? Is that what that is? You're just sort of shoving one thing. What other products have the same characteristics of – there's a thing called the consumability effect, consumption effect, sorry, that young marketeers are taught, which is there are certain products, if they're on discount, you buy more of them thinking you're going to save them up and therefore you'll save yourself money. But actually you're kidding yourself.

40:54And when you get them home, you eat them quicker. And chocolate, sugary breakfast cereal and booze all have a high consumption. I did that last night. I was at my mates in Clapham and I went to the Sainsbury's just to get a little cheeky thing of chocolate buttons, dairy milk buttons. They're my favorite chocolate. Next thing I know, I'm walking back with one of those big share bags and I've decimated the whole thing like a ravenous hurricane in about two minutes. And it's just like I didn't, it was, it's as much as I've got them. But the whole point was to share them. Yeah, that consumption expansion or the more you've got in the fridge.

41:29You know, if I've got 12 diet cooks. It only works for certain products. So that doesn't happen for kale. With kale. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, unless you're a sort of Lululemon yogi, then you probably are. The other thing, by the way, you'll notice with this island, if you go and look around a supermarket, is that people have now created in-aisle islands. So there are these displays in the aisle that are kind of blocked off almost with like flashing lights around them. So they've created the same effect, but it's not at the island. Yeah, it's my eye. the system responding the what you said there that the metabolic rate of biz nature business and uh and government is is that i thought that was fascinating i want to kind of try and thread the the needle between nature and business because i do think they are very they're similar i asked this to guy at riverford the other week we talked about this at length about similarities of nature and business and uh you know you said there about like the mistakes at the beginning like you need those mistakes they're they're evolutionary they're adaptive that's what makes you stronger of those little mistakes you sort of course correct i'd love to know like what are the similarities between nature and everything you've heard about that and and business in your time at leon what some of those parallels do you think it's a really good question well i mean funny enough i was uh i was talking to my uh co-founder and uh omar habal in uh in bramble uh which the business i'm setting up at the moment and he had seen a um a uh he'd sent me an uh elon musk talking about starting up a business and basically musk had said that starting up a business was a bit like looking into the abyss while chewing glass and and he said i will come back to nature but he said um he said you're looking into the best because basically a business is always you know for much longer than people outside think it feels very fragile always about to run out of money always balancing fundraising with action always growing fast you know moving at breakneck speed and then chewing glass he said was because basically by definition by the time the problems got to you they were the really hard ones so you had to spend your time trying to fix you didn't spend your time on the fun stuff as a founder you spent your time fixing the stuff that was really important and no one else could fix it that was a chewing glass piece but i do think that actually I've completely changed my over the time my view of like what of what a business is about and feels like to a much more organic one so when we started Leon John Vincent my partner in that was much more instinctive than me and and much more kind of visionary in the sense that he could close his eyes and he kind of knew what he wanted constantly getting ideas like just from his brain, whereas I was always, I get ideas by piecing together things.

44:46I kind of like create collages and that forces me to think in different ways. So I need input. I need input to my brain. Sure, sure. His brain is self-producing. And I kind of thought of starting business with Leon as sort of maybe like a battle against entropy. so trying to create entropy as in that's where the natural state of nature is to move towards more disorder so structure is in the end the whole universe will just be a hum all the atoms, this is true this is how it ends you know this already, it ends with all the atoms equally spaced throughout the universe and a very gentle hum going through it all of human life has been pointless anyway Anyway, so I was on that bleak note.

45:37I always thought that it was about a battle between a battle of, you know, against entropy. So trying to create order, using your energy to create order out of chaos. And in a very literal way, that is what business does. It takes energy and it uses that energy to create products or services, order out of entropy. but I've actually now I now think of business as a much more organic I used to think the analogy I used to use was you're trying to build a car while driving at 100 miles an hour you know so you're trying to drive the car which isn't quite built and drive it 100 miles an hour and build at the same time whereas I do now think of business as a much more organic thing which is about reacting it's about understanding the system that you're in and reacting more quickly and better than your competitors uh and if you spend too much time

46:47creating the kind of the plans then you will be overrun by people who are moving faster than you So I now kind of think of building a business as an organic thing, as kind of organic creation. You are an organic living thing that is growing, that is getting more people into it, more talent, but growing and responding and using that talent to navigate the environment rather than creating a kind of more Stalinist five-year plan. And like, you know, it's a bit like, even though they were terrible, I think a business a bit like the Star Wars 1 to 3 rather than, well, 1 to, do you remember how like all the, I remember Lucas talking about the spaceships of why were the spaceships in Star Wars 3 to, was it 3 the first one?

47:46the idea is all in some sort of discombobulating order wasn't it yeah so he said why were they all so mechanical and whereas the previous ones the prequels were all organic and he said because they lost their way and they became this kind of monolith and so i used to think of business as being a more mechanical thing and i now think of it as being a more organic thing and if you get the incentives right it will in some way be self-organizing rather than you having to impose and order on it right like it's a kind of fool's errand constantly to think you are imposing the order on it yeah no i love that that that finding or creating order from chaos that was your sort of first one and now it sort of changes it's more of an organic thing the um i mean you're still creating order from chaos because that is literally you know overcoming entropy is what we humans do we all that's what that's what creatures do we organize we use the sun's energy to organize ourselves but it's about doing it in a more organic way focusing on the incentives within the business that incentivize you to react to your environment rather than looking at it as a directive a very top-down directive yeah that's so that's and Taleb's got a great thing called stoicistic tinkering, where you basically tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker.

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49:04And he says lots of people see these founders as sort of these – human beings, another thing human beings love to do is mythologize and sort of create these sort of superhuman godlike people. I think in the modern day of that is founders. Like we revere Elon Musk. We revere the Steve Jobs of the world, where there's almost sort of like godlike deity sort of figures. And don't get me wrong, they are complete geniuses. but what Nassim Taleb says is he says, actually, if you boil it back, it's like a lot of it is just, is linking this to nature, it's just trial, error, trial, error, trial, error, just never, never, never stopping.

49:40And I think that trial error is a way more organic way of doing things. It's like being in sync with nature versus, as you say, the directive top-down, like, well, we're going to fucking do this. And then, you know, and I think it's, I haven't really explored this before. And also, I suppose linking it to nature is so many founders, uh say like the brand is their third kid like there are so many analogies linking it linking it's their kids like they you know you birth the brand yeah i think if you think about trial and error yeah like um natural selection is the ultimate trial and error yeah of trial and error yeah yeah yeah yeah and i suppose those are the trial and error and the i mean you hope you hope as a business person that you don't that you don't that your trials are not as random as the genetic mutations i think if i think you have to think to be successful in business you have to be slightly less random in your trial and error you have to because if you fail if you if you do just like continually do dumb things then you're probably not yeah yeah yeah yeah there's there's a massive caveat with yeah with that because you can get a lot of people just trying and yeah absolutely insane things as i was all under the guise of trial and error you know i do think it's what you do not know you know systems thinking you do not know what is going to happen when you try something when you act upon a system and so trial there in the end in some form getting that feedback you get that you get that upshot of serendipity which is what stoicistic tinkering is you get that you're he almost says it's too rigid having a map let's go into sort of leon with this then so what were some of those things that were kind of that you those small bets you were placing those small trials um which then led to kind of big serendipitous upsides that you weren't expecting that you could only kind of rationalize retrospectively well so i mean there's there were some huge ones with with leon that were like um Some of them might seem obvious.

51:49I'll give you two examples. When we started, the question always with Leon, the Leon brand, was we were trying to do what we called internally McDonald's in heaven, fast food in heaven. So we wanted it to be fast food. We wanted it to have a lot of the visual signatures of fast food, but then we wanted it to be completely different. So if you get a fast food system and put good stuff in the one end, can you get good stuff coming out the other end and there were always debates about where that line was drawn and initially we had thought um that that photographs of food businesses with photographs food always served bad food so you didn't want to have photographs like fast food So we had word menu boards.

52:42Sorry, word menu boards. We had written. Ioli rap, chili rap. We then decided to trial some photos to see how that, because we got what we called was, we had this kind of thing of, we called it the Carnaby Stare because our first restaurant was in Carnaby Street and it was some poor customer looking at these words, kind of panic in their eyes as a Leon regular behind them was kind of tapping their watch impatiently for them to make their mind up. And we kind of thought, well, maybe that's not the best mind state for a customer to be in when they're at your restaurant. And so we tried photographs with an amazing photographer, Jason Lowe, who did all of Mark Hicks' photos and really brilliant.

53:33so you got this kind of so we we got a really good food photographer to do fast food photos and immediately overnight it added huge amounts to our sales you know so it was something we could have tried earlier it might seem like an obvious trial but there were all sorts of other things that we tried well they all seem obvious retrospectively that's the point of it another one that was a disaster was uh trying taking we the the the main box used to be rice and a stew and a topper and some slaw and we tried to take the slaw out at one point in a way and it was a disaster it made the portion even though it wasn't really small and so like we'd stopped that pretty quickly other things that were surprising was we didn't realize how we didn't realize when we started that people a significant number of people look at the back of the queue and decide whether or not to join it or go to Pret depending on how long it is so what does that mean it means that if you added a till which we did we managed to fit in we had uh four tills at Carnaby Street we managed to fit in a fifth till and immediate we thought we were you know we were managing the queues pretty quickly there when you know everyone was getting fed within a minute and a half we used to measure it we added a till and we increased sales by 25 overnight because they're just for people who were looking at it one till because you added you went from four to five tills sales up by 25 so you know so so those kind of things you just don't you can't ever know uh until you try and you have hypotheses but it's uh yeah so what would you say from a leadership perspective you know the invisibility invisibility of nature i love that as a again linking nature to business i think that's kind of a theme today but like um i think there's stuff in business and i've worked for a brand and i've you know i've interviewed tons of tons of founders and there can be there can be things that happen in an organization you can't necessarily see it but it's kind of potentially like cancerous so i mean one example could be like a negative employee or something you don't necessarily it's not you can't see it happening but it is uh it's it is nefarious and i think i think a role as your leader is as you say is to try to find kind of order within chaos what would you say is the invisibility of nature parallel in in business do you think it's a good question um 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 maybe you've got an Okada listing, maybe you've got a Whole Foods listing maybe you're absolutely killing it in Selfridges maybe you're absolutely killing it in your farm shop and your indies but my friends, making the leap, crossing El Chasum crossing El Rubicon to grocery retail is not easy it's the Champions League of FMCG, it's super hard it means playing at a higher level and that's where some of your amazing brands sadly stumble look, retailers want stories backed by data not dreams and a pretty pitch deck and let's be real supermarkets are not just going to magically make a space for you and your little brand they need data something's got to go for you to get in for you to get on shelf and that is why i've got to tell you about north star they are the team that's helping purpose-led fmcg brands go from gut instinct dreams to unstoppable pitch decks that actually unlock retailers north star i'm not like another data company that force feed you data like foie gras that act like a nasa space mission it's super super simple to use their team are amazing and they actually get the challenger mindset north star are your shortcut to smarter decisions stronger pitches and investor confidence all built specifically for challenger brands like yours you don't need a massive sales team you need north star link in the show notes click that link and you'll be able to book a free demo with north star highly highly recommend that and thank me later well i mean i guess what the invisibility of nature is is that you are using a um a resource that you are assuming is free and at some point you're going to exhaust that resource and there will be system collapse so i guess the thing that we a kind of parallel in business for that is the faith and trust of your team probably sure so you can run a team incredibly hard but we we started when we started doing pulse surveys so literally measuring would you recommend every week every week okay amazing yeah yeah would you recommend your job to a friend, how are you doing?

58:33Like just measuring that, like the goodwill, the extent to which you were drawing down on the goodwill of your team, that led to some really fundamental changes of how we did things. We noticed that there was basically a, you know, it was a leading indicator. So it went. team members a bit unhappy manager leaves team members leave sales go down and then once you've got a restaurant down that stage it takes a hell of a lot of effort to to get it back up to where it was so and this was remember this was back in 2000 we started in 2004 so it was like the digital stuff now i think almost everyone does it pulse surveys yeah in those days i don't they did and that was just recognizing like you know if you think about a system the other definition with the system, by the way, is you measure it in terms of stocks and flows.

59:31So you have a stock of anything. You can have a stock of cash. You can have a stock of lamb in your fridge, but you can also have a stock of trust that your customer has in you. You can have a stock of

59:49goodwill that your staff will have in you. And anything you do within the system, the feedback loops will change the way stocks and flows happen. So for example, if I sell lots of lamb, I get a flow of lamb from me to the customer. There's a flow of money back from the customer to me and my stock of lamb goes down and my stock of money goes up. But that can also exist for intangibles. So for example, if I, over the Christmas period, are taking a lot of money as well as my stock of lamb going down and needing to be replenished, unnoticed, my stock of goodwill in my team, the cost of some of that money coming in will be my stock of goodwill in the team going down.

1:00:38And if you don't spot that there's that cost being more of that money, then you build long-term problems yourself. And that probably is, that is the invisibility of nature. Globally, we are eroding the stock of nature, which at some point will come back to bite us because again as Partha Dasgupta and as economics of diversity argued the whole economic system is inside nature not outside it it is supported nature offers no nature offers business the energy the air the water the pollination all the things that business needs to survive it can't get by that nature yeah it's mad it's the the i loved that that is just a beautiful phrase like you've got a stock of trust and i think it is that is the that's the intangible that's the invisible thing and it's like that can that can road like that you know one thing and that and it goes peak to hunger like you're up up shit creek without a paddle quite literally and i think it's um although generally to be honest it's it's not that it can go like that it's that you haven't been aware that you've been gradually eroding it and then some trigger event so if you have a very high stock of goodwill or trust yeah the trigger event that ends eroding it is uh needs to be much more powerful than than if the stock is low so yeah if you're known to be a scumbag and uh everyone thinks you're a bit of a scumbag and then it comes in the news that you've done something bad then you can find yourself quite quickly cancelled whereas if everyone who's intervened who's interacted with you over time thinks you've been really great and something comes out in the media that's bad people give you the benefit of the doubt so i think the erode you know it's gradually then suddenly isn't it is that i think hemingway that's hemingway yeah yeah gradually then suddenly yeah you get you go yeah bankrupt gradually then suddenly and probably you know for me like how do you how do you get fat and it'll be like after christmas gradually then suddenly before i know it i've had quite a few booze ups and it's like back to cutting it all back the um the line i loved in your book uh and it kind of one of my favorite authors is murakami the japanese author and uh he'll often say like he'll have his protagonist who's super depressed and will just go and make an omelet or something like that and i love the bit in the book where you say like sometimes i'm so stressed i just make pickled onion monster munch sandwiches which is is an extraordinary crisp, I must say.

1:03:14But it's... I haven't done that for a while. No, but I loved about it for two things. One, it made the... It's so easy when you're talking about complex issues like this to come at it from a sort of a high status, I'm better than you position. And I think that one line made, you know, Henry Pill human, but it really added human to it. And also it's like we all do that. like you know we can all try and be good but sometimes things can be so stressful that we do just want to go and decimate a packet of hobnobs we do want to go and decimate a big mac you know and i love that bit but i'd love to know i can't do i can't do hobnobs too sweet i can't do really it's too soft i can't do anything i could eat with my gum what is what is your like your most what's your most heinous heinous thing you will do i think it's um scampi knickknacks whatever they were called they're pretty remember knickknacks yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah it's really you know i it's basically very strongly flavored savory salty crisp what about what chocolate would you would you go mess with i'm not i'm not really i'm not a sweet really a sweet tooth person it's more the savory snacks it's like what about a frazzle sandwich if you frazzle two no two a quavers on a train a quavers and a can of Stella is like that's like and that should only be eaten on a train a can of Stella yeah the word now I remember I once saw someone having a katsu wasabi katsu curry on on the tube and I was like this is just this is heinous like the whole curry the whole carriage stunk of katsu curry um but yeah I'd love to know like what has been the the hardest day or the hardest moment and what were your thoughts as you were making your sort of pickled month-to-month sandwich like what were the thoughts going through your head what was the problem and then how how did you solve that problem so leon there were just like countless moments that was like 10 we did we opened leon in july 2004 and we sold it in july 2021 so So it was almost a 20-year journey.

1:05:31And it was the first, a couple of things. It was the, both of us, you know, it was the first business we'd started. So we didn't really know what we were doing. We'd left jobs that were pretty well paid. And I certainly couldn't, I kind of, when the things were pretty bad, I couldn't really think what I would do next if it all went tits up. So that was quite stressful. um but there were you know I think that the that when you're running a business the the there's the kind of I would say there are three different kinds of stressful um stress on you there is the ongoing grind of the fact that the business is always behind your, by definition, behind your vision of what it should be.

1:06:28So you're always living in this place where you have a vision of how good it can be, and you're not there because you're never there. And that is quite kind of, and so when that is, when you see the things that you know are wrong go wrong there's kind of a particular stress to that and whether that's a any examples of that when you're i love that division lags behind the reality yeah so i think really like everything from uh it normally comes through customer when customers complain about things you know are wrong like uh the portioning on this is too small but you haven't managed to get the price right to change it or um you know you they got that they got a delay of serving this dish and you know it's because you made that dish too complicated and you can you know the ways in which it can go wrong so that is the kind of ongoing frustration day to day and then there are the kind of existential moments and i think there are two kinds of those there are self-created existential moments and that's basically when you're selling business running out of money so the though you know when you have around when when you haven't delivered against your plan and you're trying to ask investors for more money against a vision of the future but you haven't delivered on the vision of the future you gave in the past that is an experience that i pretty much every ceo of a business startup will have gone through probably multiple times and you are then living with your you're living in a world where you believe it but obviously there's some self doubt and but you can't let that self-doubt show externally and that is just a very intense period of time it really helps having a business partner to laugh about it because it's so intense the idea that you know because if you go that's the eating glass bit isn't it that's eating you're eating glass not monster the abyss and eating glass yeah and not eating a monster much sarny you're eating glass yeah funny enough yeah musk said like you know i've got a pretty high pain threshold you have to have quite a high pain tolerance and i think probably one of the good things that's happened is that over time you're just your your pain tolerance goes up because you can't possibly produce continue to produce the amount of cortisol and stress that you do when you're a youngster because you just see how often these things happen and you deal with them but then the other thing that i actually find rather exhilarating is when you are faced with existential problems and it's not your fault such as so if you look at covid for example and if you look at how hospitality responded to covid i think there were a lot of people who found it quite freeing so i remember saying to one of the businesses that i was um on the board of at times Our job is basically to run out of money after everyone else.

1:09:48Because if we run out of money last, there was nothing we could do. If the whole of the sector has gone down and we're the last, say what? And it enabled this level of ingenuity and innovation in the hospitality sector that is just complete. Because everyone's so scared. of doing those experiments when you don't have that existential threat. So suddenly you had business, you know, rockfish, for example, that I'm on the board of a really wonderful fish, seafood business in the South West run by Mitch Tonks. During COVID, Mitch bought a fish business at Brixham, vertically integrated his supply chain so now buys his own fish and tells it would you sorry again dumb three-year-old here henry a vertically integrated supply chain yeah he used to buy fish from third parties and then he started buying it himself which meant he could serve in the restaurants what was cheap you could see what's fresh and cheap on the market and then pass that on to the restaurant so suddenly he has a lower cost of fish than anyone else but at the same time he set up a direct consumer business because the restaurant closed so and that's now doing really well and like there's just no way that in the normal course of operations outside covid he would have done that he would have said well i've got to go from nine to 16 restaurants why am i thinking about but he's fundamentally created a much stronger business as a result because now he controls his supply.

1:11:34I just think a lot of people do that. The whole way in which we staffed and thought about staffing post-COVID has changed. People were doing things like closing on a Monday, which they never would have dreamt because they were trying to get every single last bit of money. But then they realized that that was causing problems from us. I think all sorts of existential threats like the meteor hitting earth um you know that leads to enormous creativity it leads to sending Liv Tyler up on a not Liv Tyler Liv Tyler's boyfriend up onto an asteroid what was that film Armageddon yeah well no it's linking it back to nature again and it's like it's these these black swan events and I'm obsessed with Nassim Taleb so I can't have a bad on about him but these blacks these black swat events can like they can either make you they can make you make you stronger what the whole adage of what doesn't kill you make you stronger which is like rocks fish you know you you sort of become anti-fragile or as a nature doesn't fucking like can just completely decimate you and i know so many businesses that did get completely wiped out and is that it's there's the truth of nature in that i think and it's um it's endlessly it's endlessly fascinating that and the uh yeah i just i i think that that that strength and that so you said that that third kind of stress which is the sort of outside of your control um existential stress but it kind of breeds that uh that yeah that that sort of injection of creativity it's it's exciting it breeds i mean funnily enough uh john vincent um my business partner in Leon he wrote a wonderful book called Winning Not Fighting which was based on his experience he became like really into martial arts as we were doing Leon and in fact he had this brilliant idea which was just crazy and worked really well of training all of our baristas he noticed that like there were two that being a barista in the morning was both the highest skill element of leon because you had to serve really good coffee really fast and also the most stressful because you've got a queue of people waiting for you and so he did this thing of doing the barista training with people wearing heart rate monitors and the objective of the training was to do two things it was to speed you up but also to lower your heart rate so you had a more pleasant time doing it and he used martial arts to do this and he wrote this book winning not fighting which was about the principle of like not having to run into every fight that uh that you that you needed to go could get into but one of the principles of winning not fighting which i think is great uh is um expect to get punched in the face so if you're if you're in business you are going to get punched in the face by your competition.

1:14:36So you have to use that to create a positive feedback loop rather than be, oh my God, now it's another thing. And I think that somehow those punches in the face from external, unforeseen, unpredictable events can be very energizing. To the right, to the right, to the right. Yeah, to the right degree. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not for everyone. Yeah, it's like putting a two-year-old versus bloody Khabib or someone like that in UFC terms. This is just crazy. What other things did John Vincent teach you, these sort of nuanced? I love the idea of martial arts and business. I really believe I love learning at the cross-section of things.

1:15:23I think everything is intertwined. So the unexpected punch in the face. sorry they expected to be punched in the face as anything else kind of interesting winning not fighting was a really good one so i have a very kind of um not protestant mindset but very kind of uh stubborn determined mindset so it's like you show me an obstacle and i will either climb over it smash through it you know just kind of like a head flag to a ball and he coined this this phrase winning not fighting i think he's actually about to start a podcast winning not fighting podcast which was brilliant um but he that he said like why are you always fighting these battles all right you know because they're there and there was a really good example of this which was genuinely one of the things in my life that has made me kind of reconsider how I do things which was the um advertising staff we were the first people in the UK to do a superfood salad our salad from the beginning was called superfood salad and I don't know what happened but anyway the advertising standards agency uh wrote to us and said you can't call it a superfood salad because you know what's a superfood this is a misleading claim blah blah blah and my kind of response when john told me about this was fuck them everyone has copied us like you know wh smith has got a fucking superfood salad we're gonna um you know we're gonna take this on and we're gonna win and he was like nah let's just change our salad to super salad because if we fight it you and me we're going to be spending just hours and hours in meetings with lawyers and this that the other and what's the point so that's exactly what he did and we are now one of the few businesses in the uk that food businesses doing kind of healthy ish food that doesn't have a superfood salad and that is an example of winning not fighting it didn't make two jobs of difference to the overall success of the business i love that it's um there's the but what you said fuck and there's osha's got in the green room at the back there's a he got it by the guy who did um meat liquor gave it to him he's got all that art in the back yeah we recorded it there scots yeah scots that's it he's got a massive massive thing which just says fuck em all fuck em all that's just fuck em all and i was like that's sort of my approach with this is everyone says to me you can't do it i'm like right game on it this is like i'm not going to stop but i but i probably need to apply some more winning not fighting because fighting is my sort of default mode yeah and it's like you know and it means that you can save up your energy for the fights what are other examples of like where you've gone in like let's fight and john sort of said let's just let's kind of let's just win this mate let's It's like we don't need to be so sort of aggressive.

1:18:28Because I think you're so right. It's like fighting can cause – it's almost like the metabolic rate in your head going fucking crazy. It's like, I need to do this. Chill out. Yeah, I'm trying to think. I'm trying to think off the top of my head.

1:18:47Something will probably come to me. Can't think of it in the moment. We'll come back to that. I want to talk about chefs in school. And I really believe, I think there's lessons you can get from cooking that you can't, that kids just can't get from physics or can't get from the standard lessons. I'd love to know again sort of linking cooking now to business like what do you think are some of the lessons kids would get from learning to cook that would set them up for success whether that's yeah running their own business or um you know becoming a ceo what would you say are some of those those kind of uh those lessons do you think well I think that actually the reason for helping kids cook learn to cook is primarily one of pleasure and that should be you know enabling someone when we did the school food plan we actually wrote me and my wife who wrote with us wrote what is currently the um the food curriculum which is theoretically compulsory up to the age of 14 isn't happening for various reasons in too many schools but we wrote this curriculum and in the curriculum it includes the line uh that teachers should instill in their pupils a love of cooking because it is something you know it's one of the great it'd be also to one of the great creative outlets for for humanity yeah yeah and funny enough the civil servant said you can't ask teachers to instill a love of cooking into people's.

1:20:33That's too much to ask them. And I was quite strong on this. I thought it was quite important that it was about pleasure and love and not just about it because it was in food technology. So it wasn't just about, you know, you have to be able to have knife skills and because like, what's the point of having knife skills? What's it for? And for me, it was primarily for pleasure and secondarily for health. And so I wrote to the Secretary of State who commissioned this from us, Michael Gove, and I said, the civil servants are trying to stop us doing this. What do you think? And he said, funny enough, I've just been having a similar battle myself.

1:21:16Go and have a look at the English curriculum, page five, line three. And in there, it said instill in pupils a love of reading and he had personally fought to have that put into the inscriptum and so we were able to show the civil servants that if love of reading is in there love of cooking is in there so I think for for children for me it's mostly about long-term pleasure in life be able to cook and it's a it's a lovely flow activity it's something that takes your mind off things enough to uh to enjoy it while not doing other things and then and then secondarily it's about being able to cook on a budget and be able to cook healthy on a budget which you can only really do if you can cook rather than some kind of meta meta occupation informs all other bits of life and i'm sure you could write a book about how uh cooking is the meaning of life and i'm sure oh yeah yeah no you can get you can kind of push push these parallels into into uh yeah gobbledygook land which i've done before but yeah i completely agree and i think i think it's interesting because you met people who are like i'm not creative right they just their school tells them not creative but then they're astoundingly good cooks it's like it's like one of those things and i do think that cooking does teach you trial and error if you're not if you're not sort of following a recipe and you are just sort of you know throwing stuff in it's like oh that did that work that didn't work i think that's a great sort of well Even if you are following a recipe, there is no, even the great recipe writers like Simon Hopkinson, who really writes exactly how he wants you to do something and tells you what it's meant to look and feel like.

1:23:04even they you you will need a bit of trial and error yourself to know exactly what it feels like to melt onions until they're melted but not brown you cannot you cannot do that first time round you cannot be told how to make an omelette and get it right first all right there are certain things where the gradations are so fine that you need to have trial and error you can't you can't even with a cookbook you need trial and error how does your wife like improve your thinking so it's a good question she definitely does so the thing that she does that's incredibly irritating but you're going to start with irritating and then work its way back from there yeah go on but the the predominant thing that she does is she said when when it's i will write when so So I will write a first draft of anything we've done, but she's edited everything.

1:24:06She's edited the school food plan. She edited the national food strategy. She edited, well, she co-wrote Ravenous. I will write the first thing. And then because she, in the nicest possible sense, she knows nothing about food systems. I mean, she actually probably knows now she's probably in the top 5 % in the country because she's done those three things. But theoretically, she knows nothing. she will say what do you actually mean i don't understand this can you be more specific can you write out what you actually mean you've jumped three steps and being forced again this comes back to the 14 year old being forced to explain yourself in a way that someone who knows nothing can understand often more often than not I would say reveals a lack of understanding in you you have taken a shortcut in your thinking that because you haven't been forced to write it out has been concealed and being forced to write it out actually changes your the kind of structure the the framework that you're using and funny enough that's it's one of the reasons why when people are thinking and in businesses and stuff i think that slides are quite dangerous oh yes if you because they enable you to be sloppy in your thinking yeah so if you really want to make sure that you've understood something write it out in words because then you can't take shortcuts and so that's what she does mostly uh it links links what do you actually links back to Hemingway again he's got a quote which is the first draft of everything is shit and I love that and it's like the amount of I listen to a lot of podcasts with comedians and they have it on their laptop because a lot of a lot of writing is you've got to beat the beat the resistance which Stephen Pressfield I don't know if you ever read the war of art great book about resistance and overcoming it and it's that sort of creative creative kind of it feels like a block and you have to run at it and the way to sort of get through that is to accept that the first thing you're going to write down is crap but then you're going to go back to it and you're going to polish your thinking polish your thinking i think it says linking to what you're saying there henry about the slides is the slides are a way to to sort of not polish your thinking it's to kind of just put a veneer over your thinking and it's not it's not actually it's not actually the the lucid to kind of truth with that framework of you know you writing this draft wife comes in polish polish explain explain what was the hardest chapter to like to get down in that book we spent a long time on the systems chapter okay yeah i can imagine that yeah for two reasons one was that it was quite early on yeah and we wanted it not only to be clear but to be fun and like interesting to read.

1:27:06And there's a real risk that you start, you have to, you have to start it quite close to the front because nothing else makes sense. Sure. But like, you don't want to sit people down and say, just here's the theory. So getting that crisp and clear was, was, was difficult. And then at the end, trying to explain how huge the potential, uh the potential different outcomes could be depending on what happened the food system and express both the fear and the hope in a way that wasn't where the fear didn't crush that was quite yeah that's another that's that's a very yeah that's another it's walking on the line isn't it there the between because you need people to be the purpose of the book why write a book because you want people to act.

1:28:00You want people to think things and act things differently, act differently. That's the only reason for writing a book. What do you want people to think differently? What do you want them to do differently? And if you end up with a kind of crushing, Lee depressing ending, people will not act. So you need to be able to give, you need to say like the, the meteor is almost hitting the earth, but we can, we can, we can change it. and part of that was looking back and saying because the defeatists say oh you know the genie's out the bottle we've got this food system it's never going to change but over 20 30 year periods things change beyond you know any um people are very bad at underestimating how much things can change in the in the long term they tend to overestimate how much you can change in the short term and underestimate how much things can change in the long term.

1:28:58I was talking in a school in Hackney the other day to a bunch of sixth formers, and they were saying, you know, are we really going to change? Is this going to change? You know, nothing's going to change. And I was like, well, you know, when I was young, you could smoke on the tube, and you'd go down onto the tube, and the smoking carriage, and the door would open, and smoke would belch out. and I do think there's a chance, you know, you could smoke at the back of the plane. Are you young enough to remember that? Yeah, no, no. So the back of the plane was a smoking area. There were like three or four rows.

1:29:35And there was a little curtain across to stop getting that. And of course, most of the smokers would not sit at the smoking seats, but they'd go back to the smoking area to smoke. So this kind of unbelievable fog would go through. Half through from the plane, yeah. I was saying to the kids, I do think there's a chance that we'll look back at the food system now in the way that I look back at that and think, wow, that was really weird. It was really weird that we lived in a world where you could smoke on the tube. It's really weird that we lived in a world where you went into a petrol station or a supermarket and 75 % of the foods that they sold were stuff that was killing us.

1:30:22It's really weird that we lived in the world where the food system was so destructive of nature and carbon that actually it was a threat to our ability to produce food. I do think that there is another future where that isn't the case. Yeah, it's interesting that Matt Ridley, who wrote The Rational Optimist, says good news travels quickly. Sorry, good, bad news travels fast, good news travels slowly. And it's like you can't appreciate things happening. And I think it's a William Wilberforce bloke. William Wilberforce. Wilberforce. He was the guy, yeah, the anti-slavery campaigner and also the guy who was a key and banned in the RSPCA.

1:30:59as a yeah so what i say so that's the 1800s like that in 1800s i think it's 1830s whereby he's like slavery was was like that was a thing then and we look back at it now has been like one of the most heinous things that you could ever do i'd love to know um and i was listening to a joe rogan podcast the other day i don't know he's been some comedians like in 210 years time we're going to look back at some things as if those were the those were the modern day equivalent of sort of slavery i think one example he said is like how we incarcerate people now it's like we've got all this technology but it's still like repugnant the way we actually incarcerate people the other thing he was saying was junk food but what do you think the kids are going to be looking back on saying like in 250 times they'll be doing their history lessons they'll be looking at our periods what do you think they'll be looking at thinking like what were those human beings doing then you know In terms of our understanding, I think a couple of things will have happened and that will affect the food system.

1:32:00So I think this complex biological system, these feedback loops between the soil, nutrient density, our gut biome, our mental health, our immune system, we will understand those systems because of big data in a way that we don't today. and I as I said I used to do I studied physics calculus which was invented at the end of the 18th century simultaneously by Leibniz and Newton without calculus none of modern physics would be possible you couldn't have relativity you couldn't have quantum theory etc etc you couldn't have fluid dynamics and I think that the whole science of AI but not AI large language models AI management of big data is going to explode our understanding of those systems and so what you will see uh in the future is i think you'll have a combination of two food systems sure you will have a um a system where fresh food is produced in a very different way where nutrient density is prioritized where we understand more than just hunger what these things are doing to us and we're eating more fresh food better.

1:33:22But I think we'll also have, as we go via Zempic, this first range of GLP-1 agonists,

1:33:37as those doing, we will have the medicalization of that as well. So we will have, as we understand this system, you'll have people who will work out how you can hack it in different ways. But I think it is inconceivable that we will not be, in either of those two ways, eating better and being more healthy. and so I think we'll just look back at it as a period of you know it's of a scientific a kind of a bit of a scientific dark age where we realized there was a problem but we didn't know how to solve it we didn't know what was causing the problem and I think that we'll see ourselves as you know enlightened and um I just cannot I can't see how with the escalating cost and socialized cost, we go on doing what we're doing at the moment.

1:34:33In the States, if you look at how the system interacts in the States, it's really interesting. So you've got the fast moving consumer goods companies, consumer product companies, who are really beginning to get frightened now by these appetite-depressing drugs because it's not only that they're making people eat less, they're actually making them like cherries and fruit. They more, I think, oh, God, I don't really want Cheetos. anymore i want and so that is quite so they're sitting there thinking well what's that our purpose how do we not lose 10 to 20 percent of our revenue what feedback loop loop is that sorry so that is that is mpeg what was that is that escalating as mpeg is acting on the appetite that is the thing that's rather than change the commercial incentives companies change the appetite is changing the appetite and then is that is that escalating or reinforcing or what's that's breaking that's breaking the escalating feedback loop okay with you yeah so it is taking the junk food cycle and it is break it is making your appetite not it's changing your appetite so it doesn't respond to those things so that it doesn't make you crave um all the bad stuff it makes you like good stuff and like less of it that's what's going on there it's basically a miracle drug really it's a miracle job yeah well you know in some respects yeah some people it's interesting some people think it will continue to be a miracle drug some people think that um that you will basically all drugs go through kind of three phases the first phase is or it's quite interesting the second phase it's it's going to solve everything and then the third phase is i wouldn't give it to my dog uh and so there are some people who are like well hold on a second it act clearly acts on your brain do we really know and i don't think we know yet how that's going to play out but anyway yeah you've got it is it's breaking already it's breaking the junk food cycle in the States.

1:36:27And so, but not by attacking the commercial incentives, by changing the appetite. And so the fast food companies are frightened by it. The pharma companies, the drugs companies, as Zempick and Wagovi are the first of a whole ray of drugs in this space. So there is a pipeline coming on for all the different companies of different drugs. Some of them are injections, some of them are pills. And the pharma companies are thinking, we will have that profit from the food companies. And then the insurers, so in the states, it's not the state that bears the cost, it's the insurers. And they're the ones who are doing what we would call nanny state interventions in America.

1:37:08So in the name of capitalism, they're subsidizing fruit and veg. They're teaching people to cook. They're literally walking around supermarkets with people they insure to show them how to get a better diet because they pay either way they either pay for the appetite suppressing drugs or they pay for the amputations from type 2 diabetes so i think that that system is just fundamentally not sustainable i i cannot see how through increased scientific knowledge and interventions you don't get to a system where we look back at today and think that was just weird weird where do we stand I know you go a lot in the book about, the bit I find fascinating, another thing, was the isolationist thing in Japan, where they sort of close everything in.

1:37:55And that made them, everyone thinks, as you say, Japan's got this kind of holy, we eat the best. But it wasn't like that. They were eating a lot of, wasn't always like that. I would say, how do we stand comparatively to say the US as other countries in terms of the, out of everyone you've sort of spoken to in terms of facing this issue in kind of the right way? Do you know what I mean? So we are at the forefront in terms of environmental regulation and changing our farming system. Yep. We're like probably the leading nation in the world on that. Yep. And we are, in terms of outcomes, we're one of the worst.

1:38:42Only Malta has more obesity than we do in Europe. We're a close second to America and Canada. But why is that? Because I don't understand that because other European, this is again, other European countries, they booze a lot. Well, they don't binge, but they booze and they smoke. Like what's the, why do you think we're like, how have we got to this situation where we're the worst in Europe? Well, it's hard to using kind of data prove what was cause and what was correlation. But I think there are two very plausible root causes. The first is that we became separated from the land way earlier than our European counterparts.

1:39:42So because of the Industrial Revolution, we enclosed large parts of our countryside to grow sheep to produce wool. And we moved huge numbers of workers from the countryside into the town. Why were we before them? Sorry to interrupt. So our industrial revolution kicked off before the others. But I don't understand why that was. Oh, well, it depends if you believe the British narrative. We had a lot of coal and we had some clever engineers, you know. Right. Okay. Or the British narrative is we're just great. I'll take both of those. I think you can argue that cheap coal plus engineers probably is as good a, you know, good education and good engineers.

1:40:28it. But so we went from, you know, the early 19th century where we produced almost all our own food to producing only 30 % of it for the Second World War. So we basically outsourced food production. So we would create textiles and sell those to the world. And we would use the money from that to buy our food for the rest of the world. The France didn't reach the same level of urbanization that we had in 1860, there or thereabouts, until 1960. So they kept their food culture. I've just done this report called Nourishing Britain, which was published last week, where we interviewed loads of prime ministers and health secretaries and people about why we're so bad at the politics of food in this country.

1:41:24And Nick Clegg, as part of that, said, you know, my wife comes from a rural Spanish village where the GDP per capita is much lower than a lot of the UK and they eat really well. So this link between poverty and bad diet is quite a uniquely British thing. And I think that is partly because we just lost the culture. We lost the culture of living on the land and of our own indigenous diet. So that's one part of it. Just quickly, sorry, my curiosity is sort of erupting here. But another thing I've found fascinating, again, through is like our class system is just quite a uniquely British thing. And like how does that – again, being a fish and water, right?

1:42:09Like literally until I interviewed Seth Godin, he was like, you don't realize how sort of, and listening to podcasts between Brits and Americans is like, we'll always say, oh, you're posh or like, you know, there really is a clear class system. And me being a fish and water, you don't realize you're in it. Like, how has our unique class system impacted our food system? Do you know what I mean? Well, we go back to 1846. I'm sorry I'm gonna have to think this through because I've never thought of it with the class lens on but I guess the first like one of the first events would be 1846 which was the repeal of the corn laws so repeal of the of the corn laws corn laws right up until 1846 we were very protectionist and so we basically kept the price of corn at a at a high level so that the lords largely the upper class who owned all our land could benefit from the price of expensive corn and then there were riots and in 1846 the corn laws were repealed government fell and that was when we started importing lots from from abroad and then at the same time you were getting this mass migration into cities so um you know how is the how has that impacted our food system i don't know because you'd say in a class sense you would say that the i don't really know how class works now the people who own the factories they're middle class aren't they they're the aspiring bourgeoisie i don't know it's a good question i'll have to go I've always looked at it through a poverty lens, but not through a class lens.

1:43:58There must be elements of it that are class-related, but not poverty-related. Yeah, because I didn't realise how, I think it was Jimmy Carr said on a podcast about how he spent a lot of time in America and the UK. It's like, when he went to America, he was like, it's a racist divide, whereas in a racial divide, whereas in the UK, it's way more of a class divide. And it's just something I was like, but again, being a fish in the water, You don't realize it until you're out of the water kind of thing. Yeah, that's fascinating. And then the one thing I wanted to ask you about was, I love this quote by Keith Floyd, which is, if I can find it somewhere, which is, yeah, to know a country, you must eat a country.

1:44:40And I love that. And I think, you know, one of my heroes is Bourdain, who's, you know, sadly not here. but I think his sort of just voracious appetite to learn through eating and by going to different cultures. What are some of the places you've been around the world that through eating that country you understood it better? Well, I write about Japan in the book and eating it and then kind of picking, you know, understanding how that diet evolved. But I think if you look, you know, I think that if you look fundamentally, what you see in a cuisine of a country is a combination of its geography, its politics, and its economics.

1:45:31So, for example, if you look at, let's take an example of, where's it got a delicious cuisine? Mauritius. rich is really interesting it's weird food isn't it it's like it's amalgamation of everything isn't it chinese yeah french it's crazy so they have they have a you know chinese french indian bit of indian and you can trace the ways of integrate quite interestingly all integrated into its own cuisine so those cuisines didn't separate if you look at um another culture beans quite a bit jordan there you've got these two cuisines so you've got what they call the desert and the zone so you've got and the and the zone the zone there's the zone s-o-w-n oh sorry yeah yeah yeah they talk about like the agricultural diet from the fertile areas which is very different from the berber the desert the the the desert diet which is you know there the staple is they get this extraordinary yogurt which they dry into these hard balls because that's how you keep it and then they make these man saf this incredible stew where you get the dried yogurt and you boil it up with water and then you put meat in it and so the whole and all of the culture is built around the cuisine the geography so i think i i instinctively whenever i go anywhere And the other thing you've got in Jordan, interestingly, is they've got all these dishes that have come down.

1:47:05So there was a migration from Georgia. So you had back in the 19th century, early 20th century, I can't remember. Migrants coming down from Georgia and they brought a whole load of Caucasian dishes. So walnuts cooked with milk and chicken, for example, which is a classic Georgian dish. and those now exist in northern Jordanian cuisine so you know I think that it is it's one it's one lens to understand a country and it's probably one of the most enjoyable lenses to understand a country through yeah the Jordan thing's fascinating what what other what other like didn't what other crazy like places have you been to and the food's really kind of um yeah just as you're saying it's one lens to explore things but like where the foods really kind of grabbed you oh so another great one uh traveling in lao so lao yeah in lao i was there before uh methanol laced alcohol but um uh there you've got this extraordinary um interaction between the French cuisine and the indigenous cuisine.

1:48:22So you've got at a bus station, for example, in Laos, your classic kind of what you'll buy to go on board a bus, if you're going at lunchtime, will be a little plastic bag. Now this, by the way, this is, I'm talking 1999, so it might all have changed.

1:48:46they got vending machines in the bus stop now that i'd imagine that i'd be heinous yeah i do so but then yeah then i bet you used to i i would be prepared to bet you still get this so you got your lunch dish was um sticky rice um and a little kind of charred vinegary chili sauce that you dip the sticky rice into and a banana that you eat the sticky rice at the end so that was your savory and your pudding well hang on so wait so the rice is is doubling up as as you're yeah you eat the rice with the banana at the end and dipped into the chili sauce at the beginning and that really delicious sticky rice and that was your staple lunch if you got breakfast they would literally have the most delicious iced coffee and uh the best baguette that you've tasted outside of france but they would serve the baguette with uh instead of butter they'd put condensed milk on it so you'd have condensed milk that's crazy yeah what is this savory or sorry sweet the sweet the sweet sweet condensed milk with a baguette with a really strong iced coffee and so that was a combination of the french chloe isn't the barn the barn me because didn't the french kept invading the vietnamese the barn me is like it is a that's yeah you've got like yeah yeah you've got but i mean i talk at the other one the other brilliant uh fusion which i think we don't take enough credit for is the uh and you talked about it earlier in the podcast the katsu curry so when um when the french after when the french when the japanese it came out of isolation the major period late 19th century so yeah just for listeners that because like that blue i only learned about this recently but it's the reason in japan's culture is so unique is they basically they locked the borders for how long they like the borders like hundreds a year maybe yeah exactly they didn't didn't trade with anyone and then they started trading and they started trading with the dutch because the dutch would stand on bibles and swear they made the people and the dutch were the only people pragmatic enough and um and uh and the chinese and the emperor's like my god everyone's so big and we're so small we're going to have to improve our diet and one of the ways that they improved their diet was getting the they started with the armed forces creating new recipe books for them and new recipes and then they would on the radio they would uh in the early 20th century they would kind of share these recipes for the general population but one of those dishes was the katsu curry.

1:51:44And the katsu curry started off as a dish on British naval ships, which was inspired by fried chicken and an Indian curry sauce from their time in... Wait, so that's a British thing, the katsu curry. We invented, the British Navy invented the katsu curry. Yeah, yeah, we need more credit for that. This is the late 19th, early 20th century. So this is, we should be very proud of ourselves for this. I wouldn't realize I eat fried chicken back then, but that's mad. Yeah, I could be so wrong here, so forgive me. But I didn't realize how much influence Portuguese had on the Japanese as well. I've just been in Lisbon.

1:52:30Well, my mate lives in Lisbon. I was there a couple of weeks ago and we did like one of the tours. and I think that, like, if you go online, there's so many words that are Portuguese and Japanese. Yeah, well, they were trying to convert them. They were all trying to convert them to Christianity. Was that... Shogun. Shogun is the TV show to watch on that. Oh, but wait, so the Portuguese... I mean, you know, my only word was that tempura is apparently a Portuguese word that has gone into Japanese. I didn't know that. But, yeah, the Portuguese went out to do two things. They went out to... to convert them and to trade with them.

1:53:08Interesting. A couple more questions and I know you've got to run. What's one truth you believe that most people disagree with you on?

1:53:21I think we are far less. We have far less free will than we think we do. A large portion of our... we have far less free a large portion of what we call free will is actually an illusion and that we are right we are homeostatic system largely run by by uh by our hormones and that they're very hard to uh to overrule much harder to overrule than we think wait so so sorry so yeah so wait we have less free will than we do things you do that you think you are deciding whether to eat this biscuit, whether to go here, do that, a lot of that is decided unconsciously and then presents itself to you as a decision that you have made, whereas actually your hormones have decided it for you.

1:54:17There's actually quite good evidence for that in terms of when you make a decision, looking at the brainwaves on when you make a decision versus when you think you've made the decision. Okay, yeah. And final thing, just for my own curiosity, what are some of your favorite books? My favorite book, incredibly pretentious, but I came to it late and it just is really good, is War and Peace. It describes, it is like being the characters. It's like being inside real people's heads and it's just fantastic. That's a big mammoth one, isn't it, War and Peace? that's not that's not a chilled uh holiday read there are some longers in it as well um i love um i love moby dicks it's so mad there's that incredible scene where they read that there's an incredible scene where they're all where they've got the um the ambergris from the sperm whale the sperm and they're all needy you have to break it down into the oil with their hands and there's this kind of incredible weird scene with all these kind of heart sailors who've been out at sea hardened sailors for hours kind of having this uh almost um kind of transcendental moment together needing needing the atmosphere really so if you if you think if you think if you haven't read moby dick and you think it's just about wales you should definitely read it because it's it's it's so weird so weird and brilliant amazing look henry absolute pleasure thank you so much my brain's bubbling with wisdom it's so yeah and thank you for writing such an amazing book that reads so well i think that's that's the other part for me um i've absolutely loved that thank you oh good i'm glad you enjoyed thank you for having me thank 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 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

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The UK Is The Most Obese Country in Europe

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Spiders On Speed: The Complications of System Thinking
Restaurants Ordering Lamb, Good & Bad Feedback Loops… “the system will always react to an intervention”
Chocolate Pudding vs. Kale: Survival of The Fittest, the Amygdala and why we’re sick and obese
The Junk Food Cycle & CEO Incentives: “it’s not the CEO’s fault for selling bad food”
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