HONEST Burger founders: How Artificial Intelligence Will Change The Future of Hospitality and Culture

1:00:21Like there was no like crystal ball. London's about to explode. Blah, blah, blah. We were just like, everyone has a fucking burger. Like you do. And I do love eating with my hands. There's one thing. Yeah. I love eating food when you eat with your hands. Just, you just have an instant. You have an instant connection with it that you cannot get with a knife and fork. So true. So true. But my wife's... That's why we don't give forks a standard in honest to this day. Yeah. Which pisses off our staff. And I think many people go, I actually do do it. Can I have a fork with this now? And you're like, I've been so belligerent on that point by the way like please I remember we opened in Chiswick sorry I'm just going to deviate for a second first reasonably middle class area we'd opened I think and everyone was asking for bloody forks with their burger and the staff were like please we just gave them a fork and I was like fuck no don't need a fucking fork to eat this burger I hadn't thought of that but it is the closer you eat the food with street food it's a connection to your soul like it really is eating should be quite an intimate experience like you're literally putting something in your body for 24 hours and then getting rid of it like it should be yeah so long it takes a digest mate

1:01:28but and it isn't abby people just treat it as fuel right it's literally just something to keep you going um but i do genuinely think eating your hands is great so that we decided on burgers and chips um i was a student at the time so i was generally just making like cooking lots for my mates um but again we didn't we never thought about opening a restaurant i think that's the one thing very good point to stress back then restaurants were never on the cards for us it was we were our kind of our goal was glastonbury we wanted to be at glastonbury we wanted to be on exit main stage and serve you know 10 000 burgers in a weekend that's what i had someone had said to me they they'd heard of or done it themselves i forget now and made like 100 grand in sales just from one weekend in Glastonbury.

1:02:13And I was like, cool, let's do that. And I was like, and burgers are shit at festivals. I know, but then we realised that burgers don't need to be good at festivals. Food doesn't need to be good at festivals. You want it quick and it can be very expensive. Anyway, that's what we - It is expensive and it's shit. That's the thing, it's expensive. It's getting better now. There's lots of like foodie festivals that do a lot more. But yeah, back then, yeah, this was years ago. This would have been, yeah, what, like 12, 13 years ago. um but yeah we just wanted to do food that we both enjoyed and then you know feel very much the kind of people culture um he was going to be front of house i was always going to be the food side of things and we never i think we did discuss that but i was kind of naturally fell into it i was always a bit more interested in ops than people yeah and i was always really into my food um and and had learned to cook at uni never worked in the kitchen though um but then just just enjoyed eating and enjoyed cooking.

1:03:10I don't mind saying, I've said it many times, you're much more than cooking than me. I like cooking, but he's got, you know, there's a difference between liking to cooking and being able to cook, so I can say I would, but then there's like, got like that next little bit of like flair of just knowing some stuff, just a little bit of exercise he's got with the way he cooks. Fair thing. Compliment of the day there, she's on my head. You finally admitted that. So what sort of stuff were you cooking at uni? Like, where did that, where did that tell them the truth begin to bubble beef wellington no no and you joke I used to go around you go genie no no exactly no no I was not a rich student at all I just had time so I would go I'd have like we'd have mates around and we'd you know it would be one of the few nights we wouldn't be getting pissed or going out we'd say I'd say to everyone how much money have you got and it would be some people would have a fiver someone would have six quid someone would have three quid and I just say cool give it to me I'm gonna go cook something and that's that's and you could I mean I had some howlers I used to make I tried a beef wellington with a piece of top side it's fucking disgusting um but you can actually make like you can make incredible meals but not that expensive if you've got the time to go for it um so yeah I had this moment and this was a this genuinely was like as close to an epiphany as I think I've ever had in my life where it was fresh week I was in Sainsbury's on Lewis Road in Brighton which is not a very nice place and I basically never cooked anything in my life and I had my mum my parents are divorced and both my mums are amazing cooks and I'd eaten so much food from them but never taken anything in on how to make it and I remember this this first day when I was trying out to fend for myself I didn't even have any pans in the kitchen I had nothing and I was like fuck if I don't learn to cook now I'm just going to eat shit food and it was that simple the mindset for me was like i must learn so i can eat nice food because i'm not going to not eat nice food and that was that but we were cooking all sorts we did end up i think luckily the timing when we decided to do business together was i was making lots of burgers on barbecues in the beach in brighton and putting all sorts of shit in them which you know i didn't i think i'd watched a gordon ramsay video and he was like ketchup and mustard and onion and egg and breadcrumbs and I was like cool I can do all this and then then we tried a burger that just was just chuck steak minced chuck steak and I was like that tastes so much better than any other burger I tried did you get Gordon Ramsay on it what are you hopefully one day I mean you had Phil Howard didn't you no we had we've had Paul Ainsworth oh he seems like such a legend he's a legend I love his restaurants I interviewed um have you had a hex clad frying pans yeah yeah he's he's gordon ramsey's business partner i interviewed the founder of that um his name's danny weiner really interesting guy and he was saying talking i was like oh what did you learn from uh gordon ramsey and he was a bit like saying what you guys were saying in terms of when you're suddenly looking after that many people it's like how how do you how do you deal with that oh my god i am so so so excited it feels like hungry is finally swimming in the big leagues.

1:06:27I can't believe this. It's absolutely mental. But delighted to announce that Big Fish, yes Big Fish, are part of the podcast. Perry's been on the podcast three times. Listeners absolutely love it. Some of my most downloaded and cherished episodes of all time. But Big Fish are behind literally so many brands in your cupboard, in your weekly shop. Charlie Bigham, Year Valley, Tyrells, Clippity, Goo, Rana, I mean make the list longer than the River Nile but they also share risk and invest in brands that they really believe are a force for good. They are brands that they believe are going to be the next big thing like Howda, the snack that gives back.

1:07:10But even more exciting news, big fish want to speak to the next wave of small challenger food and drink badders that are destined for big things. The raconteurs, the movers, shakers, buccaneering visionaries. so look if you want to speak to big fish and just have a chat get your brand in front of them then drop me a message my mate louis from local beer amazing beer was in their office aka la fish bowl uh last week chatting to perry freddie and the big fish crew so drop me a message if you would like to speak to one of the things you said on your podcast um which i thought was really interesting was this kind of either ambient anxiety of just having so many people's livelihoods to look after plus you know you've both got kids i'd love to talk about that because i don't think it's something that not all founders necessarily talk about but how do you how do you deal with that when like you you go to bed at night looking after your family but there's also this much bigger honest but i sometimes think family's a bit wanky as a phrase but like and like the entity that you've got to look after as well like how do you navigate that i mean yeah it's not easy but it's kind of you can't let it weigh on you i don't think um i don't agree there were times i mean during covid that was fucking rough i remember you know when when we realized that that we were gonna have to shut all the restaurants and i didn't even know what furlough meant i'd never heard that word in my life and then there was a period in between closing and before furlough was announced I think it was like five days or something like that.

1:08:48Yeah. I think they talked about furlough in Paris in France and mentioned that the French government were doing something around it. So I was like, maybe. But I remember, I mean, we were very honest and I was really proud of the way we handled that situation. We didn't fire everyone on Zoom or anything like that. We just said, we've got enough money in the bank to last for five weeks. And after that, missed, you know, all bets are off. I think that's what we said. And everyone who heard that. We can cover all your wages. Yeah, we cover all your wages. and yeah and for five weeks and then we'll you know hopefully we'll have a solution by then um and i remember that everyone really appreciated our honesty i've had people tell me we we hired people and i've met people that were on roommates of people of other people as a girl that worked for us she joined us because she worked somewhere else and she was the guy who was listening to the live zoom that we did with brian and the others talking about that and she overheard her saying and she was like, holy shit.

1:09:42And I think her business had done like the opposite. I was like, holy shit. And she said to me, she was like, the reason I applied to Honest because I heard what you guys were saying to my mate. I was sat off camera next to him in the living room as he was hearing the plant. So yeah, like that was for anyone in the world. That was a fucking weird time. But I remember that one was, I probably felt like I've never had trouble sleeping my whole life and always sleep and during that period I would just like be conscious like waking up in the middle of the night just like oh what the fuck are we going to do now yeah it was brutal yeah I'm the same you know there is like I feel like I can the honest answer yeah give me the honest answer yeah like I just don't think about it like and I have there anymore and that means like well no ever I can't think of a night like and but that I really care about our people and hopefully I've demonstrated that on this podcast and certainly my career I've demonstrated I feel like I can say this out loud like really do we try and do right by people like it's the most important thing if i'm working with another business now first thing i say to them is do you give a shit about the quality of food do you want to look up to people if you don't i'm not interested like but yeah i just i don't know if it's i'm incapable of worrying about stuff that i can't control that's pretty good trait to have no i didn't have to try like it's like so you know i know i'm in control of a lot of things that honest stands for uh i certainly certainly used to be heavily involved and um so i'm not saying it's not on me what am i saying i don't know i can't tell you i've had many many sleepless nights for a couple around covid and that's probably it i really haven't i suppose if you're if you're if you know that you're doing right by your values and as everything you've or or trying to build that culture then there's as you say there's only so much you can do once that I need to switch off per se but like once you've once that door's shut or the staff have turned off the lights there's only so much you can't do anything else yeah I suppose that allows you to sleep easy in some regards yeah I felt like we did everything we possibly could and then Michi comes along and announced furlough and it was like okay well now now we know we stand but yeah I felt a bit sorry for some of that well maybe not sorry is the right word but I felt for those businesses that went a bit earlier and sort of ditched off their staff overnight and then five days later asking them all to come back because furlough was announced so um i know that didn't go down with a bunch of people very well you can imagine the um what so what you you said on on your podcast is we're both wildly different but but but what i find interesting is you've also got this like clearly gel and this you know you've been in business for a long time there's this sort of that podcast is joke so you can see there's good banter between you two right but i'd love to explore these differences and i'm obsessed with like how one plus one equals three or like one plus one can equal five if you get the right combination right and so say i don't know who wants to go first on this but say you were like a burger it's a bit of a fucking random question right but say you were random you thought this one out yeah yeah yeah yeah plan this out here's what i made earlier if you were a burger like what what would you be i've never asked that before what would I be?

1:12:53What do you mean? Like the ingredients? So, so there's two ways to take it. So yeah, I might, I asked this to the guy who did Callum Franklin, you know, the burger. I didn't ask about pies. Yeah. I said, if you were a pie, what would you be expecting him to say like, Oh, the ham would be from he's from Southeast London. Like the ham would be from here that you can be here. He just said, um, yeah, 90 % nervous energy. So that's how he took it. So it's, it's yeah. however you want to take it. Simple. I love the word simple. And I think it's got a bad rep because I think simple people, it's like, I know, but people, you say something simple, it's like a massive insult, but I am pretty straightforward.

1:13:32Like my wife would probably disagree with that, but simple people are great as well. Simple people, yeah, you just know where you stand. Simple, yeah. I like the, I like the fact that our honest burger is a very simple burger. It's layered. You can taste everything that's in it. There's nothing, there's no like, sort of cookery or chef-y kind of master or anything like that. It's just simple flavours, good ingredients. And that's what Honest is built on from a food perspective. And that's what, you know, if I was a burger, I'd have to be the Honest burger for sure. I'll take that crown, I'm afraid.

1:14:03I would say the same. I think you thought we were going to say different things, didn't you? I thought... You look disappointed. No, no, no, no. This is what's interesting to me, is it's like you're both simple or you've both picked this simple thing that may be the thing that unites you. But how would you say you're different then? Like how are you completely different? How, when that comes together, is it like really different? I'd explain this. Maybe I've said this to you, maybe you haven't. I've explained when we had new people join the business in senior roles. I've tried to explain how, what it's going to be like to work with me and Tom.

1:14:35Right. And I've said that Tom will be hard on you on the things that you do. When Tom is hard on you, he'll be hard on you for what you're doing. like you'll look at the thing you've done pick it up and eat it and go that's not good enough you haven't done that well enough or it doesn't look right it's not you know he'll look at the thing you've done and have a go at you whereas i'm i'll be harder on you for the things that we we're not doing you're not doing like i'm more like why aren't we doing this like we should be doing that i've heard about this or i've heard about that like i want us to be here so i'm a bit more like i would say i'm a bit more conceptual and you're a bit more logical and analytical i I would say, which is a good combination.

1:15:10I think you make it, you know, that makes it sound like you don't disrupt. You know, you've done some incredibly disruptive stuff in the food space that loads of businesses I think have copied. Such as? I think that the special thing, the collaborations, I don't think we own collaborations, but I remember thinking at the time we were one of the first that really went out and spoke to other businesses and said, hey, we want to put your stuff in a burger or collaborate with you and do the local thing. And a lot of people do that now. Maybe we weren't the first. I'm talking to the mic to make sure I don't upset anybody.

1:15:40Yeah. Maybe. I'll get a few reviews in the old comments section. Yeah, bring it on. I'd love to know. But I feel like, so let's not say you're not disruptive, but I think like I'm more like, why are you thinking? What are we not doing? What are we not doing? And you'll be hard on people when it's like, in a good way, I mean. I think it's like, it makes sense. Hope has come across in this podcast. Like I'm, it is very simple in terms of when we start the business, who's people and ops, how's food? and marketing and stuff yeah but it's kind of like the the the visual stuff the detail the design the things that are tangible i like and i think you like the things that are much more trait based and personality based and behavior based which is fucking hard whereas my stuff is like you know food you can you can touch food you can you can manipulate it you can cook it um you can pick up and eat his thing you can't pick up and eat culture a behavior yeah that's so true you'd be a burger so you just admitted that my side of business is harder than you or what side of it um harder for me to do because I can't do it yeah yes one thing you did say back on that on I think it was one of the podcasts you said simple is not easy and I thought that was a sick quote because as you say like the word simple implies like doing less and thereby making things it's like the easier part we used to always say that our food was simple, we'd be like, it's easy, it's simple, man.

1:17:08It's fucking, there's only like 10 burgers. We had this epiphany together recently though, wasn't it? It was a couple of years ago where we were like, we've got to start saying the word easy. Yeah. That's a complete disservice to our guys in the kitchens and on the floor who are knocking out 300 burgers in two hours in the city. Yeah, and that's the thing. That is not easy. So if you compare, if you compare our kitchen to say Coat, which, you know, Coat has an infinitely more complicated menu than we do and their kitchen has, you know, probably five times the ingredients or wagamum was one of those they have so much more more ingredients more stations more things like that but they've also got three times as many chefs in there and this kitchen's probably three times the size of ours like what we do is focused and it should be because you're a burger restaurant most people sort of bacon cheeseburger like that's that's the best seller of any burger restaurant in the world of any menu in the world bacon cheeseburger right and that's what we want that's why the honest burger is that and well obviously we've grown a little bit and we've tweak the rest of the menu as we've grown.

1:18:01But we do still like to think the essence is simple, but the execution is never easy because there's a lot of shit to do. And like we said a minute ago, you know, cooking a frozen chip, that is easy. You can, no, no, that's both. Cooking a frozen chip is simple and easy. Like you could fully automate that with a robot, and it would be just dink, three minutes, down, up. That's that. ours yeah we do cook-offs every morning so every single time we get a new batch of chips into our restaurant every single day they'll cook a portion of chips and work out how long it takes to cook and it could be you know depending on the variety and this is you know god's honest truth our cook time on chips could go up by a total cook time could be three minutes one season could be six minutes another season just because of the dry matter in our potatoes and different varieties and that is something that the chefs have to just deal with.

1:18:58Yeah. I think, again, more recent, you can articulate your business better the longer you've been in it. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a really obvious thing to say, but I always feel like honest, if I can come back to two things, I'm like, it should be a simple place to work. It's not going to be easy because I think we told ourselves it was going to be an easy place to work. We're totally setting them up for a fall. It's totally unreasonable and unfair. I do think we've fucked up with that in the past by saying, by not even, not having a really rigorous training program. And we still, we're just about putting in a really rigorous training program because we're like, it's fucking easy.

1:19:35Look, the menu's just there. You know, there's only that many burgers, really coleslaw and chips. It's easy. But actually, we want our people to know every single thing about our menu. I want them to know about regenerative farming. And we could spend days talking about that. Like, there are things that we've definitely got wrong around that, around that simple not easy quote which there's another mistake he's saying it's mine fuck off I said simple not easy mistake you just highlighted wait so you said Phil you said it could boil down you said honest could boil down to two things simple place to work and for customers it should be a simple place to eat and I love that I love the idea that a customer doesn't have to come in and do this with the menu through five pages and a huge wine list it's like you're coming in you're having a burger and actually there's only eight of them Yeah, but some people still, it baffles my mind when people will look at our menu and don't get it.

1:20:29I think we've got the simplest menu ever. Some people do look at it and they're just like... Yeah, but so it's simple. But what I'm learning from you is simple is hard or simple is not easy, right? Because there's a lot of, on the surface, it looks simple. But there's actually a lot of depth and texture. So the fact that, correct me if I'm wrong, but each branch to have that sort of local feel has its own unique burger. like that is really complicated that's not easy but it's simple but it's like oh yeah because you know i walk into tooting and it's like what was the uh was tooting the one is he done like a jerk yeah yeah it's like oh yeah so i feel like this isn't some like huge like five guys for example it's a small if there's something intimate about that yeah looks really simple but i bet you that's We've got like 40 restaurants with 40 local suppliers.

1:21:20Our finance team hates it. That's not fair. They don't hate it, I think. But it would make their lives easier. And they're buying, you know, because there's only one burger in one restaurant, you're buying tiny amounts. You know, invoices that will be like 30 quid or something. Do you know what I mean? Like we don't run the business from the finance department. Hi there, guys. Thank you so much for listening as always. It means the absolute world to me. Before we jump into this episode, I need a really big, big, big, big favour. I have pitched us some massive guests, humongous guests, and unfortunately they've said no because my subscriber count isn't big enough.

1:21:52Please, please, please just hit the subscribe button on Apple or Spotify or Follow. Ultimately, it helps all of us bigger guests equals better conversations, equals hopefully better insights for you, which means you can scale hopefully faster with a little less stress as well. So please hit that subscribe button and yeah, enjoy this episode. so i'm liking this theme of like doing things that look ostensibly sort of simple that's right words yes simple but actually behind the surface they're actually pretty complicated so what obviously the chips the localized burgers per branch what what else is like looks simple but it's actually really fucking hard for you guys to bring that experience alive everything well i think a lot of the stuff we talked about this morning you know if you want to not give people you know staff scripts a huge long list of service steps you know and you're gonna let them wear what they want and honestly i would say like nothing we do is easy at this scale now yeah that's true and then you know i'm not trying to kind of get the violin out but you know hospitality hospitality is not fucking easy right now like i i honestly sometimes i like sort of drift off and think about the good old days where we just have to worry about brexit and it's like we thought that was like the biggest grenade the industry has ever seen it's like i would do anything to just deal with fucking brexit and the shit the industry deals with now so i did generally and i think anyone listening to this who works in hospitality would probably agree that nothing is easy right now and from a customer perspective going in paying for some food eating it and walking out that should be a simple process but even that's quite difficult right when you go into a restaurant that's understaffed or their delivery's been fucked because you know there's the courier companies understaffed, wherever it is, like, there's just all these layers of, of complication now that I don't feel like they were as big a deal 10 years ago.

1:23:44And now they're just constantly happening. It feels like there's not a lot of joy at the moment in the hospitality industry. A lot of the fun stuff, you know, seems to have been diminished and there's a lot more stuff that we have to deal with. I think it's, I feel like it's starting to come back a bit, but definitely. I think this Christmas is feeding. We've got a really nice vibe at the moment and, you know, really great like-for-like sales. But, I mean, utilities. Yeah. Utilities is crippling businesses. Like, we signed up to a two-year contract because at the time that felt like the right thing to do because the utilities were doing that.

1:24:21And, you know, I hear stories of businesses, big, you know, branded, very successful businesses that are scaling back their rollout because they can't afford to because their utilities are so outrageous. and they're locked in for another 18 months or whatever. It's shit like that. The government should be supporting people like that. Why should us buying gas and electric today because we signed up to a contract 12 months ago and we tried to hedge our bets in a, I fucking hate this word, but unprecedented environment. And we're getting shafted and the people who are selling us the fucking gas and electric are making so much money, even though their costs have come right down now because we should we hedged our bets we're getting fucked yeah yeah it's um it's rough in terms of like a lot of our listeners i think to relate to founders that have have not like made it who've scaled big businesses right i always think as the as the business scales the founder has to scale and or like scale with their skill set right or like change slightly what are some of the weaknesses you've had to work on from going from like when you're that one store one restaurant in brixton to 40 now like what are the weaknesses you really had to hack at to personally yeah being fucking immature i think both of us i would say i was quite mature yeah i'm sorry stubborn we're both still stubborn but i think you've you've you've you've grown man but i think we both have honestly if you just if you'd have interviewed us 10 years ago we'd be very different people how so well we discussed earlier like i don't drink anymore like drinking was a big part of my kind of personality i thought it was anyway it's obviously it's not but back then it was it was uh it's something now where i was like i need to take my life more seriously i need to take my career more seriously and god drinking in hospitality is very easy um it can be very damaging so yeah i think for me that was you know being far more self-aware and self-reflective is important because yeah when you're trying to grow a business and you've got people that depend on you and you know it's a it's an old one but it's a goodie like lead by example yeah you talk about culture like culture is fucking meaningless if your leaders aren't leading by example like the smallest thing and and you're gone and i hear stories about people that have been on your podcast and i'm like really they've they said that i'm like honestly they've done that and but they're like yeah man fucking rock and roll that's what founders get away with i don't think we've been that bad probably done a few things yeah we've done a couple of these things i think we realized you know i think definitely at the stage of the business growing and realizing that some of the stuff that we were doing wasn't fit for purpose anymore i remember being massively behind sort of this obstetric we're not trying to grow the business between like i was getting out like 14 and 25 which is a really tough phase for me i felt like that as in 14 sites sites yeah the business my my ability had been outstripped by the business you know the business had got bigger than my skill level at that point i mean i was a part-time waiter in 2009 you know um took on a bit more responsibility in that restaurant but was very wet behind the ears as were you right and I remember feeling like suddenly I had all these the kind of the the arrows were all sort of coming in and it's like I didn't really have recruitment you know we already mentioned training and didn't have a department for that it was just like we were loud and we were confident and we were in the restaurants all the time and I had people kind of whipped up a bit cultish really into like this what it is to be honest and actually when you're only here recruiting five or ten people every month or so it's okay but when you're suddenly that you know quadruples and everyone's different and what works was you know it was harder you know the dilute this dilution i'm not saying anything groundbreaking here like your impact you can have just by crashing around the restaurants and talking a game so i did one thing where you took over brixton for a month and you yeah i did learn what it's like to be a gm yeah that was interesting what did you learn well I can be touched on some of it I mean it's it was he's glad I've been with this a long time and he on the night out we were pissed and he there's probably an example of something we had to stop doing anyway he he came up to me he's like dude he doesn't feel the same anymore I've been with this four or five years you know Marco yeah Mark oh Mark Brennan really good honest employee in terms of the customer stuff and that loud kind of confident extrovert kind of that we always used to look for and he said to me it didn't feel right and I kind of told him to fuck off basically I was like like we were you know we were kind of mates culture right there i've had a cup of drinks and i was like nah what are you talking about because he wasn't being articulate he was had a cup of drinks and i just read it off as like you know kind of drunken bravado and but it stuck with me so it doesn't feel right it feels more like we're just focusing on the numbers blah blah uh so i said that to my partner helena it's bothered me for about three days and i realized like the only way to know really is you gotta get back in there so i went back in and managed bricks and for a whole month like properly did it like i didn't just tap out eight o 'clock at night and go home and didn't work sundays like i did proper hours i was literally about to ask you did you work sundays i worked all the fucking time i did i did it properly and i just you i kind of felt like he was right you know people were getting more trouble if they were missing five cans of coke at the end of the week and if we'd lost four members of staff that month you know wait sorry say that people getting more trouble if yeah they were getting more trouble if you know there was more repercussion and more reports and more focus on us on stop takes and you know you know if you're missing five cans of coke where are they what's going on like this uh but you know four human beings left the business that month and no one was really talking about it certainly not outside of the restaurant we weren't there was no out and this this is kind of going back to what i was saying earlier is where a lot of these beliefs come from and that kind of audited the business i went through everything i was like right i'm gonna look at all the things like how did how do we express what's important in this business to the teams and the restaurants i looked at kpis i looked at reports i looked at bonuses I looked at the training we give and I looked at the need things I have to come to and I was like well those are the things aren't they like if you're trying to figure out what's important to these guys or what reports do they send me or do I have to send what KPIs do I have to look at all the time or more importantly what my bonus on what's going to get me in trouble and I added them all up I found 151 things which is already way too many and then I put an F next to it for financial, a C next to it for customer and a P next to it for people depending on what sort of focus they had and it came out like 50 % of our things had F-necks in them.

1:31:01Really? You had C and the rest, whatever that is, 20 had people. And I was like, well, that's just off kilter. And I'm not saying you should have 80, you know, you should be 100 % P, like you need to have financial. And I've definitely flirted with that at the time and maybe gone too far in some places, but I definitely felt like actually he's right. You know what I mean? Like he is right. Like no one is asking me. There's none of the reports I had to send when I was down in Brixton for a month. And I appreciate it was me and my area manager probably was struggling for that relationship suddenly as the founder being his GM in his restaurant or whatever.

1:31:32But yeah, the cold hard facts were like, yeah, the reports I sent on a Monday, no, there's no report asking for what's going on with my people. No report saying, why did, you know, asking for explanation on levers or anything like that. It was all financial and very customer focused, which is fine, by the way. I mean, loads of very successful businesses have focused on those things, but it's not the way we want it to be. I feel like you've seamlessly queued yourself up to talk about Pineapple Report. Surely. Use this moment. He's just launched something. Yeah, actually, I saw that on LinkedIn, actually.

1:32:05Yeah, it's not really, I mean, Pineapple, yeah, I guess I'm fed up of, like, so I kind of feel a bit bad about saying, you're hiding crap while I was talking bullshit, because I don't think he probably was. But, like, I just, there's a lot of, and myself included, like, I've obsessed over culture for, like, 10 years now, and I'm actually, now I'm studying it in a way, in part. I'm starting to really understand. And like, I've been forced to do two modules in statistics. I don't know if you've ever done statistics. I had to go anything. Numbers just didn't work with my brain. I don't understand it.

1:32:32I mean, I remember the first lecture, I was like, I don't think I can even ask a question. I don't understand the answer. And not sound like I'm stupid, right? And luckily, there was about 15 or 20 other people who were thinking exactly so as me. So we created like a little, like a little tickets group over here that had to ask like stupid questions after the lectures. But I got there in the end. and it gave me this real grounding in data and how important that is it's not everything but you need to have better understanding what's going on so for me culture is about like what data points are out there they give you an idea and i've invested in a business which really started me on this journey called uda which is all about sort of knitting together everyone's people systems creating one source of truth and when we get that going and it's going to completely change the game for hospitality once one source of one source of truth let me give you an example so like we're very active in this industry so he's going to create a bot we're going to try and create a bot at some point called flight risk there's all ai and automations right yeah you're going to call it flight risk and the idea is imagine as an operator or a people director you could have tech that helped you look set up warning signs when someone might be about to leave rather than right now which is like all these people left let's try and understand why and stop happening again right that's that's hr right now here's our staff turnover why did those people leave right what do we need to do better whereas if his system will go into your roto it will go into your hr system your lms system your payroll and because it's got all that in each one of those systems the most incredible data sets but no one's then putting them together and correlating them right so flight risk might be that he was noticed that when someone leaves it's because they've done over three weeks in a row over 55 hours and they've just had a new general manager promoted for the first time right and those and i'm just yeah yeah but those two data points show a very clear pattern in your business that generally then you'll get a bunch of leavers so boom that's about to happen in here here and here so you might want to go and chat to that john jane and susan that's nice i know so all these all these data points are sat there right now like i asked him for a bot sorry as a founder i was like i want to be able to walk up to reading the door in reading and it's tell me who's working and a bit about them and he was like done now so if you think about that example like the richness of that data at the moment it's in all these systems that no one is putting together it's like i know because you're in our payroll system and you're in our rotor system that you just went on holiday two weeks ago it's in there like we know it right you just went on holiday for two last two weeks or that you just got promoted or that you might just come back from paternity leave or whatever right we know this stuff about you but now imagine if you can put that into one place where when i get within 20 yards of the door and honest and reading it pings me and says hey phil dan's working today and he's just been on holiday um and he just got promoted four weeks ago i could walk in and go hey dan how's your holiday that's not like so i think a lot of what bats this up pineapple by the way that was you yeah i've just done a great job of selling my amazing well i'm an investor in it so that's good for me but but the but i think there's a there's a huge as you're talking it sounds like very david brent but like the customer's always right right and i think so many businesses put so much focus on how do we in even in this book they're like um this hospitality book they they do these things like what is the customer doing what is the customer doing how can we make this moment a moment magical but actually if you go upstream and say okay how do we sort the employee bit first well not sort it out but just be way more have way more kind of lucid clarity on that so when you walk into the store you you know being bish bash bosh that's exactly it that that's where you can set the tone as we said right at the beginning set the tone of the culture and then everything else flows from that i think that's mad the fact you can use that's so rory southern being able to use the data to to evoke the emotional feelings all the data shows behavior right behavior is usually backed up by data his matt's favorite thing he's gonna love this when he hears this podcast uh his opening line is amazon knows more about your employers and you do amazon knows more about our employers than we do literally just from their buying habits like they know more about the personalities and the behavior and their desires and the kind of yeah well the habits of our employees amazon knows more about our employees and honest us right so just let that sink in for a second so but which is but it's totally not it's totally we can we can fix it and this is what he's trying to do and hopefully we'll be successful but like you know you learn a different way to i learn how i learn and you'll learn a different way to how you learn and if we can figure out those things and instead of just sending one message to everyone like we have a system workplace and this is what you're just going to try and do which is like you get this bit of confirmation communication this way phil gets it as a video because he likes visual tom gets it as a picture because he likes to see to learn and this guy just gets to go and fucking do it and then reflect on it like no one's segmenting according to personalities our business we treat everyone the same and there's so much opportunity if we can just tap into it and data and tech is the way in but i do pineapple is slightly it was pineapple that sounds interesting well i just said linkedin yeah it started it started in all good things i trust things that start small and kind of snowball but this guy came to me and he's got culture consultancy and asked me if i could help crack hospitality essentially doing a bit of his quite a big brief he didn't really say that but like Google will phrase X.

1:37:52I was a big player. Great guy. Culture consultancy. There was a lot of support and education. It was like, man, I want to get to hospitality. I think we got something to offer. And I think you must get this. Like people think we've got this huge black book of founder names. And like, if you've got Phil, then got the numbers to like all the businesses we want to buy our products. And I'm like, I'm not a, I'm a shit salesman. Pretty good salesman. I must say. And B, the, you know, the founder network doesn't work like that. Like if we tell each other shit all the time, they wouldn't be my friend so much longer.

1:38:19So I can't do that. But something I think the industry needs is a benchmark for people metrics. And this is my kind of thing. I'm fed up of talking about culture and all these wishy-washy, like, it's this, we're treating this, it's that. It's actually, like, we all need to talk about the same numbers and people need to understand where they sit. And this is 10%. I'm not kidding myself. Like, we're doing the first, like, you, Matt, is trying to do the really clever stuff. But what Pineapple needs to do first and foremost is give a people director and a business an idea of what good staff retention is in the industry.

1:38:48or sorry not even good good is the wrong word he knows what good is that's the point we don't know what good is but I can tell you that the staff retention in the industry is 86 % for 12 the last 12 months 12 month rolling LTO is 86 % in honest no across the industry right with the businesses I've got in this project at the moment we're a small sample size about to get a lot bigger now 86 % so if I'm sat in another business I can go well ours is 100 % we might want to focus there or ours is actually 50 % we're doing better in the industry okay let's move on focus on the other stuff so that's all pineapple is it's five metrics i'm asking businesses to join um we've had an incredible response once or two weeks ago i've got 170 businesses have asked to join it whether they actually do and then whether they actually give you their data and then whether they actually will pay the subscription which we're going to introduce in january to be part of this club this community to get the data is another matter so that 180 might boil down to like 10 but like we've had an incredible amount of businesses like some huge ones and stuff like and what do so what are they trying to do like i know it's you can't do it case by case because like over 100 them right but like what do you think of the the one to three four things that they're trying to find out that they can't currently find out um well i mean the five metrics we've got is is staff attention uh tenure of across roles so how long has the general manager been in role um uh internal progression 90 day turnover so of the new people you hired how long are the last 90 days that's really interesting one really yeah that is interesting and the other one which is will's one from sport it's a real big thing in sports team civility so this idea of how long like you take any given honest restaurant and add up how long each member of that team has been in that restaurant so not how long you're in the company like phil's been in honest for 10 years but you move phil from liverpool street to brixton in this metric my clock starts again at zero in brixton so i bring a zero so there's this thing about cohesion and you see it in sport all the best sports teams look at football right Brentford's a good example Brighton Brighton's a great example yeah and then compare that to Chelsea and Man United change the manager every three months think they can buy in the talent and buy in the superstar the superstar never they're a superstar here it doesn't mean they're gonna be a superstar here so we do this thing there's this superstar fallacy where we think we'll just go out and buy the superstar and we'll plug them in here and Will's got loads of amazing stats on cohesion well that's what Chelsea have done they've basically bought their team of superstars that have no idea how to at Merck together.

1:41:08And do you know when Chelsea had their best season? When they had the transfer ban and they couldn't sign anyone. And also they won the Champions League with Di Matteo who was like a fucking reserve manager. Oh yeah. The team, the German team that won the 2014 World Cup, 80 % of them had won the under-17s World Cup about eight years before. So there's this whole thing about cohesion. Matt, like Ifermuda, is going to create the fucking cohesion bot. So imagine if you went to a rota according to that. He's like, I was telling him this story and he was like, imagine if you could rota cohesion. So you're doing a rota and it says, cohesion minutes on that shift.

1:41:39Sorry. As in, you've got too many inexperienced people in that team. The people on that shift haven't worked together this much, haven't worked together enough. So in the rugby example, this is a company called The Gain Line did this work. They worked out that you'd need to have 3 ,000 cohesion minutes on the pitch, I think it was, to win the league. And there's direct correlation between the more cohesion, every time you have less than that. So their cohesion minutes is, when you look at the 15 players on this 15 in rugby room. Yeah, yeah. when you look at the 15 players on the pitch they used to add up the cohesion minutes how long had that team been together and as soon as you fuck around the cohesion I was listening to the radio on the way up about Steve Borg, we've obviously just been kicked out of the World Cup about how he's so data driven and I think the more you actually can there's so many things you can apply to sport, to food I want to talk to you Tom about, you said on the podcast if people actually knew, I don't know what podcast to listen to, if people knew about the horrors of the supply chain, like if we were to open those blinkers or take the blindfold off, then it would change the way we kind of consume food or go to restaurants.

1:42:48What is the horrors of supply chain across the industry, first question, that most people won't know or acknowledge when they're having food? And then how are you trying to change that, make your dent in that? I think the biggest horror for me is it's either it's either conscious ignorance or subconscious ignorance, which I'm not sure which one of those is is worse. But it's restaurants who don't know where their food's from or don't care where their food's from. And I think that's the majority of restaurants. And then when I say restaurants, I mean that specific restaurant. So that waiter who's serving that food, selling that food, do they know where it's from?

1:43:36Do they know what system that food supports? The vast majority, and you go, you know, the big chicken brands go in there and ask where their chicken's from. They'll be like, you know, no idea. And they don't want you to know because they're not proud of it. And there are things, you know, there's things that I realized that Honest was doing that wasn't as good as they could be. And some of these things come with massive pressures, not just financial, but also the infrastructure. Like how can you create something that's doing good and gets consistent supply of it? And it's fucking hard. But generally, I think the issue with food is we're just overly reliant upon chemical inputs.

1:44:19And that goes, that's not, you know, and I'm biased a little bit, but I know a lot about this and I've done a lot of research. it's not as simple as meat is bad plants are good like there are there are terrible inconsistencies with people's understandings and i've had many passionate sort of young vegans who will who will try and um they'll you know we'll put a post out about something normally about regenerative farming um that we really support we think is really should be a really big part of how the world feeds itself you know for the foreseeable um sorry for sounding dumb here but regenerative farming like if you think about it as a system where you so it's a food system where for us there's it's a journey of continuous improvement so organic is a really good example of something that's doing a lot of good but it's really closed organic and for most farming systems they can't even contemplate becoming organic because it's a very difficult thing to to jump on board with financially the time frames around it it's very hard but if you think of organic in terms of using less chemical inputs and when i say chemical inputs i mean you know pesticides are poisons like if you drank a pint of pesticide you'd be dead but this is the stuff we spray all over our fields and then we expect that we can then eat that and it'd be totally safe for our health like i just don't think that's possible there are pesticides farmers use the farmers will even go on the field for three or four days afterwards because they know the health risks to it and that's the stuff that then goes into the food and then we then process it and we eat it like stuff like that really terrifies me and just how depleted our systems are how depleted our soils are how overly overly reliant we are on fossil fuels in farming systems whether it's meats or plants so stuff like that does terrify me and there's there's stats that are thrown out there's people saying we've got you know 55 60 harvests left before our topsoils are so depleted that we won't be able to grow on and there's lots of people saying that's bullshit and i don't know enough about that but for me food systems that work with nature feel far more logical than food systems that try and replace nature and then sadly the majority are trying to replace nature and that systems that are you know monocrop agriculture intensive cattle farming intensive poultry farming all those things they rely on third party inputs pesticides fertilizers bought in feed shit like that whereas you know for us regenerative cattle the majority of their life they're in a field eating grass grown from the ground on this on that same field like compare that with an intensive farmed animal that spends its life eating horrible food that makes its fucking shit toxic and gets pumped full of of worming agents and antibiotics because it's ill because it's surrounded by another 2 ,000 animals.

1:47:27All those things. I think if people saw that and they knew that what they were about to put in their body came from that system, I'm not saying everyone. Most people go, I don't fucking care. I'm just hungry. But I do think a few people, a percentage of them would go, I don't want to support that. And that's what we're trying to basically show the business at our scale, you can do it better. you can be more curious about where the food's from and you can show people that kind of curiosity the again it goes back to it's almost that whole you know when you took the path of most resistance with the potatoes it's like you're doing that that this is the new version of that with the way you're sourcing the ingredients i think what you said there about like the consume conscious ignorance or ignorant yeah yeah it's not just restaurants it's customers yeah yeah customers are worse i think because they're just like yeah you know can i buy a whole chicken and it costs three pounds in the supermarket like they know that's not but also from a brand perspective as well so i interviewed the founder of union coffee if you do you know he's a really interesting guy and he was like we've got this whole backstory like they he was one of the first guys to almost bring um the coffee culture to the uk super interesting guy and they've done all this stuff for the farms over in Guatemala and Colombia.

1:48:46And he was like, we tried to put that on the packaging. And if we're being really brutally honest, the consumer did not give them monkeys. Like the consumer was like, does this coffee taste good? Yes or no? How strong is it? And it's like, well... What does it cost? Yeah, our mission is to... They've had to do this thing where it's like, okay, we're going to put as much as we can on the pack. But it's like, the consumer doesn't really care. And it's like... Quality, it has to taste good. I mean, that's what the whole plant-based meat bubble burst because they realise actually it doesn't taste as good everyone was imagining it's not good for the planet either yeah it's not good for the planet it's not good for your body it's not good for your bank balance because it's extortionately expensive but it was you know it was the next Silicon Valley kind of you know boom we can IP food and all this kind of stuff but yeah if it doesn't taste good then don't even bother like that's that's kind of seems quite a simple statement to make but a lot of people were fucked up on that my mum said something the other day that's stuck this way around, you know, the planet.

1:49:45And she's talking about getting electric, her car's got this little mini and it's dying. She's like, I'm going to get an electric car next. And I was like, how are you going to, she lives in various Edmonds in Suffolk, right? And I was like, how are you going to charge it? I've got a little lamppost on my street and she doesn't have a driveway and there isn't a lamppost to charge in her street. How are you going to charge it? She was like, I don't know, but I've accepted the fact that I'm going to, my life is going to just be a bit more difficult, but it's the right thing to do. And I was like, holy shit.

1:50:08Like, that's cool, isn't it? like she was like yeah it's not going to be easy but I don't have a petrol car anymore and I was like that single thing of like yeah some our behaviours are going to have to change a little bit if we're going to sort this problem out and like I said you know we've got kids are electric cars the answer though that's another I think they're probably better than petrol cars but like you know we've got to look our kids in the eye right you're going to have to look us in the eye then in 30 years time and whatever you've left behind and he's going to ask you why you didn't do more probably right yeah sure a few more things I want to explore you I'm loving this gents it's learning so much I want to talk about your behavioural science is masters is masters yeah you both are super curious in your own kind of avenues and it comes together super interesting what are some of the lessons you've taken from actually one step back why did you go on that course like what piqued your curiosity and then what are some of the lessons you've taken from that that you allow to pour into Honest?

1:51:11Yeah, a bunch of things, really. I mean, I've got a bunch of, I've got some friends that are really into it. A friend of mine started a great business called Cogload. Cogload. You should get him on the podcast, by the way. Jerome Rebo. Oh, what does he do? So what does Cogload do? He's created these little behavioral science nuggets. It's like an online, he's created a language, it's a bit like Duolingo for behavioral science. So like for people who don't understand, haven't interacted with it, like he's distilled loads of papers and research into like nuggets he calls them. I'm sick, yeah. But just a great guy, just really engaging.

1:51:41You should look him up. So I've known him for a long time. And Matt from UDA, you know, is a behavioral scientist. I've always been interested in it. And like Tom said, I've had this in my kind of psyche for a little while. Like I like conceptual stuff.

1:52:01It felt like a good step forward away from philosophy, which I love as well. Like I love the whole, is the table really there stuff? but you know it's a great conversation I think it's good for I think if everybody did philosophy for a year it won't be a better place but I'm going to come back to that because that's super interesting but behaviour science felt like a bit more of a scientific data kind of led thing although I wouldn't really get into that data was you know the statistics stuff was a kind of happy offshoot incredibly difficult sorry bad answers for his input question I had a bit of imposter syndrome as well actually sort of seeing the world outside of honest properly for the first time and stepping out and interact with other businesses.

1:52:40I didn't want to just be Phil the co-founder of Honest. And I know like I'm really proud of what we've done and I'm not trying to sound modest, but I don't want to sound arrogant either. Like I think we did a really good thing. Like I think we worked really hard and it's a good story. Like you've heard some of it, like it's true, you know. So I love being Phil the co-founder of Honest and I love the respect and the accolade that you get from that. But I also felt this like I wanted to, I have an opinion on culture as you've heard quite passionately and I have an opinion on operations and people.

1:53:10And I didn't want it just to be backed up by some fuck ups and some things I've done well or not so well within honest in one place. I wanted some academia behind it. I think it was probably the real reason I felt a bit like a bit of an extension. Like who am I really? Like what is, I'm just a founder of a burger thing and I didn't do it on my own. Jeez, I couldn't have done it on my own, you know, like and it wasn't just tom by the way we had to talk about dorian our third co-founder you know he was instrumental in a lot of this um so i had a bit of a position and i less love behavioral science so i i just well i thought i would love behavioral science and i do and i did and i just it's just such a good subject like what is the for again for people who may not understand what it is what what would you say the definition of behavioral science i think it's there's a couple of things that you know there's there's two ways i'd describe it if you think about economics on one side that the history of behavioral science kind of follows this path of the joining of economics and psychology yeah behavioral science kind of is not taking either something from either but kind of its own thing but if you think economics is like the rational like two plus two is four and the way we why humans make decisions and behave it's a very we go through this rational process of this this and this that's the kind of homo economicus view of behavior and then the psychologists are a bit more interested in in uh the psyche and and neural neurology and stuff like that whereas behavioral science is the kind emerging of those two things so i think a good example is if i said to you you know i'll give you 10 pound now or i'll give you 20 quid in six weeks time what would you take probably 10 an hour yeah most most people take the 10 an hour right so the in theory the economist doesn't get that answer that makes no rational sense i've just offered you 20 quid and you've taken 10 right yeah yeah yeah so there is this thing going on in your brain that's saying it's called present bias the idea is that we value things right now twice as much as we value things in the future right now there's a how far in the future is you know if i just said next week for 20 quid you probably wait so that but there's a there's a level of kind of critical thought that's going on there in your brain and present bias says is saying take the tenner right so that's behavioral science is understanding why the hell did you take the tenner right like you know we all know that if we bought a better washing machine it would save us you know be more economical and better for the planet but a washing machine costs like 400 quid and actually right now that feels like in today that feels like a lot of money whereas the money i'll save in the next three years five years for having a better washing machine it's harder to get hold of we're talking about washing machines yeah behavioral science and food is mad or like or hospitality is mad because there's things you can do that don't make sense but can have a huge emotional impact i think that's why rory is so rory sutherland's obsessed with food and like i think one reason he wanted like he's come to this podcast a few times so we just talk about food specifically and so like there's stuff i went to um like there's the things you can't um he always talks about pre-rationalization and post-rationalization there's things that make sense retrospectively but like in food like as you said the the way um nigel speaks to a customer that little thing it makes it doesn't make necessary sense but kind of a huge emotional impact there's a guy that one of my favorite studies um you have to be careful with these because it's one study one small size will it replicate but like this guy was trying to debunk market research he was like totally wasted time like asking people all these questions and then deciding what product you're going to build or how you're going to market it wasted time and he tried to prove it by having two groups and two separate rooms and this group had to drink they both had to drink a bread a french and a german wine same wine in both rooms right Two wines, both in the same wine in two different groups.

1:56:49And after tasting both, you had all the tasty notes and who made it and the look of the bottle and the label and design, all the things. What do you think of this? What do you think of that? And which one would you buy? Most of the people in this room bought the French wine. Most of the people in this room bought the German wine. And it was simply because in this room, you play French music and in this room, you play German music. So like there's this thing. And I love that. Wait, so he did debunk market research. Well, his study seems to suggest so. Yeah, because there's the David Ogilvy quote, which Rory talks about a lot which is people don't think what they feel they don't say what they act so don't listen to any if I was going to be and this is too extreme but I've got myself to a point which is kind of the pineapple stuff really is like I have no interest in what you tell me I'll watch what you do like we do something called Vibs at Honest very important burgers and it's a benefit for our staff they can come for up to four burgers once a month they can bring whoever they want very important burgers VIPs yeah yeah yeah and again Ollie I mean man Ollie we keep talking about Ollie, don't we?

1:57:46He brought that in. And I remember one of the most interesting stats I'd had in the history of Honest that really made me sit back and go, like, proper KPI made me go, he said, do you know how many people are redeeming that? I was like, no fucking idea. Like, it's a really nice thing we've done. Sounds great. Good soundbite for LinkedIn. We do vibs. And he was like, but you know how many people are using it? It was like 8 % or something, right? And I was like, ugh. Right, now look, maybe they're just sick of burgers and they don't want to, but they didn't have to be there. The rule was you don't have to go.

1:58:12Like, this is for your mum and dad to your place that you work, right? When your mates come and see you, take them for a burger where you work. So is there a better metric for pride than that 8 %? I was like, if you were really proud to work at Honest, then I would have thought that would have been higher. It's probably not the only data point. And I'm not saying people aren't proud to work at Honest, so it's not foolproof. But so I'm really not interested in that. But if I asked all those people, hey, are you really proud to work at Honest? Like, would you take your mum for a burger if she gets busy?

1:58:41Yeah, yeah, of course I would, Phil. Of course I would. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you don't. You don't ever. You've never redeemed it once. I share the same kind of views, I think, around feedback. I really struggle with getting feedback on food, and that's my own kind of stubborn issue I have. Sorry, by that you mean, so like feedback from customers or staff within? Feedback from a customer who's had a good or bad experience, so that is what it is. when we launch a new product and you know we've had lots of marketers and brand people come and go and they're like cool so i'm going to get a focus group and i want to get you know 12 vegans and they're going to try the new vegan burger and then they'll let you know what they think and i was like yeah i just don't really think it makes any sense well they might have listened to a certain type of music when you ask them as well they're coming in you're you're not a customer coming to one of our restaurants and ordering that burger and eating it is a completely different experience to asking someone who doesn't do this for a living to come into an environment with a fucking clipboard and give us the feedback of that experience they are two completely separate things and and but that's what you build your fucking food product on is get everyone in a room like this yeah and tell exactly what you think and pretend that you're a chef so you can really you're gonna you're gonna talk about the seasoning and it's like but there'll be so many things like we carry these biases and judgment around all the time and you won't be aware of half of them but like you know there's so many reasons why someone would choose something over something else so they might have nothing to do with the food and that's what's terrifying like yeah but i also i also think like with when you get when you solicit all this feedback is you end up with the very vanilla answers which means vanilla brands so like the category i always talk about is protein bars right you have grenade who actually did something really interesting then a whole smalls of all the brands that just look the same because they're all looking at the same same feedback and i always think when one of my big beliefs in the kind of way i approach the podcast is ask the questions you want to ask because that's you've got to follow your curiosity and i think create the burger you want to create create the pizza you want to create and you know like imagine john lennon started soliciting feedback for every fucking song he wrote do you know what i mean it wouldn't be john lennon if david bowie wrote his feedback so i think yeah yeah i just i i'm completely with you i think you you can they yeah you wouldn't they would he puts the song out to the world you put your burger out to the world and that's what you want to put out to the world and it seems to be working i think it's really interesting i i completely agree i think it just dilutes it dilutes the sharp arrow you've got and becomes really blunt yeah agreed but then you know you've got to make you can still make the right you can you can make behaviorally sound behaviorally scientific decisions right you can look at and And this is what Jerome Mattelli from Coglo, like there's things that you can do that will make a messaging more powerful.

2:01:34Is there any examples of how you've applied that? Probably not so much honest. I don't know. I mean, I'm not qualified yet. You're a, what did they say? A master of nothing? Not yet. I'm trying to think of some better examples. you know like we there's the thing he got everyone to I did one of his training days and he got everyone to draw a poster to get people to give blood and everyone was like just give blood and all this kind of stuff this was the thing the NHS the NHS used a variable science unit to help them not enough people give them blood and they basically a huge influence on behaviour is group social norms, if everyone else is doing something then we're more likely to do it so the NHS ended up, instead of having just like just give blood I think was their thing, they changed it to you know, 250 people have given blood in the last uh week and it and it improved like 12 so it's not like you know it's always little marginal gains it's not like there's a silver bullet to everything but it's just the flip of like telling you like we don't we like autonomy we don't like being told what to do and actually just give it doesn't work like now think about offices right i mean you know when people don't like clean your coffee cups and all those like you know you've got like poster police in your businesses that like put posters everywhere and everything trying to get people to do shit doesn't fucking work right doesn't work like like put people paper goes in here it's like fuck up like no one it doesn't work i'm telling you it doesn't work like there's better things you can do from a able science point you'll get people to um the uh the one rory talks about is you know have you seen when you're when you're speeding um well if you're speeding i should say for when you're going a little bit too fast in those 30 miles per hour zones it's got the face that does the sad face have you seen that yeah yeah it's got a smiley face with a sad face that apparently had like the results of that and they're not i'm not the top of my head were way crazier in people slowing down than like the the old punitive ways of getting people so down it's literally just like a fucking smiley face um it's paper science man that's why i love it and there's not an example you can think of in the consumer world where you can't apply a bit of it or you're you're at the wrong end of it or the right end of it yeah a few more things i want to wrap up with and then yeah i'll uh yeah yeah yeah there's not there's actually two more questions.

2:03:48What's one truth you both hold, well, it could be different. What's one truth you hold that most people would disagree with you on? God, I think trust is lost, not earned. I think you have to place trust in people and then have them lose it for you rather than have people have to earn it. And I think I'm in the minority on that. Should I say that again? No, no, mate. The coffee's wearing off my Trust is one of the most interesting things I imagine doing my thesis on this idea of the lowest common denominator effect, which is when you dump down your processes for the lowest common denominator in the room.

2:04:27There's loads of, in product, it's really, it's about mass market. How do you dump down a product to mass appeal? It makes total sense. But there's loads of, no one's done this in a cultural sort of corporate sense, which is one, hoping to get some good results. But some people have done it in education, like the idea that you know you have to tailor the teaching to the stupidest kid in the room and then what for me that then of course the implications of that on the smartest kids right there's loads of examples um so i'm doing something on this called the lowest common on my effect uh and ultimately where that without getting too much detail where that path leads you is this idea of trust and i think it's definitely two camps and i think i'm in the minority given how many people i spoke to about it where certainly businesses at scale are you willing to say i hired you for a reason, I trust you to do the job, give you the autonomy and the space to go and do it.

2:05:15And then you have to then break that trust. You're going to have to do something for me not to trust you anymore. But you're saying trust is earned, not given. No, no, I'm the other way. I want to be the other way. I mean, I definitely used to be a trust as air guy and I totally get it. It's compelling, it's safer, it's, you know, from running a business point of view, it makes total sense that someone has to come in and earn your trust and then you kind of release them into the world if at all. I would say my truth, my truth, is that your question? Well, it's one truth that you agree with. Some people agree with me.

2:05:44Certainly more behavioral scientists, people I spend time with agree around the kind of trust is lost. But I think definitely in the corporate world, most people believe it. Employees and people have to earn your trust before you get it fully. So I think I'm the other one. What about you, mate? It turns out I'm really struggling. And I think, as I was saying earlier, my son is not sleeping at the moment. So my brain is like scrambled egg. And this is quite a deep question. And Phil's just come up with that. I don't know my brain is not being my friend come back to me well then that's where I want to I want to wrap up I ask this to all guests and you've teamed me up perfectly mate who've got kids because I think it's just an interesting lens but like what's one piece I know your son's only 10 months old and Theo's only like 8 but the what's one piece of advice you'd pass on to them do you think and yeah whoever wants to go first on that we touched on it earlier and i and i believe this so much i've spoken to so many people who seem to have everything in place to go off and do something themselves but something's holding them back i don't know what that is you know they're the only ones who know that so i will support my son in any way i can for him to just do it and get on with it and that's my I know it sounds like a real basic one, but I just can't tell you how common it is.

2:07:10Maybe it's just hospitality because there are lots of scary barriers. And I think the big one for me is everyone, and Phil said it, I mentioned it earlier, like I think everyone thinks that me and him have this like special power to get honest to where it's got to today. So much of it was actually, we just go on with it and we made a ton of fucking mistakes. And, you know, I think one of the best quotes I've heard is it's only a mistake if you make it twice. like you you make the mistake you live by it you earn it wear it on the you know on your sleeve and then you move on um i think those those things are superpowers and i do think they're things that people tend to struggle with but yeah for arthur i just want him to get on with stuff really well i'll be pushing him to be proactive and then follow his his passions in life um because it's so easy to to just put it put off procrastination is like everyone's worst enemy and we all fucking do it so easy now with TikTok and social media just drain your brain away for days and then yeah so I think yeah for me it will be I'll be really trying to push him into things he enjoys whatever that is amazing funny to you Phil fuck I don't know sorry I'm a bit like you gave me loads of time and I think you're a really good answer and I'm still struggling I mean I've got a son and my daughter's six I'd say would I say different messages I wouldn't I don't know question one piece of advice what advice should I give my kid life's not that serious don't take life too seriously like it's not when I say this out loud I think it sounds really dark and morbid but I find it completely like liberating no one gives a fuck about you really outside of your friends and family no one cares people don't give a fuck imagine you don't affect many people's lives like most people die and they've forgotten right yeah and I love that like I'm and I don't want to be I've got an ego right I like I want people to ask us how we did it and I love doing stuff like this like I'm not shaking me I'm trying to share the fact that I've got an ego but like I want my kids to think don't worry about who you are or life too much it's not that serious because no one really gives a fuck about you outside your close family and your close mates like after that they're really good shit so like I find that completely liberating other people be like curled up in a ball in a free position there's a guy I follow on Twitter who on September 8th because it's my birthday this year put out saying oh by the way this time last year the Queen of England died and he's like you completely forgot about that and that was probably the most important person in the world his whole thing was like you're not fucking important just go and do it do you know what I mean you forget about the Queen you're not important yeah but London makes people feel I spend a lot of time up in Scotland and I do it because it makes me feel totally insignificant You go for a hike on a mountain and you don't meet another human being.

2:10:03And you, you realize that this, that shit has been an existing for millions of years. It doesn't give a shit what's going on in the financial markets of London. It just continues. Whereas when you're here, you're just like, Oh, I've got this and got to do that. And I'm looking to buy that. And I, and that guy, that looks cool. And I want to make that person happy. And it's like, so true. So I guess my advice is to my son and my daughter, no one gives a fuck about you. Apart from daddy. and they're not important yeah go get them tigers what's your great granddad's name exactly you can't even remember your great granddad so the idea that anyone in this fucking planet remembers us like very few people go to a graveyard and just realise how many of those people have just gone and you think about what people get upset about these days I don't want to talk about this people choosing to be offended which is one of the most annoying things about the world we live in now like choosing to be offended by stuff and you think about some of the things that people worry about and get upset about and stress about and then there's some really important shit that no one seems to give a fuck about right but like and I just think you're not important you're not important just get on with it do what you want to do be nice to people and just have a fucking go gents I've absolutely loved that yeah I feel like we could keep going but yeah it was insane thank you so much thank you so so much for listening to the podcast I really, really do appreciate it.

2:11:28If you liked 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