Tech Billionaire Owner of UK’s Most Famous Italian Restaurant Thinks Differently About Business

1:19:11He's one of these people who pushed away from the medieval pattern of thought about things being kind of all mystical and unexplainable to actually saying things are rational. But at the same time, in his book In Praise of Folly, he talks about why it's a good idea to be like these bees and not necessarily just do the same old things, Just experiment and do some really wacky things because that will turn out to generate new ideas and new insights and new benefits and things that you couldn't possibly have otherwise thought of. I actually said, my response to Stephen was, you bastard. I'm trying to finish my book and you've just just just added at least two weeks to me trying to finish this bloody book yeah yeah yeah um anyway uh you said I could use bad words on this yeah go for it um anyway so I did read it um and there's a there's a there's a reference to it in in the book yeah um and like a lot of the stuff you read an awful lot of stuff it doesn't necessarily pop up in a very direct way but it really did shape a lot of the that that when you're trying to write a book and land it that really did a course correction and well how so oh because thinking's that because basically it gave me the confidence about how this notion about serendipity goes back a long way and has some very deep roots to it.

1:20:56See, I've been observing in Cambridge in particular, back to this observing in practice and wonder if it works in theory. And so I've seen this stuff, seen it work, but you don't know whether you've got enough data points and whether other people are thinking the same way. and I've drawn from Daniel Dennett and Stuart Kaufman and you know a lot of people on the theoretical side and evolutionary thing about thinking about systems and so on and then you get oh do you know what I missed Erasmus I did need to know a bit more about some of the ways in which people who are not part of some of the more technocratic tradition that I was drawing on actually think about the problem and how that how they and it makes it it makes it much more rounded right yes and you have more confidence yeah that what you're doing is is founded on some more profound truths than simply just inventing something just because it's a nice thing that you've done in cambridge so your book spoke to me on on two of those levels as we were saying before well actually well quite a few actually the coop cooperation love that that's like i does i've been thinking about that for years that's true different inputs equals different outputs so like say i'm doing this podcast i want to go and read as i said to you i'm reading moby dick reading all sorts of random shit because then that gives you these different inputs these different outputs equals edge those two were massive for me and then the other one was when you talked about how like that idea of the edge of chaos so as i said i've worked i've worked at a challenger brand right i work for the company um and again a lot of my listeners a lot of we do these networking events which are welcome to come to like they're sick and um i've seen what happens a brand evolves at the beginning if it's sort of you know genesis is quite chaotic it's very serendipitous you're a small team you're in a small office ideas flow quickly yeah what happens is as you go along this this the adoption curve to scale at some point um they they they the shackles of process and order come in yep and basically what happens and i've seen this happen firsthand you get some sort of you know curmudgeon smothered corporate come in which is probably a bit of a heinous way of saying it but basically comes in and kicks out all the the chaos and you've got this really tight rigid thing and then then the brand starts to go down like that right yeah so and it's so that kills it i mean it's exactly right that kills it yeah you've you've got to have that continual playfulness that's why i'm in praise of folly yes is really interesting because it's this playfulness in doing apparently stupid things right yeah it's the permission to do that so they so they the the the same time with a brand you do need tight control on a brand yeah because the trouble is that people will invent things now i once had this problem with my consultancy company right now looking around so i had a i had a we had a boardroom table that was about this size right yeah and um and i got so fed up with it with what was happening to the brand that i laid out every single piece of material that the company was producing you know printed brochures and reports and other things and I laid it around the table and I got every single member of staff to walk around the table and the question that they were supposed to answer for themselves was does this look like the same company and what what was happening was you know people were choosing the wrong font or they were you know they were doing the wrong color palette or they were just inventing something for themselves now that's that's kind of fine but but you know in terms of projecting our message out to the outside world it was a disaster and i had to get the entire company to understand that it was a disaster before i could actually then change things and get everybody back onto the onto onto the evening keel now let me contrast that with your your stuff shirt corporate coming in your stuff short corporate in the way you described it simply cracked the whip and told everybody to fall into line that's why it's the edge of chaos that's that's the that's the bit that's i did something different right i did something different it was look i'm going to tolerate a certain amount of flexibility here but you need to understand what my problem is and what our customers problem is if they go around and see such a load of different messages coming out from us so i interviewed jack stein rick stein's son yep down in padstone uh he's a legend and we were talking about the i think another which is one of those things i like i like things that are both right and wrong yeah so uh the one percent improvement rule right you know business like do one one better one better one better kaizen well actually and so the example is is rick stein had this or um vanilla sea bass dish on the menu whatever right and he was sort of gallivanting around the world you know he's i think he lives a lot of the time in australia uh doing lots of tv shows around and so they had a new chef come in each time and uh over the course of about eight months they had a new shift chef come in so the first chef comes in he's like i'm just going to add my little one percent improvement to this change the dish next next and because it's happening so slowly every week you can't see it's changing yeah another one percent thing and then actually rick comes back and goes what the fuck have you done swuffing a sea bass dish but the issue is they couldn't see it because it was happening so slow yeah yeah yeah like what you were saying about my podcast going off piece if it happens so soon you can't see it that's right and um is i suppose with the different prints of of your you know around the table it's like if someone's just done a little type fun they may not recognize it but then before you before you sit back you're like wow what have we done here yeah so so this is the this is the the the eternal problem of running a business and doing branding and how you work you need to evolve you need to do those little changes but at the same time you need some kind of guiding principles about how this is going to work yeah and and imposing it on people in my book doesn't doesn't work because um people will i mean they conform but they won't necessarily do things i once met the head of the swiss armed services right so the the chief Swiss Army knife.

1:27:34No, the actual army knife. Literally the head of the Swiss military. And she said, you have to get people through four stages, right? I hear you. I hear you and I understand you. I hear you, I understand you, and I agree with you. I hear you, I understand you, I agree with you, and I will do what you say. Right? And unless you can get everybody through all four, you're lost. And it's that understanding that just telling somebody to do something is never going to cut it. So why did I walk them around the table? It's because they had to understand for themselves. Right? I hear you. I understand you.

1:28:21Do you agree with me? Yes. Right. Now let's all work together to get this brand back online. Yeah. Fascinating. what are i think the deeper the wound the deeper the wisdom what have been some of your favorite failures favorite failures

1:28:43failures failures um favorite failures the ones that taught you the most

1:28:53um yeah i got involved in a um a generator company because um i'd been involved with some of the founders before we'd done a um a base station company for 3g now let me explain what that is so you imagine you got your wi-fi router right but instead of being a wi-fi router when you plug it into your ethernet cable at home uh your broadband link it turns into a wireless base station so you haven't got coverage in your house you just plug it in you've got a wireless base station yeah okay now vodafone actually picked that up and did something with it they did it for a bit um and that was very successful we got the company to a certain point we sold it to the americans and that was that was great we hadn't made a turn on it and then the guys who were doing that decided that what they wanted to do was to do power generators for um for in particular for doing standby power generators for mobile telecommunications masks and there there is a huge need for this and we could do some real smarts on these generators which weren't being done by the the generator companies which were allowing to monitor what was going on and manage these things and save huge amounts of cost and it was a catastrophic failure um because we didn't have enough money and capital to do it but also because we were facing a bit um a market where you weren't really selling into people who valued what you had to offer it seemed to us that it was going to be very valuable that your diesel generator never ran out of diesel that it could operate hybrid and could use solar power so you would become largely green if that's what you wanted to do that you could tell when somebody had siphoned diesel off the out of the tank that you knew when you should go and service the generator because we had got all the stats on it instead of having to expensively do it after so many thousand hours of um as a as a kind of like a zombie all of these things were huge value propositions but they never would get through to the final customer who was actually paying for it because the entire industry was structured in a way that there were lots of intermediate steps so nobody would actually see the real benefit of what we were doing we actually had this thing rolled out for the emergency services network for the united kingdom and i believe probably some of those generators are still functioning but the whole thing was constructed in such a way that nobody in any decision making capacity who could see the value of it would be able to make that decision as to procure that generator and it was such a lesson what are the lessons you took from it but the structure of the market that you're selling into matters probably more than the value of the product that you're selling so let's let's take no no no because i'm just like what happens when i do this is like i'll pick up on something i've heard elsewhere and i think it's it's um oh my god yeah um um there's a cleaning company called purdy and fig absolutely smashed it right right a good friend of mine jack rubin weirdly we used to party together at nottingham now he's like he's now flying um and he said something to me he goes and i asked him a question i was like what's one truth you believe that most people disagree with you on and his answer was it's not actually about the product or the brand it's the market you're in and i think people don't look like that they think i've got this best thing since like spread i'm gonna force it yeah yeah and actually he was like no no there's a real demand right right so look in the uk unfortunately we have not got the same kind of um training apprenticeship ethos that you have in a country like germany or norway right yeah the result is that the uh the installation for home heating systems is done by people who are not as well trained or as professional as you would like them to be okay in general yep and we have this kind of culture in the uk which is a bit slapdash it serves us well because actually we are quite innovative yeah but on the other hand we're not sufficiently professional and efficient as we really ought to be because we're not as well educated and as well trained right and we don't value those things so much you know people will be um a bit a bit down on anybody who who's a bit too sharp and who's a bit too professional a bit too slick right we all know that yeah yeah yeah yeah you don't want a slick rick yeah no no no yeah come on come on and and and so when it comes to something like let's roll out heat heat pumps in the UK.

1:34:11The supply chain and that cultural attitude, the lack of training, means you are facing a massive problem. Now, heat pumps would actually save people a lot of money. And in a place like Norway, where it's a lot colder than it is here, they've moved over to heat pumps. That's what they've done. Basically, all homes are heated like that. Why isn't it happening in the uk and the reason the reasons are because of this complex supply chain and lack of expertise and training and understanding about how to make this actually work and and so you're right you know the the you might have a product that's going to save you money and save you time but the structure of the structure of the market how it actually operates and how people take decisions and the cost of getting it actually used by the customer means that you're never you're never going to get there yeah i think systems again there's another seth going thing but he says we often don't understand we're in a system like a fish doesn't know it's in water right and it's like there's so many different systems right so you could have like the solar system is a system right we don't we're just sat in this restaurant we're actually in a solar system and he says the issue with systems is they're often invisible right and so again to your point it's like there's there's these little intricacies and it works both ways you can either get slam dunked and sort of fucked by it your business doesn't get off the ground but other ways you can and what Seth's saying is when you know you're in a system you understand the system the goal is to dance with it not fight against it it's like a it's like a fish trying to swim upstream yeah so this is this is real this is a really important point yeah you do need to understand how that system actually functions and then i cover it in part in the book yes you know about the the complexity of things and you've got to recognize just how complex these things are and i you know i i've been on a government committee um you know at the end of last year and earlier this year which then ended up with some of the recommendations going into the spending review and the government committee was dealing with how to scale up companies in the uk and to be honest you've got a number of people sitting around the table who just thought there was one answer that there was just going to be one thing and all we needed to do was i don't know liberate pension funds so they can invest more right jeez i mean you know the system is very complex and i'll give you in in those terms um an example from cambridge and then i'm going to talk about something else completely different about sparrows and insects um but but in cambridge we had a lucky break and that was arm and arm arm is the computer they design chips and then people make chips based around the arm design and every your phone will have at least two if not more arm processors in it and arm is in i don't know at least nearly probably nearly 100 of all the mobile phones in the in in the world right um so it's a very successful cambridge company and the not as successful as nvidia for other reasons but but it's a very successful Cambridge company but when Arm was sold it produced dozens and dozens and dozens of millionaires they were all tech savvy they all had loads of money they all wanted to know what to do with it and what happened was it went into the Cambridge ecosystem at the time um before that we we'd founded I'm Robert Sansom have founded a thing called Cambridge Angels which has now invested over a billion pounds into companies in together with partners but the injection of money that came in after the first five years of or 10 years of cambridge change was operated just spun up the wheel in cambridge now once you spin the wheel up how does the system actually work it's not that somehow we can liberate capital to grow companies what is actually happening here is there's technical expertise and there's money has now gone into the system yeah that now increases the chances that people are going to be successful with companies yeah because they're now successful with companies there's more technical expertise and there's more money flowing around and because there's more technical expertise and more money flowing around there are more successful companies and the circle keeps going yeah right and that's what's happened in cambridge you can you can you You can see how that system works.

1:39:07It's a bit more complicated than that. But when you get people thinking there is, you know, a tax break or there is just more capital needed or something, just never believe them. Because the system, you need to think about how the system works. Again, it's almost like inversion. It's like not looking at it from a brand product perspective, but a system and market perspective. i think with food and drink like um someone once said to me and i agree like 2011 was like night for food in in the uk it was like 1962 for music i so you had so you had but that was that was the point of it i mean bocca was just getting off the ground so this is what i'm saying we were in the vanguard well but it was like we were like the animals or whatever it was in was the animals around in 62 the slight lady they're about they're about that well yes you had this i mean it was this kind of this different way of thinking about music right yeah and but then also like i'm obsessed with the beat i mean talk about this all the time i'm obsessed with the beatles but the with food and drink it was this it was the system working in its favor so you had like you had one the rise of street food which meant london and more london but actually other cities were open to trying different foods yeah because actually the risk was low so instead of you having to go in and have a sit down at an afghan or a korean restaurant you could go and have a little bow and try it yeah yeah so trial went up for all these different cuisines social media yes um you know the rise of the foodie influencer yeah um that that again increased awareness and then you had a few few places and i um have you been to coal in mayfair no i haven't i heard so he i was like he was saying how this this whirlwind happened and he was right so he actually He said Bocca del Lupo was one restaurant, 2011.

1:40:50He said Smokestack in Shoreditch. He said there was about five restaurants, he basically said, which made London almost like magnets. And then getting more and more people interested. And then you had all these new chefs coming in like, I want to be in London, it's the place to be. Yeah, exactly. And then the system changes. And then the system shifts. Exactly right. So, you know, I suppose it's a bit like, to take your analogy, you know, a music producer listening to The Beatles for the first time, you know, early tracks and thinking it was Decca, wasn't it, who took on the bar. Yeah, well, they were originally, they were lambasted.

1:41:27They were like, you're not very good. Yeah, but when I saw that original menu structure for Bocca, and I went, this is exactly it. This is a new way of thinking about food. this is exactly what I'm looking for. Going back to your point about risk, about street food, bocca is, in a sense, a lot of it is street food, actually, in that sense. Yes. And it was just that vibe at the time and stop being quite so pedantic about your food. you know be a bit more free and easy about what you can mix and what you like it was it was it was in the same way as the early 60s it's that kind of liberation from the straitjacket yeah it's a very good point yeah no it's it's fascinating and i think also and i i you can also use the system to be super grateful as well and because i think people complain about how hard businesses but i actually use it as so i listened to a podcast with um jimmy carl right right really good one and he was saying you know timing master in the art of timing is he was saying he couldn't be a comedian in the night if he was same wit same humor he couldn't be a comedian if he was born in you know 1890 for example oh yeah it's the systems had to move through and you're seeing this in comedy with you know joe rogan in um austin create the mother comedy mothership is now a destination for comedians comedies now back up and running and i think there was a podcast like you know i spent a lot of time in lisbon my mate lived out there great city but i was like you know what i'd probably run out of guests like pretty quickly i mean that's pretty harsh on the city but with london you get everyone coming in so so in my book yeah in my book um i talk about a chap called ayans spaniard yes i just can't remember that bit yeah yeah well i probably poor chap because he was the he invented the first working steam engine okay yeah yeah i can't remember that bit yeah yeah well nobody remembers him because basically he was isolated in spain i mean he actually got it working for pumping water out of mines which was what steam engines were for but thomas newcomen you may well have no okay james watt i mean we use weights now to measure the...

1:43:56He's a fan of Brutog. Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so James Watt, you remember him. Yeah, yeah. But if you look at the difference is that Ayantz didn't have a network. There was no network around him. There was no system into which he could plug. Yeah. Now, if you compare that with James Watt, with the Lunar Society, the Lunar Society was this eclectic group of people formed in 1765, which by, incidentally, is the recommended retail price of my book, which is no coincidence at all. The Lunar Society had these eclectic people, Priestley the chemist and Wedgwood, who was the manufacturer, and Darwin, who was a doctor, and Bolton, who was an engineer, and all these people, right?

1:44:44And what was drawn into that Lunar Society, and as a result, had the resources, because he was plugged into a network that could make use of all of that, could make use of what he had, and just as important, would be able to guide him, because James Watt, although it's not diagnosed, he was probably on the spectrum. He was a difficult man, and he was obsessed with lots of detail. And he wasn't suited to building a business, but the people around him, that network supported him to be able to make it work. i think the other thing which we have we've sort of danced around but i'd love to sort of plunge into now is uh kind of uh left field different inputs different outputs and i'd love to know what are some of the your weird kind of curiosities in very peculiar places that you think could actually be really impactful to running a business food and drink business and it could be anywhere it could be a big idea it could be you know maybe darwin i've talked a lot about darwin on the podcast with some people but like what are those big ideas that well i mean that's quite a difficult question to answer because um in the the problem that i've got is that there are there's a lot of material that i would i draw on i mean you said you read all these different things like moby dick and all that kind of stuff and you'd probably find it rather difficult to explain how that then led into particular anything in particular but it's very important in my book i talk about the fact that intellectual foundations of this book is a bit pretentious but still basically it's look these are the things that i've read that have influenced this book and i can't tie them back you know normal academic book would have something where you you'd have you say something and then there'd be a reference back and see this thing okay i've got a bit of those but mostly mostly it is look think about this as a world view that's what i mean yeah yeah right yeah yeah yeah and and so if you're then coming back to some big ideas that come out of that world view i suppose it's one changes that one gets old gets older one changes the thing that's really struck me particularly in writing this book is the importance of social anthropology now in social anthropology you have this view that you observe what people do and you write it down and you may be trying to explain or put it into a framework but you're mostly without value judgment just observing what is happening and it's a it's that if you want a big idea particularly in the the something like the restaurant business just observe what people do not what you would like them to do or how you think they ought to behave it's what do they actually do and that tells you much more about how to run your business than anything else i have a false quote from machiavelli i've not been able to find it i thought it was machiavelli but it's basically I treat people as I find them, not as I would like them to be, right?

1:48:11Which is a very similar kind of approach to things. You know, we come at, one of the mistakes in business is to come along with a preset idea about how things ought to be, right? And just keep an open mind that you'll have missed something and you need to be very careful about observing stuff. so in in terms of a big idea but that's a really big idea is basically just observe right my insights that we talked about i mean when we talked about the stress in restaurants and stuff like that i'm observing myself i'm observing other people i'm observing you know what's going on that's how you synthesize and come to a conclusion that actually the best idea is to make sure that within two minutes of sitting down somebody has paid attention to you but i think it it links back to there's a golden thread to our conversation david but it's it's and look i've been guilty of this thing everyone's like i've got this idea i'm gonna enforce it on the world yeah and this this product is going to change the world it's actually like and that through the social anthropologist perspective or lens it's like actually well hang on step back like is this the what is this the right market for one is the system ready for this product do you have a network to make this happen.

1:49:25Like they're much, and that's, it's a much bigger perspective, but I think it's an important perspective. Well, at a slightly more micro level, you know, can I explain this idea to you in 90 seconds? Yeah. And as a result, at the end of 90 seconds, are you enthusiastic? Because if I can't explain to you in 90 seconds, and if you're not enthusiastic at the end of my 90 seconds, there is something wrong. Hmm. Hmm. um abraham abraham lincoln's got a quote which is um i don't like this man i need to get to know him better yes i love that quote and i love your there are some people there are some exceptions to that rule yeah especially if you go around you know so late at night when there's some drunkards pouring out the pubs but i'd love to who's someone's perspective that you kind of disagreed with at first glance but then when you got to know them better it kind of changed your worldview well that's a that's a really interesting one um the trouble is after the event now i can't remember ever disagreeing with them so it's it's a bit difficult to back calculate um uh who would i who would i disagree with i suppose there's a kind of some elements of politics where that's the case where i may not change my interpretation but i can see better the other person's point of view um although accepting what people are saying in political terms is always rather more difficult isn't it um i i think i think i i mean i i i see it more as more as a journey you know i can't name any particular things but over my lifetime i've employed the principle as far as i can takes a bit of nerve i suppose to listen hard to people and i know that my my own worldview has changed as a result of that and along the way i will have disagreed with those things and then found out more and then synthesized it and changed my world view as and as i say the trouble is that now i'm sitting here with this kind of picture of the world and i can't really remember what i disagreed with people about but i think that's the point is is it's what you're saying is is it's further upstream it's more of a way of existing in the world which is a journey whereby you do sometimes you should as a la abraham lincoln if i don't like this person i need to get them to know it better i think i've had that so many times i've met you know friends of friends i'm like oh that bloke's fucking annoying and you actually have a pint with them they're like they're fucking sound yeah i mean it's like it doesn't even have to be as big an idea of like what what do you disagree with politically it could be something as as innocuous as you don't like your mate's missus or something like that but what you're saying is the worldview and a way of being in the world yeah yeah i think i think that's right we're getting very very philosophical at this point but you're you're right as well there are people who i have perhaps not thought were you know i had great ideas but then getting to know them better you know and and unpick that but there is this this other thing about people you know about your reactions you have this instinctive reaction about people you know within the first few seconds um and you're reading people particularly if you've met a lot of people and you're a little bit older um and i'm going to say something which is maybe a little bit controversial you should trust those first instincts um it's very important for recruitment for example in that first literally the first two minutes of how somebody is coming across and what they're doing trust the instincts as to whether that's going to work or not because there's a there's another problem that we have as human beings which is we try to accommodate and i need to get on with we need to get on with everybody so you then try in a bit in a kind of orwellian sense you know you need to count the number of fingers but remember what the truth is right it is what do you mean by that well at the end of 1984, Winston Smith is shown, I can't remember how many fingers O 'Brien is holding up, but he holds up three fingers and tells him he's holding up two fingers, whatever the number is, right?

1:53:56And gradually, Winston Smith's vision changes, so he only sees two fingers, right? and it's the um the the it's this this accommodation that people have ability to accommodate almost everything without remembering perhaps that there was a little warning signal at the beginning about somebody right so you need to remember all of that um and now let me unpick this for for why i'm saying this so first of all yes you find out about people and there's stuff you need to find out and you understand them more it doesn't need to mean to say that you would hire them or you would necessarily like them but you do understand them better and that's a bit more towards the social anthropology point i'm not going to judge you i'm just going to understand you right yeah there is the other bit which is i'm linking into particularly business decisions for example hiring somebody your reaction in the first few minutes is something you need to hang on to and then if you're hiring somebody in the interview explore the implications of all of that and try and check whether that was right most of the time that initial impression is probably about right and what you're doing is you're you're exploring the rest of it now i'm not giving a completely straight answer to abraham lincoln's thing but abraham lincoln of course let's think about where he was talking about it from he was talking about it politically so what he's doing i don't know much about that period so like just give some context okay so i i as a school prize yeah i was given a book a book token um i was given a ask what what book i wanted and uh And I asked for a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

1:55:50So I read a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and then I wrote an essay about it. So that, you know, Abraham Lincoln is one of my... It's quite serendipitous I asked you that then. Well, yeah. So I know a bit about Abraham Lincoln. Now, you know, he's a lawyer. So give some context that was happening in America, because I think it will help us understand... Oh. Go macro, then you can... Oh, okay. So in America, you have a situation very similar to today. Yeah. There was an awful lot of factionalism going on. Yeah. And Lincoln's problem, so he gets elected in 1860, and he's walking into a firestorm because for the since the 1840s pressure had been building in particular with people like there's a chap called Cahoon who was a southern senator who was absolutely well you you might think of him as completely crazy but he was arguing for states rights for the states as individuals not to be part of a union to have the right to own slaves to do all these things and basically um a very individualistic kind of approach to stuff um and so lincoln inherited a a very factional and tense united states within um a very short period you know they were into what the southerners would call the war between the states which tells you something which we know as a civil war and lincoln had within his own party the republican party a a massive set of problems where people were telling him to do different things he including his secretary of state who told him that the best thing to do to avoid civil war was to declare war against the united kingdom lincoln's response was to sack his secretary of state Lincoln his whole why do they want more against the UK oh because if you've got an external enemy okay then you can unite the country I mean yes sorry how many times have we seen that that was a bit silly by me yeah yeah how many times have we seen that it's a standard political play just find find an enemy yeah in order to unite everybody against that enemy I mean it's a we can see that playing out in all sorts of ways at the moment yeah Lincoln went no right this this guy goes.

1:58:33He's not what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do here is to bring everybody together. And he had all sorts of problems in New York. You know, there was talk of New York declaring independence in an independent state, not subscribing to the army. And he had, you know, we think about the Civil War as somehow great, some great crusade that ended with the liberation of the slaves the the detail of this is nothing like that nothing like that so in that context looking at lincoln's quote lincoln is saying i need to build a coalition to be able to get everybody to work together for a common aim right what i need to do is to understand people understand what their motivations are he's not necessarily going to like them but he's going to understand how they operate so that he can build that coalition so that he can achieve the overall objective and that that that i think is what the quote means now it's so interesting and it's like i thought you were saying what's happening now i'd really be like history doesn't repeat itself but it rhymes there's that there's there's a there's a cadence to it what would you say um from that book like what pulled you to him and what would you say are some of the lessons from that book or or abraham that you've applied to running your businesses oh he's there's a there's another one which um i'm not quite sure i get the numbers right but it says if i'm given seven hours six or seven hours to to fell a tree i'll spend the first four or five hours sharpening the axe that's so good yeah that's one that kind of applies to like instead of you know trying to hack at the the tree i.e this is our product put it on the world it's yeah it's the same it's the same thing it's like look at the market look at the system it's back to back to some of our early discussion where we were talking about visualizing things thinking about the problem you know my example of the neuroscientist who imaged the patient and then walked through how the operation was going to go, you know, that's the equivalent of sharpening the axe and making sure that you've got everything in line.

2:00:48You know, there's a big difference, for example, between the way in which the UK might approach doing a project and the Japanese. The Japanese will sit around for absolutely endlessly talking about the detail of what they're going to do. And then when they do it, it's done like that um how would we do it oh we just dive in yeah yeah but i love that about us yeah yeah well okay it's it's it's these these things i don't want to get what's to even literally things but these are different strategies for dealing with problems sometimes messing around and discovering things that the japanese would not be able to discover by simply sitting down and talking about it turns out to be the right thing to do sometimes sitting down and detail planning and working out everything and then doing it turns out to be the right thing to do um it depends on the project we we tend to apply what this kind of oh come on let's just get on with it um far too much interesting i'd love to know um how you make or some advice or maybe mentor models for making decisions under high pressure with imperfect information.

2:02:04Because again, a lot of people listening to this, especially with what's going on with restaurants right now, especially what's going on with brands right now, the kind of common, what I'm picking up via osmosis and some sort of my sort of conversational tentacles in various groups is like one, high pressure and two, like, we don't know what the fuck's going to happen. um like what could you speak to that right so i think one of the things you need to need would need to do is just not run around saying don't panic mr mannering um to to sit down and actually think about what you do know um we've i mean we've we've done the same thing here Rebocca, I was...

2:02:47I used I went through you know some of the data that we've got for the past year where we're sitting in the beginning of October now you know and what's actually happened over the last 12 months and I went through the data and I went through the data and I went through the data and I went through the data and I went through the way. rumor or hearsay or although that's important because it tells you about the temperature and the general attitude you need to be able to get some more data about what's really happening out there in the market and get some hard stuff um you know one of the things about restaurant businesses is they think that the um the the appetite limiting drugs now are actually potentially having an effect right i don't know whether that's true or not it could well be but people are in general you know because you can see that by sentiment analysis in the press people don't want to eat so much i mean they are they are they are being very much more conscious about that that is a secular trend that you're not going to be able to buck so you need to build that into your if you were telling yourself a story in five years time about you know it's 2030 what happened well we recognize the trend that was obvious in 2025 that people were going to eat less and but what they what did they value you might say well what did they value they valued really interesting food and they valued uh they wanted value for money and wanted things that were tasty they wanted to be able to not feel guilty about what they were eating or other i mean i should concoct a story but you base it around understanding what's happening in the environment and then writing that story so that it's plausible.

2:04:40Now, the thing about human beings, about this story writing, about this thing, is by writing the story, you're able to synthesize things and turn things into a framework that if you were sitting there with an Excel spreadsheet, you could never do, right? And so it's this balance, get the right thing about the amount of information, make sure you've got information you're not basing this on as i say hearsay or the last person you talk to and then just think step back in that impartial way and think about what do those trends actually mean and therefore what what does it look like in five years time and you know making decision making decisions under pressure might be a different thing i mean we talked about restaurants under pressure and indeed they are um that that that tells you about that that long-term thing and guides you on the immediate decisions in terms of taking decisions immediately under pressure well i go back to the the the point that human beings don't take decisions very well under pressure most of us um and uh you need to somehow relieve the pressure just if you if you think you're taking a decision under pressure if you're at all possible remove the pressure how would you how would you do that literally how would you do that oh well i'll tell you one way to do it is toss a coin okay i mean you know there's it's it's pretty pretty obvious to me that if you've got a choice between two alternatives um and you don't know how to choose between them you might as well toss a coin yeah that's right mate yeah um you know is you're not going to be any better are you i mean so and and particularly if the decision needs to be taken quickly um it's far better to take a decision than to avoid it now i i i margaret thatcher once said you know i i i i wait as long as i can before i take a decision and then i take it right and that that is i think a very good guiding point but you need to recognize the point at which you make a decision and you need to know that taking a decision is better than not doing something that's so good to hear of making a taking decision is better than not doing something always recognize always rec just think about the circumstances you're in do i need to take this decision yeah if i take this decision am i you know what what are the consequences of of doing it now not you know whether it's a or b or c it's if i do it now and in business the worst thing you can do is close off options because once you've taken the decision you've lost your options i think doesn't jeff bezels talks about one-way two-way door decision making i've heard that so one-way door is when you make a decision and it's like can you come back from that decision yes so then but two-way doors it could be something like a two-way door decision could be like we're going to change sorry two-way door decision could be like we're going to change the we're going to use a different type in india right a one-way door is i'm going to change the name from bocadalupo to bocadalupo like that i think understanding that nuance is hard yeah yeah and and absolutely important is back to this point about timing yep and and you know do you need to make that decision and can you make that decision and still as you say come back from it right it's it's options in business are the most important thing have i still got options can i do this or this or that yeah right have i left those options open if that happens have i got some alternatives those that that is the essence of running running a business yeah what other um like a lot of the lens of social anthropology like because you're right it's like we hear this thing that a zen pic's coming you know i think heston's just done a zen pic menu of the fat duck everyone's like oh fucking hell you know what i mean like he's he's quite he's he's got a good nose for trends but i'm trying to like what is what's going on with us from a human you understand from a better have a better understanding and the idea from a human nature level all of bees all are running from bears um like what's going on in our psyche and evolutionary when we when something happens we kind of get into that response mode well i mean the the thing about our inheritance in that sense is that it's always been important for us to take early decisions and to do things quickly um because otherwise you know you're upping the risk.

2:09:30And that timing is something which you need to be trained out of, in a sense. You know, people want to do, you know, take a gut decision, but you need to be aware of what the consequences are. Now, it's a bit, that's all getting a bit theoretical. I wanted to just go back to heston for a moment because heston heston is part of you know a whole range of restaurateurs all of whom are experimenting and doing different things now heston's azempic menu turns out to be genius everybody will lord him and say absolutely brilliant you know heston you've done it again you know yeah yeah you've absolutely absolutely got the trend completely right it we won't be talking about it in two years time if he got it wrong right so there is a survivor bias in all of this where we we applaud people who got it right but of course they they they they're taking a decision which is almost random you know in in the grand scheme of things if you didn't know it was heston and you had a range of 100 chefs who were all doing these things one of them has tried this thing yeah then it's effectively random yeah you know one of them's just by probably by chance done it is it going to work i don't know yeah but in the general trend of things as i was saying there is a general trend about weight and about eating and about there is a cultural shift going on now i can take that back to my book because in the book um there's there's a a bit of research done by some guys called chris starkis and fowler they produced a book in 2011 which um talked about how do people react when they're in networks and as long as somebody is within three steps of you how they think and how they behave influences you because they'll influence somebody who influences somebody who influences you and if they're fat you're likely to be fat if they're happy you're likely to be happy and that that that works through all through through a whole load of other things so in terms of the the trends and what what's going on you can probably tell if you listen to your network and and and and are part of a big network how those trends are operating so in terms of a restaurateur you know i would be talking to about this corporation thing I could petition I would be I would be talking to other restaurateurs quite a lot to pick up what's going on as well as my clients to find out how they were behaving because that will tell me an awful lot about the atmosphere in which I'm operating yeah I went to the pub I went for a pub with went for a pub went to the pub with Ashley Palmer Watts who was the head uh head duck head duck uh head chef at the fat duck right now does devonshire there was there was um ceo of de shum was there osh was obviously there um a few other um chris pizza guy was there and like again big operators but sharing ideas you know and sharing coup petition it's like this is and no wonder those lot are doing so well yes exactly right that's that makes so much sense exactly right and now now those are the guys those are the guys who are going to have picked up enough information from that network to understand where the trends are really going what's really happening yeah and therefore are likely to be the survivors what are other um because there's have you heard a proportionality bias where like we blow things up again it's sam tattam and it's so it's so if we we may look at we think a big problem needs a big solution we think a novel problem needs a brand new solution we think um something that's um is is kind of new has never been solved before potentially another category and sometimes it could be something really small so like for example the the small solution to the to the big problems you know when they did the um on the when you're speeding well not when you're speeding you should be speeding but the the the it used to say like 30 up you're going at 39 miles per hour right they change it to from a smile if you're going yes that's right small small um small changes small changes but actually has a massive thing yeah what what have those been in business because i think we in business you can over complicate things and think you've got to do these um massive big changes and sometimes it's something really small and inane that sat right in front of you that has this huge change what would you say those have been for you um well i i agree i mean i think that there's a there's a lot of overthinking and attempting to think that by matching the size of the problem to the size of the solution, or size of the solution to the size of the problem, is somehow the right thing to do.

2:14:35And it isn't. You're quite right. If you think about going back to our discussion about systems, systems are complicated things and a lot of interactions. If you could find just that little place to tweak and then the whole system then falls into a different mode, that's that's the ideal and for me it's um you know if i would much prefer to to think how the system works how all these interactions are working yeah and to find the right thing now you don't need to do any mathematical models or anything else to do this you can do your own systems map by simply you know get a white get a wall or something and just put up post-its post-its up on the wall and then draw lines between them preferably a nice wall like this something you can draw on um and draw the lines between them move the post-its around they're actually little apps um there's a thing called inspiration maps which allow you to do this kind of thing where you put blobs down you can connect them and then move them around and then you see how the whole thing interacts and then you you look for things that particularly Things that are going round in a circle that are self reinforcing and you think where can I intervene?

2:15:50What do you mean by self reinforcing?

2:15:55Well a self reinforcing spiral will would be in a restaurant. We're not making enough money. We're gonna put our prices up People stop Eating quite so much. So we're now going to economize on something else and so we're we're into this death spiral and we're now losing money so we have to put our prices up and off you go how could you do that positively well positively um i would say there might be we talked about menu structure you know there's a there's a there's a really neat way of dealing with menus where you can present um either you know imagine you present something in order of you can have version a b or c in terms of this price goes up goes up and everybody's going to choose the cheaper price or you can you can give it with the um the the full thing or say you take off this and take off this and it's cheaper cheaper people will tend to go for the more expensive thing there are all sorts of yeah choice architectures choice architectures which is yeah the technical term for it so you don't need to react by doing the obvious thing as i said price was the obvious thing but i think you're the greatest thing you've done in terms of small change to big problem if you looked again let's imagine we took out all the restaurant menus in soho for example where we are now put them on this table around here you know you that's the kind of this is kind of a rudimentary way of looking at a system that's okay right we're going to just put and i still think this is the best genius obviously the food's extraordinary i had the eight here last week but um is the lasio lasio yeah the region that is just you've just put one thing on the menu you've told a story with sorry yeah i mean there's a story there's a marzipan balls which i had um at the well there's two actually puddings one's called paladinono which means grandfather's balls right sounds nice that is lifted from a fabulous restaurant in rome right and so when when it's on the menu it says aroma yeah and um the the other one which is a another chocolate is a chocolate marzipan ball which is was made by an old lady in a sicilian village um and again that's taken from her recipe um for how to do that and that just and that says Sicilia yeah or Sicily and if you can write in English and they but they're authentic they they're not this stuff isn't made up and that's the other point about it that what's here is authentic it's not it's not okay there's a little bit of experimentation and you know maybe a little bit of poetic license taken but mostly you know the point is about Italian cuisine is regional it's not just spaghetti bolognese in the case spaghetti bolognese was invented in england it's a bit like chicken tikka masala um really yeah it's it's not it's not it's not um it's not italian at all what have you learned from being in italy about like the way they do business like i'm not being in italy but like having a house out there like oh how they do business well it's it's a lot about the relationships and the culture i mean we had a there was a where was your house sorry it's in tuscany um just about now south of siena there's a little village called monte chielo near us and there there's a lady who sadly passed away called daria who had um a restaurant called la porta um and we used to go there and and eat there a lot she died of cancer a couple ago very sad um but when she um it was it was i actually she actually talked wanted to talk to me about selling her restaurant so i actually i went over and went through her account she sent me her accounts i went through all the stuff then went over and had a chat with her about how to price the restaurant what a strategy ought to be what other things she would do and so on and i learned a couple of things one is actually restaurants in italian not necessarily particularly different to restaurants in london so you know the same principles apply um it sounds like play it again sam doesn't it um but the the the other thing was that there were um similar kind of social obligation ties that underpin things that if you get them right make the whole thing work with her suppliers and the way she dealt with um you know the local council and and all those kinds of things now they were different probably much more based around those that social and trust interaction and closed family kind of connections in italy than you would get in london but you know Pidilupo, for example, we operate on a principle of our suppliers.

2:21:02We pay them. We make sure they're paid on time. We have exceptional relationships with them. And that is actually quite an Italian way of doing business. You make sure that those people who are part of your network, you make sure they're okay. so in a sense i've learned i've learned a lot from the italians in that's wild yeah yeah which makes makes a great deal of sense whereas if you approach it from i know the not exactly anglo-saxon as the french would say but you know a more american transactional perspective it's not so good well i used to randomly i used to deliver cheese around london you know a man in a van like I finished uni, I was like, I don't know what I want to do.

2:21:48I was like, I'll just go and do this. Again, retrospectively, you can be clever with this, but it was very fortuitous because this was 2016, but I ended up spending 12 hours a day listening to podcasts. But I would drive, do you know Harvey and Brockless? They're cheese, they did cheese dairy. Oh yeah, no, I've heard of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you may have seen their vans. But one thing I did notice was in different types of restaurants, so when you go into an Italian restaurant, like in London, they're so warm to you. they're like do you want some do you want some um do you want a sausage do you want a exactly right do you want a coffee go and drop it into i won't say but it's off like and obviously the other thing again which is really interesting lesson as soon as you put on one of those yellow hivers jackets and you have a trolley people treat you like a piece of shit like and it and it's just it's just and it's just you realize like how how honestly yeah no no it's disgusting that is a general life lesson yeah i remember when i was when i before i before i went to university i was sponsored at university by what was called post office telecommunications and i did a year before university doing various things and i i went around with an engineer in the local area and i went to the ibm offices in richmond and the secretary there treated me like a piece of shit yes yeah yeah and i always remember that and i always remember that you you know that that you should never do that right everybody deserves respect and that italian thing where you get welcomed in and so on is part of that you know you're part of it comes from a you know we our society in in the united kingdom was largely destroyed by the industrial revolution how so Well, there's a chap called, not Laurie Lee, he's the character from Cider with Rosie.

2:23:40He wrote Cider with Rosie. Laurie, anyway, I'll remember the name in a second. But he wrote a book called The Way We Were. Now, the way that society used to be organised in England in particular, but elsewhere, was it was based around households. and the household would be the baker or would be knitting wool or would be doing these other active would be a farm or whatever it was but these households varied in size they didn't usually get bigger than about 40 or 50 but that's how we were organized and that's that's the that that was the social fabric thus revolution came along and people then became these individuals i mean they might be members of families but they were basically individuals they were atomized and made to work within a system that destroyed that particular kind of social fabric that kind of the village life or even in in towns i mean towns weren't very big in those days you know a few hundred thousand at most um where where they it was that's that that kind of collect not collective um that household system it wasn't collective yeah yeah household system worked and so what you then did was instead of having that kind of friendliness and give and take which was part of what the italians have managed to retain we destroyed it because we put everybody through this mincing machine that turned turned into the big factory towns in manchester or birmingham and because we destroyed their fabric because the industrial revolution we it started here way before we got it like not got it but like it happened in england or britain way before like the other rest of europe why was that why do we is it because we had access to coal or like because we essentially it was like the what what was why did we get it so much earlier lots of there's okay did that fund the empire as well there's an entire 12 volume book in itself right let's try to do it in 12 minutes but yeah yeah Is that what funded the empire, essentially?

2:25:46Or was that the empire before? Or did the empire fund the Industrial Revolution as well? Well, again, it's a complicated system. Let's go through how did the Industrial Revolution get going. Yeah. Okay, so let's go back to the Black Death. Right, what happened then? So we're back in the 1340s. Yeah. Okay, so... What happened then? Well, firstly, as a result of a combination of climate change and disease, we lost about 40 of our population wow that destroyed the feudal system feudal system being where your lord and master owned you you were basically an indentured servant um you were a slave you were a fucking right yeah yeah okay everything you produced was owned by him right and um you had no real agency you couldn't do anything so the whole was frozen a bit like egyptian civilization or anything else so we were frozen in this feudal system big catastrophe comes along 40 of the population gone people there's lots of spare land the land needs to be worked and so people have to start paying people to work the land so we're now making a transition to a cash economy yeah right yeah people can now develop specialist labor and now they can sell that labor and now you've got the beginnings of a breakaway from that feudal system into something that ends up with the Tudors being able to then construct a political system on top of that where there are guilds, where there are people working, doing specialist things.

2:27:24And by the time you get to the Stuarts, so we're back in, we're getting into the... Wait, what's the difference between the Tudors and the Stuarts? So Tudors are basically the 1500s. So that's Henry VIII. That's Henry VIII, yeah. Everybody knows Henry VIII. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, yeah, yeah. That's right. History for dummies over here, mate. But there's also, you know, this revolution keeps on rolling, right? So with Henry VIII, you get this change, breakaway from Rome. And, I mean, you know, Henry VIII can be seen as a kind of, as quite an autocrat and quite a revolutionary figure in destroying things.

2:28:01But it's kicked off because of this Black Death. but there's also the beginnings of beginnings of the idea of invention and i mean because there's a bit going on on the continent because there's a big big big picture thing here but they so you get the 1500s with the with the tudors and they begin to have to construct a political regime to be able to deal with this economy that's now developing one of the things will be sheep sheep are now being farmed and people are now being able to produce wool and weave and because of these specialist trades and they're now trading all of that and places in the united kingdom are becoming very rich because of the wool trade and you know you need a political system to be able to cope with all of that so that's that's all going on and then you you make this the the elizabeth comes along and we discover the new world and where you know all this stuff opens up and there's enormous amounts of cash flow floating in because the the the spaniards have gone off and done the armada this is the point of which you know towards the end of elizabeth's reign this is where aance in spain makes the first steam engine right and then what year is that that's 1603 1605 something like that yeah um and there's this flowering of inventiveness it's shakespeare it's all the Is that the Renaissance or is that Enlightenment?

2:29:26The Renaissance is before that. Right. Right? This is more into the Enlightenment. So I've read a book. Sorry, I'm really curious. We really are joking. We're all floating around. Yeah, yeah, but this is like, this is why, this worked perfect. Okay, so Renaissance is, that's in Italy, doesn't it? It happens in Italy. We're like, I remember there's some guy called Poggi or something. Well, so basically the 11, 1200s, we begin to get a change, mainly driven out of Venice, but also the rich city-states in places like Florence and so on. And patronage allows people to then have enough time to do really interesting things with works of art and also to start to experiment with bits of science.

2:30:09In fact, you know, if in a parallel universe, the University of Bologna turns out to be the most prestigious and advanced university in the world, but they they went through a period where they clamped down on ideas and they became more conventional wow which meant that places like cambridge and oxford became the centers of that rather than bologna um so there's there's and perspective is is a big thing that happens you know 1200s or so people start to realize that actually instead of having these flat pictures you now can actually draw perspective and optics become important about wasn't that what's Leonardo da Vinci was famous for right yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah da Vinci da Vinci is one of those you know just extraordinary figures about you know designing helicopters and bicycles as well as fucking I didn't know he did that oh yeah he designed a helicopter helicopter would never have flown it was a helix yes but his bicycle would have worked had he had the materials Had he had the materials for making that bicycle, because you need steel, proper steel for doing it, had he had the materials, he would have had a working bicycle.

2:31:25Wow. That goes back to our thing about timing. Yes, it's all about timing and what resources you have available. Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've got all this stuff flowering on the continent. And in the United Kingdom in particular, you've had this massive change. change and the development as i say of these trades you know people are now they're paid for their labor and it's a big change now you're paid for your labor you can save you can make your way up the social scale there's less hierarchy there's all sorts of stuff going on there's the development of things like the wool trade there's trade with it with um with this new these newfound lands that's going on.

2:32:09You know, people take tailing ships and they go across to Newfoundland and start bringing cod back. Wow. And you're getting fresh cod. I mean, the stories of the Newfoundland banks where you could literally put your hands in the water and pick up a fish. Not the case anymore, of course, because it'd been overfished. But, you know, that's what it used to be like. So there's this kind of big boost to the economy. and then in um in the 1600s people began to start to use they were already using coal in the 1500s but in the 1600s the the two things start to happen one is you you want to get coal out but you need to have a way of pumping water out of mines so you can do mining properly and that's where thomas newcomen comes in with his with his beam engine in the early 1700s before that the stewarts were the the there were experiments with steam engines to be able to make that work but by the time you're getting to the end of the 1600s beginning the 1700s there begins this kind of this self-reinforcing loop positive positive self-reinforcing loop which is that i can now extract energy from the ground yeah and i can then use it to build the technology that allows me to extract energy from the ground more efficiently yes right okay yeah so that is the beginning of that industrial revolution now what i can do is i can smelt iron i can now start to produce steel i can do all these other things that are going to be the foundation of everything else that's going to happen and in the mid 1700s thomas telford comes along well slightly earlier than that firstly there are the canals that start to blossom because you need to ship these goods around so we get these super highways these canals that can now transport goods long distance without very very cheaply compared to what you had to do before because then man-made those canals those man-made canals and there were networks of them all away and was that like was other the other countries have canals or like no not really not like we had the best system we we we were who came up with the canals um the guys who needed to haul coal into manchester there wasn't like a okay interesting it was it was all done by private by private raising of money yeah and to get the land you had to have acts of parliament but you know yeah yeah to do those kinds of things at the time so that's the way that worked so the canal canal start to blossom you can now transport these goods and now now that you can transport these goods you start to be able to build bigger cities and this is the beginnings of places like manchester and birmingham because you need people to come together to be able to get the scale to be able to take the opportunities from these new things and if you now go forward to um my you know the chapter of my book on the lunar society in 1765 that's the the the the the next stage in that process where you have enough industrialists and people who are engaged like Wedgwood in making pottery and building huge factories for making pottery, which is now enabled by the use of the coal that previously was inaccessible but can now be pumped.

2:35:27You can pump the water out and you can transport it with the canals and you can take these finished goods and you can transport them on the canals so you can get them out to these big centres of population. The whole thing is now beginning to go like this and really hum. And when James Watt comes along with his idea for an efficiency, for every 10 units of energy being put in, James Watt saved you eight or maybe nine. He was nearly getting on for… What did he invent? Well, the previous steam engine wasted a lot of heat. Right. James Watt's idea was to recycle that heat. With you. And reuse it.

2:36:10Yeah. Right? Yeah. And then he also had another thing which we called a governor, which basically spun around. And if it went too fast, it closed the valve. And as it went slower again, it opened the valve so you could do something at a constant speed. Wow. Yes. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That enabled a whole series of other things, you know, big expansion in the ability to make stuff. And Birmingham, in particular, became this kind of workshop of the world. and we started to then export manufactured goods out to this empire that was now growing right and so we were then able to sell stuff out to people and get stuff back so we were getting um and we we imported things like indian cotton or cotton from the southern united states which happens in the early 1800s to be able to then fuel our industries which were now burning coal right to be able to make them work and that takes us into the early 1800s and at that point you are really into the industrial revolution yeah and but to put it into perspective even by 1760 when thomas telford was building his first iron bridge there's an iron bridge in near telford and if you haven't seen it you should go and walk across it because the first iron bridge in the world and just up the road in shrewsbury is the first iron framed building which which then led to every skyscraper in new york right fuck off sorry but like what so that's in telford sorry that's in shrewsbury shrewsbury in shrewsbury there is the first skyscraper or it looks like yeah it was the first building i think it's eight stories high and you could not build more than six stories with brick but because you've got an iron frame building you could build eight stories and then that led to manhattan and that's directly that was directly because of that building you now have manhattan that's so wild that is so wild this guy this guy um again i'm just like almost in a global perspective understanding how serendipity and systems work that's what we're getting really into now what so yeah so let's let's pick up on that yeah so for example priestly who was a member of the lunar society yeah when the riots happened which were called the priestly riots which was the rights about that they were basically these people in the lunar society have these dangerous scientific ideas we are solid british people we do not like these new ideas they are somehow interfering with our culture and the way in which we like our society to be organized and there was a riot to destroy them wow okay yeah and it was largely driven by fear of the french revolution so it's happened in 1793 french revolution 1789 yeah so i've read about napoleon quite a bit but napoleon comes napoleon comes to power about that time about 1793 right yeah yeah he comes in as the kind of great general who's going to solve everything yeah and sort out everything so he takes over in france yeah yeah yeah right that's interesting about systems as well isn't it like how he overtook that well because the you know french revolution happened there were a bunch of psychopaths who then took over they started executing everybody and it really got very nasty what was that called that was like the well there was a thing called the committee of public safety yeah um which was you know like all these political names you know it's it's like the democratic people's republican career you know it's not really is it's yeah but i swear like napoleon he looked at the system again to what we're talking about he looked at the system and understood that he could basically manoeuvre his way up.

2:39:53Yeah, that's right. And he did that. Let's quickly wrap it up then. David, you've got to run. It's one of those ones where you forget how quick... I didn't even look at the thing. I was like, fuck me, we've been going for almost three hours. Yes, I know. But it kind of just goes, flows. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just quickly, I don't know how we sort of end this. We've got five minutes. But if we could wrap up what we're talking about, the worldview of systems. okay so um look the writing my book about serendipity doesn't end by accident this is is has kind of codified for me made me think through and then be able to write explicitly what i've observed and why it happens it and it happens because of these networks that connect people yeah and the way in which you have this interaction between chance these networks and the prepared mind you've got to you've got to be interested in people you've got to be curious you've got to have a prepared mind to be able to take those opportunities and how they work so that's that's essentially the the the the point of the book and and it's explored in in a lot of different ways in historical context and i try and look at it in terms of how technology affects that how it works in organizations what it means for how politics work and how we govern ourselves and so on.

2:41:14But the bit that I want to do next is about systems, because I think there are some really interesting things to talk about about systems and try and explain why systems behave in ways that you are not expecting and why simple answers to complex problems really don't work. Now, I started off on thinking about that by walking past a friend's computer where he was looking at a lorry load of sparrows and i asked him what he was doing he said well the the chinese communist government decided that the birds were eating all the plants so they eliminated all the small birds and then that allowed the insect population to burst explode and then that did far more damage to the crops than the birds had ever done so they then had to import sparrows from russia to repopulate wow right and i think that's probably going to be the beginning of my book on systems yeah which will be just how does this stuff operate yeah i think just to wrap up i think what from today is tons learning about business but ultimately even no matter how hard it is right now if you're restauranteur uh i've got a restaurant business no matter how hard it is if you've got a brand ultimately in london we are so lucky like we've got one of the best systems in the world we've got the best restaurants you've got this idea of coop coopertition where people are cooperating the uk supermarket system grocery system is the best in the world you know if you go to australia it's a duopoly between coles and walworth here you don't get into asda you knock on morrison's door don't get to morrison's you knock on sainsbury's door our system is the best um and i think actually being grateful like as as what i've taken from this i actually hear as much as people complain about our sad little wet island it's actually pretty fucking good yeah yeah it is really good and and and and i know you know there's a trend against the use of the word diversity but diversity here is really important diversity is important in ecological systems because it makes them robust diversity in what we've got here makes it robust we have a lot of different kinds of restaurants we have a lot of different kinds of people we have a a lot of ways of sharing that information we have an open collaborative attitude to doing things which actually then enables us to share information and do things better and as a result i think the whole the whole if i could call it an ecosystem in that sense is a lot richer it's a lot more interesting and it's a lot better than some other places that i've been in the world where as you say either you you know you have monopoly systems or that, you know, you have large, the whole thing is dominated by large chains.

2:44:04And those large chains are a bit like turning up to your garden pond and finding it's covered with algae. You know, it's not, nothing is going to live in that. I mean, it's just awful. What you want is you want variety. And you want, and we have that, particularly in places like London or Manchester now, you know, you have got that variety. And let's celebrate it. Let's network together. You know, as I say in my book, the good things happen with serendipity because because of those networks that you enable the chance things to happen you network together and you have the prepared mind you know you've got the right attitude about recognizing things when they when when the opportunity comes along absolute pleasure david thank you so that's right thank you so so much for listening to the podcast i really really do appreciate it if 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