Graham Ruddick | The Future of Risking it All

0:00This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more.

0:42Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Welcome back to Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. I hope you've been having a great summer. Today's guest is Graham Ruddick. Now, Graham used to be deputy business editor at The Times. And when I first left number 10, I used to write quite a bit in The Times business pages about different ideas, partly as I was exploring what I was going to do next.

1:19And whenever Graham was kind of on the desk, I would sort of write three different ideas I got in my head. And he would always pick the one that was the sort of most different. So I sort of wrote about the rise of coaching and all these different types of things that you might not traditionally see as much of in Times Business pages. So it wasn't a huge surprise to me when he decided to go and launch his own thing, which was a very bold step. He launched the Off to Lunch Substack, which was a brilliant email newsletter that arrived in your inbox in late morning. So not competing with all the early morning business and political ones that have been often out there and he uh he he scaled this quite a lot and did really well with it um but then he was actually brought out by previous guest richard harpin as part of the ever-growing business leader empire so it was really interesting to get graham on to talk about his book that he's written alongside doing all these things as well called risk roulette which looks at the different and i've got a copy of it here actually you can see it here for those watching on spotify um and it analyzes lots of different business decisions lots of different business stories uh there were some great things in there that i didn't know before my kind of professional career about various fights between british airways and easy jet and so on so it's a uh it's a cracking read and it was great to sit down with graham and talk all about risk and how we often kind of miscalculate it and misperceive what risk really is as well so it was a really good chat and we even talked touched quite a lot on sport as well so in one of my favorite episodes of where we touched on four or five of the key jimmy's jobs topics so i hope you enjoy listening as much as i did recording it with grem make sure you subscribe so we can continue to get bigger and bigger guests

3:18Graham welcome to Jimmy's Jobs for the Future. Thank you very much Jimmy. This is the return match because I appeared on your podcast well many moons ago. You were one of the first guests. Let's guess well back in the archive we've probably both improved quite a bit since then. You have just recently written this book Risk Roulette which I found a fascinating book the surprising reasons why some businesses work and others fail. And it's like a collection of stories. One of my thoughts at the end of it was that actually, if somebody wants to understand British business over the last 40 years, they could do very well to kind of sit and read this book.

3:54Because there were, you know, I appreciate I'm pretty target market for it, but there were a lot of things that I actually learned in it as well, so that found really interesting. Why did you decide to kind of write the book? I've never been anyone who really wanted to write a book. I was a big believer in that Christopher Hitchens quote of, there's a good book in every journalist and that's exactly where it should stay. But I felt compelled to write it because this topic kept coming up all the time, risk. This was like a common thread that would emerge through conversations with entrepreneurs and CEOs, how they thought about risk.

4:32It was also a common thread that came up in terms of the UK and US. the US attitude to risk is way different to the UK. And it was just something coming up so often, and the stories were so interesting. I felt compelled to write it. And I subsequently learned that that's actually how a lot of first-time authors end up writing a book. There's this thing there that they feel like they've got to write about, and that's exactly what it was like with that, because there was this narrative out there about risk that people in the UK don't understand it and don't take risks. And speaking to all these entrepreneurs and CEOs, it just became very apparent to me that just was not the case at all.

5:08But why do you think the US is seen as more having greater risk appetite than the UK? It's a great question. I think it's got a lot to do with the fact that businesses have succeeded there. So you look at Amazon, Google, Apple, obviously all the tech giants, and touch on this in the book is that you see a different sort of risk aversion in the US. effectively comes across as FOMO. But FOMO is a type of risk aversion. It is literally the fear of missing out. It's taking a risk that by not doing something, you will miss out. And fund managers in the US don't back, are afraid of missing out on the next Apple and Google, so they're much more likely to pile in.

5:53And then this creates this virtual cycle of money and capital and investment that creates more tech businesses. So you see it, I'll give you an example. There's a story in the book about Babylon, the virtual GP business. Very promising business. Ali Pasa, the founder, said he would rather float in the US because they had a better appetite to risk. It was more likely to get back to the startup. And he did indeed raise a lot of money. But then within a couple of years, the business is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and it all unravels. and you see that story replicated in in many different ways and things i think in the u.s are also more open so they talk about success and talk about failure more in the uk we don't but if you go looking hard enough in the uk there's plenty of people who understand risk and are prepared to take it um what are your favorite stories from the book that is a great question um i would pick out simon aurora of bnm as one story so one of the things i found fascinating about simon's story with bnm is his view of risk and being quite risk averse actually so he built bnm with his brothers into one of the biggest retail groups in the uk for those who don't know the story they bought bnm for about 521 000 pounds when it was 21 shops in northwest england 20 years later by the time simon stood down as ceo it was worth more than five billion pounds he had a bigger market value than mark spencer's it's an incredible story of entrepreneurship and building a business out but what's really interesting talking to simon is how he was so protective of what he saw as bnm's secret sauce and he was risk averse in the sense of they never took the business online they wouldn't advertise and the reason they wouldn't do that is he was so concerned that by doing that it would spoil what made B &M what B &M was.

7:55So for example on advertising he explains very eloquently when I spoke to him about how well advertising costs money and if that money eats into our margins and that eating into our margins means we can't charge the prices in shops that we can't and we would rather have the cheap prices than get word mouth from consumers and he was so protective over what made B &M B &M that he wouldn't take the risks of online, wouldn't take the risks of advertising. It's just this idea of risk manifests itself in many different ways and how people think about it. Two of the bits of the Simon story that stuck with me where it's sort of counterintuitive thinking is that he takes over a business as you say for five hundred and twenty thousand.

8:38So often we kind of lionised the entrepreneur in the back bedroom, in the garage, kind of doing this. And it's like, yes, that's true. And that happens a lot. But actually, there are different ways of doing it as well. Also, the fact, and I hadn't realised this until I read the book, that he doesn't want to own it for generations and generations, actually. Like it's a lot of the family are involved. He saw his family involved with business and doesn't want to kind of run it in that way also the fact his father died when he was young as well which is often like a factor that comes up like i've had simon squib and john cordwell sit in that chair over the last couple of weeks and both of their dads died when they were young and i just think it's a really kind of common factor yeah i don't think he says he said before you can either go two ways you can either think that you can't control anything in life or you try and control everything and with him it manifested into what he describes as a healthy paranoia wanting to be in control and thinking about risk in the way that he would think about it.

9:43Yeah someone like Simon Aurora doesn't have kind of that higher name recognition across the UK at all right? No. It's not a household name. And these people don't seek it. Yeah. It's really interesting we put together a business leader a list of the top people who built businesses in the UK in terms of more than a billion pounds and more than half the people on that list have barely ever done an interview you've got no media profile yeah it's not accidental not accidental I think for two reasons one they're very concerned about that any backlash they would get for themselves and also for their family the family is a big one they don't want their family to get caught up in this web but secondly I'm linked to what we're talking about they do think about it in terms of risk this is you know one of the things i really dig into in the book is thinking about upsides and downsides and for them they look at that equation it's like what's the upside doing any media really it's like one nice headline what's the downside well actually the downside actually is that it could unravel the whole business as the gerald ratner story in the book indicates like if you say something controversial about your business that gets picked up in a certain way you could potentially unravel your entire business so So it's not accidental that they keep a low profile.

10:58Tell us the Ratner story, because it's fascinating. Of course, I used to be the Institute of Directors as well, so that annual conference brings back a lot of memories. But also, do you think that could happen in the same way now that it became a kind of mainstream sort of story and so on? Explain to us what happened. It's a great, great, great question. So for those who don't know the story, Basically, Gerald Ratner gave an interview in the early 1990s at the Institute of Directors Summit, and he said that the jewelry that the company was selling was crap. He made it as a joke, and he meant it as a positive spin on what the company was doing, because it was cheap and good value for money.

11:43But it wasn't taken that way, and the next day, he was on the front pages of The Sun, The Daily Mirror, and the story spiraled from there. What's interesting about the story talking to him now is actually there was a lot of other things going on. So this was the early 1990s. The company had a lot of debt and it was potentially heading for trouble. It was the largest jewellery brand in the UK, certainly I think even beyond the UK at that time. I think even globally it was right up there. And it had done incredibly well, but it had issues. and so he looks back now and thinks this was just part of a wider problem.

12:24Could it happen today? I think absolutely it could. I think it's more likely to happen today because of social media and because stories can happen so much quicker and it could really spiral. But would it have the same sort of... So I agree with the social media point but then I just thought there's so much of that kind of stuff that happens now like whether it would be so cataclysmic to the business as in in terms of like it literally finished it overnight virtually like would something like that would definitely have the potential to have that i sometimes think of some of the stories that get written about various entrepreneurs at the moment in the press and so on like it's they aren't quite as long lasting now because there's just so much noise out there one one sort of current example i would guess is tesla and Elon Musk and you look at Elon Musk's standing and what that has done to Tesla sales.

13:21You've got people driving around in Tesla cars saying, I bought this car before Elon went mad. And I think it can only happen in a consumer brand because it has to get people with affecting spending decisions. It can only happen where a certain individual is really tightly associated with the business. And I think it can only really happen in a sort of semi-luxury business where part of the appeal is the brand and the pricing of the brand is linked to quality, but also in jewellery, it's also about the perception of quality. And I think all those things came together with that story. So I do think it could happen again, but it's a very certain sector.

14:05But I think what did happen that day at the IOD with that speech really has affected CEOs to this day. I mean, the Ratna moment is still a phrase that's, doing a Ratna is still a phrase that's used, and CEOs are petrified of something like that happening. Yeah, that is true. And it comes back to one of my main theses, which business, as a result, is getting a little bit more boring. And alongside this now, you've seen this huge kind of growth of the professional communications industry, and it just means that a lot of the sort of personalities gets chiselled from people a little bit, which people like us that want to write stories about business people is not so good.

14:49Can you tell us about the entrepreneur who uses skydiving as a way to relax? Welcome to the Engine Room here at Jimmy's Jobs of the Future. Now, you may well know that we are powered by Octopus Energy here. But I have now taken a delivery of an electric vehicle from Octopus Energy, which not many people realize that they do. But it's been amazing. It's been transformational. It's so quiet. It's so easy to charge. I've been quite impressed by it, and I'm going to be telling you a lot more about it in the upcoming weeks. But if you want to find out the latest deals that they've got on Octopus vehicles, but also heat pumps and solar panels and all these amazing new products that they're doing, you can check out the link below or email jimmy at octopus dot energy you know we're huge fans of them here we interviewed greg jackson for our 200th episode and about the 11 000 jobs they'd created in the uk so it's definitely worth checking out back to the episodes quite a lot of them do so uh this is is clara milia who's who talk about in the book who runs a business called Equitory which does um investor relations basically and I met Clara at dinner and then she came on the podcast I was just fascinated by this point about skydiving because it was part of a broader story which was the way she thought about it and it was that actually you know there's it's not that risky at all and then when I was talking to her about something her husband did he did a different type of skydiving and she was like I would never do that because it's far too risky um but it was part of this sort of calculation in her mind and you see it in other entrepreneurs about how risky something actually is may not actually be that risky so she she knows the numbers of i can't remember the exact numbers but she knows the numbers off the top of her head about what the risk of a parachute not opening is and then what the risk of a second parachute not opening is because she will always dive with two parachutes and in her mind it was just a it was just a tiny risk and the upside of skydiving and enjoying it was was so much higher and i think in that chapter in the book i was talking about mark zuckerberg doing mma and you know meta has considered that such a risk that they actually put it as one of the company's risks in meta's annual report that this founder and ceo does extreme sports that could cause a risk to his health but they um they don't see it that way and it's interesting as an aside one of the reasons they don't see it that way is how valuable they see that time to switch off this is something that actually oliver bertman talks about as well in his books about time management that actually you do things like extreme sports or things like that what it allows you to do is forces you to switch off from work and by forcing yourself to switch off from work that way you become far more productive in in the long run it's yeah i find that um fascinating like way of approaching things but can totally see why why it works people and there is also an element of kind of addiction to risk perhaps in terms of that and they need it in lots of different aspects of their life but tell us you sort of summarize at the end like what it what is risk perhaps we should have started with this really but like what are sort of three components that you see it as?

18:11So I see an understanding of risk in people manifests across three key ways really. One is understanding the context they're in. Secondly it's the mindset and what they're trying to achieve and then thirdly an important one is actually having the information available to you to actually make a decision based on what the upsides and downsides are. What's fascinating about risk is that humans, this is based on research by people far smarter than me like daniel cayman humans are inherently bad at understanding risk we tend to underestimate the long-term benefits and overestimate the short-term risks and therefore that means that we can sometimes not take risks that we really should um and so when you look at people who've taken risks one of the things that immediately stands out is how they think of things over a longer period of time.

19:09So if you take someone like Jeff Bezos, there's a story in the book about the decision he made to start Amazon. And he told his boss, he was working in Wall Street at the time, and he told his boss he wanted to leave his job to set up an online retailer. This was like 1994, so the internet was just a figment of most people's imagination at this point. And his boss told him, that's a great idea, but why shouldn't someone without a job should do that? Because you've got a great job, why would you sort of risk losing that job to go and do this and he went away Jeff Bezos went away to think about this and he he subsequently come up with what he describes as the risk minimization framework as a way to get you to think about risk more broadly and that is to think about what you would basically to think about what you would regret on your deathbed when you're 80 years old and when he looked at it that way he was in no doubt that he would regret not starting Amazon and therefore he completely turned the risks on the head the risk to him was not leaving his job the risk to him was that he'd be on his deathbed at 80 years old and he would have regretted not doing something what's also interesting about risk we touched this with about people's losing a parent is when something has happened to you that is the worst thing in the world or at least feels like the worst thing in the world at the time that changes how you think about risk because once the worst thing has ever happened to you then you know you know So it's A happened and B, and he's still around.

20:38So talk about Tom B and Evcastor, who you've had on the podcast as well. Tom is so great and such a great sort of storyteller in terms of building the business. And he obviously wanted to be a professional footballer. That was his dream when he was younger, and particularly at Trammeer, where he was on the books. And he remembers in his early 20s being told that he wasn't going to make it and they were going to let him go. and as he said, how powerful it was that the worst thing in his mind as a young 20-something, that was the worst thing that could happen to him. But then for that to happen, the next day the sun still rises and you're still there and you're still okay.

21:13That can be, if you take it in a certain way, incredibly empowering. And therefore, once that had happened, actually the risk that you start a business and it doesn't go very well is nothing because the worst thing in the world has already happened to you. Yeah, it's funny. When I read that story in that context, I had a similar kind of like moment of where, you know, working number 10 was like an amazing privilege. Not something I'd always wanted to do, but doing the business and politics job was like a real, yeah, like it was a dream job. And then of course we had a 2017 general election, which was just a, you know, complete disaster on so many levels with the Conservatives losing the majority and so on, which was not what we'd been expecting.

21:57and I remember on the night at about sort of midnight it was looking like it could be even worse than it actually ended up sort of being and I just remember having a conversation with my now wife which was just like I think there's a good chance I could lose my job here in the next kind of week and in the end that didn't happen and actually was given a bit more trust and my role kind of grew and we did another two years in Downing Street that was fascinating but I did have a similar thing in my head actually of that there was quite a moment of where it was like what looked like it was basically all over um and then once that's happened it's there's an element of it being sort of a little bit kind of freeing and so on yeah um what do you think one of the interesting things i thought was what you said about the context of money and it's one of the things i've sort of thought about in this podcast is those with money are more likely to start a business and it's a bit of a theory I have that basically we have a dearth of middle class entrepreneurs so the upper classes perhaps one of a better phrase like have the money to be able to do it and the working classes again perhaps a bit of an outdated phrase are able to take lots of risk because they're they don't have anything to lose as well so it's a kind of interesting sort of thing of where there is like no middle class entrepreneurialism um yeah i just wonder what you're i think it's a great point i think that almost is you've nailed it in terms of context the context is have you got anything to lose and you kind of will have something to lose if you've got a family you've got a mortgage you've got a highly paid job you don't have any of those things and the context you use completely different and also you can frame the context in whichever way you want so the jeff bezos example of regret minimization framework sometimes these people change the context so much that they just see the risks in a completely different way but I it's an untold and unsaid part of business exactly what you just said which is the truth is a lot of businesses exist frankly because people had wealthy parents or they were from a wealthy background and therefore they kind of had nothing to lose and I do think that one of the key reasons why a business succeeds is that it was kept going long enough to be successful.

24:17And that's either because you had money to keep it going or because you were so incredibly determined and you could see the end goal and you really believed in what you were doing that it was successful. Will Shewitt Deliveroo talks about this a little bit that you've got to have, to succeed a business, you've got to have this bizarre mix of determination and resilience, but also naivety. Yeah. because naivety and optimism, because if you actually looked at the realistic situation in front of you, sometimes you would just not carry on going. And it sort of takes a unique mix of attributes. It's a big piece to be able to kind of do that.

24:58Yeah. And it's funny because some of those things I think are so entrepreneurial cliché, but it's only when you've kind of lived and breathed it that you sort of get it. I remember sort of starting out on the journey of people saying, oh, you have to get used to hearing no, and whatever and it didn't sort of like it didn't compute at the time and like now it's like yeah you hear that like all the time but let's talk a little bit about your own entrepreneurial journey as well because actually you took the kind of leap out of the mainstream media deputy business editor of the times where i used to do some occasional writing and you would always make me write about the hardest and most interesting thing like i should explain this like for context I was writing the occasional kind of comment piece and so on in the business pages and I would send three ideas through to you and Richard or something and you'd be in charge of the desk or whatever and it was always the third one that was like the least well thought out but perhaps the most interesting and you would be like, come back and write on that one which, yeah, it was good.

26:02But then you sort of leave from doing that to sort of start your own kind of media venture. It's one of the reasons I wrote about the book is sort of personal experience from that kind of led me down this path of thinking about risk in a slightly different way. Because when I did that and left the Times to set up my own newsletter and podcast, one of the things I kept hearing was people saying, what a crazy risk, why have you done that? And I just did, first of all, I was looking at people thinking, crikey, you're way more talented than me and you're saying that to me. It's like, why? Like if I was you, I'd be doing the same thing.

26:34But I didn't see it that way. I saw it very much in the, what I realise now in that Jeff Bezos sort of frame of mind, which was I would regret not doing it. And if it all went wrong, then I would figure something out and go and try and get another job. But there would be options, right? You'd hope there'd be options. That's kind of the way I saw it. But fundamentally, it was about I will regret this if I don't do it, because I strongly believe, still do, that there's the way we consume and enjoy media and information is changing dramatically and it's never been a better time to be in the media industry often doesn't feel that way but it is we're living in a time when it is cheaper and easier to distribute information I mean as than ever before and then AI is coming in behind that now and basically is offering a way to consume knowledge more effectively and efficiently than ever before so what's that meant is that competition is fierce than ever before but it's an incredible time to be to be in the media industry and to an incredible time frankly to go and start your own business there's loads of people doing fascinating stuff at the moment in the media world that i really admire like the guys doing the local business stuff yes um whether in london or manchester or across the country and there's just so much it's it's so much great content to read and enjoy could you as a sort of proper media professional define what the media is

28:15it's changed quite a lot hasn't it so one of the so i've just finished reading um peter theel's book zero to one i want to reread it again for various different reasons and i left that book with a really interesting thought about the media industry. He talks very much about how zero to one is basically all about creating great businesses. And in his mind, a great business is a business that can create a monopoly that's so good it can dominate a market because it can't be copied effectively. And he talks about a great business needing to have great product and great distribution. And I think this is a really interesting one for the media industry because I think you have the traditional newspapers and the traditional media which are a great product really like honestly they are great incredible products like the smartest people i've ever worked with the amount of work that goes into putting a daily paper no what you think about the different brands the amount of work and thought and quality that goes into those products is incredible but then the great distribution part of that equation you need a great product great distribution to create a great business i I don't think a lot of media organizations right now have great distribution.

29:27The reason being is that they're finding it harder to reach modern audiences because a print product inherently doesn't reach a young consumer as well as it did. I think they're consuming news in different ways. And that has left this gap for a different realm of media, which is content creators. It's broadly called content creators, whether they exist on social media or YouTube or somewhere else, who are great at distribution. They have looked at YouTube, looked at LinkedIn, looked at Twitter, and they know, call them salesmen, whatever. Great distribution maybe ultimately is about to have been great salesmen.

30:02But there is a new part of the industry that is just great at distribution. And they are now loud and they are now present. And some of it is great product, but quite frankly, a lot of it is rubbish, really rubbish. But they're great at distribution. and so I think for the traditional mainstream media that's had its challenges there's so much that can be learned from that other part of the media reorganization so much that can be learned about distribution I mean it's interesting now a lot of them are trying to do more sort of video stuff like the times comes up on my Instagram feed a lot more than it ever did now as they're trying to do some more of that it's funny still not many of them are doing LinkedIn right which which I find kind of slightly bizarre because I think that's probably like one of the biggest opportunities that's out there.

30:51Who else do you think is building great sort of media or perhaps media-adjacent businesses? Look to the US a lot. I really look to the US and a lot of people like Ankler, who do some really interesting stuff in terms of Hollywood, POC, do some really interesting stuff. I love the Acquired podcast in the US. Yeah. and a lot of these are about the same thing it's about depth of knowledge and about building communities and the information and the content is just a start it's then offers it up into create a community and you've got events alongside it you've got it's personality driven stuff yeah i'm really interested about by that i'm looking at the ai world really interested in what perplexity is doing um and how that's offering a different way to consume media and i'm just back from the and honestly kind of blown away by where they are in terms of AI and in terms of people using perplexity, people using chat GPT and it's like we're kind of we're there now in terms of people who have taken it fully into their lives and it is going to very quickly change in front of us I think.

32:02What are people using perplexity for in particular? To get news. Yeah. I'm really being taken aback by the number of people I now speak to who go to perplexity for their news. Don't use Google anymore. If they want to search for information, they'll go to Flexity. I couldn't tell you the exact numbers off the top of my head in terms of usage, but it's more people by the day, obviously. And for those who haven't had a go, I would recommend trying it. This is all very controversial, obviously, because there's questions about copyright, there's questions about fair usage. I think a lot of those questions are still to be settled but for people who are interested in in the very least the debate and what's going on go and have a look at what these businesses are doing so when you went and set up your sub stack you called it off to lunch why was the theory behind that to similar kind of reasons to what I've just said we're trying correct community a feeling a brand and also because I've business news is about more than just business and to sort of narrowly define it as just business I think does actually a disservice to business using coverage.

33:14I wanted to be a sports journalist originally. The reason I ended up in business is that I was lucky enough to get on the graduate scheme at the Daily Telegraph. My first placement was on the City Desk and when I started I was like I really don't want to do this. Get me on the sports desk. But honestly from day one I loved it and the reason being was the stories. The stories of success the stories of failure the people the ups and downs and also the transparency and visibility of success and failure because you could see it through company results you could see it through share prices and those stories i think at the very essence of what business and business journalism is all about and then these things define the world around us literally whether it's the products um that we use every day apple phone or whether it's a state of the economy whether it's the homes we live in i think to just narrowly define it as just business i think did it a disservice so i wanted to broaden it out but also to give it a personality and feel so i i agree with all that but why therefore does the business pages you know start at page 40 in most of our national press a lot of the best stories go forward so to the news pages so uh at the times we would very regularly push business stories to the front of the paper into the news section.

34:33Quite often, there'd be stories of success. This is one of the things that I think people get wrong about the UK. I think people in the UK are interested in success stories. I just don't think it's true that they're not interested. We would see it in the time fairly regularly. If we had a story about an entrepreneur building and selling a business who'd grown up on a council estate or something, quite often we'd put that on page three of the paper and the readers would love it. It'd be one of the best read stories in the paper. So I don't believe that people don't like success stories in the UK.

34:59It's just not true. People actually more broadly just love stories and they are well and truly interested in finding out how someone went from zero to nothing. Do you think when you, so we should, for context, I've talked about this before on the podcast, you ran off to lunch for a few years and then it was acquired by Richard Harpin and business leader, etc. What was your sort of reflections on those few years that you did that in terms of, do you think there's a real market for the UK and Substack media? Yes, still do massively. I think Substack, when I started, almost saw itself as like a home to columnists, you see what I mean?

35:48So this was, I launched the newsletter on Substack in early 2022 it was. And at that stage, it was like seen as a home for columnists and people to do certain niche products. Now I think it's one of the greatest ever distribution tools that's been created for media businesses. and you will see media businesses, new media businesses emerge on Substack because of how easy it is to use and how easy it is to distribute your product to lots of different people. You think they've got payment things built into there as well. Since I launched, they've introduced video, audio, a whole different range of things.

36:27You basically, anybody tomorrow could launch a full-scale media business on that platform, which is incredible. You don't seem as sure. No, I don't. So my thing on it is that there is an element, a British problem with it potentially, in the sense of the BBC ends up squeezing out a lot of independent creators. And I'll get a load of messages from various BBC people when I say that, sort of getting very fidgety about and kind of worried that I'm saying that, but I feel it. and also that because we don't have a tipping culture in the UK there isn't as much people used to sort of paying somebody a fiver for their kind of news and whatever.

37:14So that's why I wonder whether the UK is going to particularly kind of struggle with it. You have to give people a reason to pay for something. I think one of the things I've learned very much over the last few years is a great product is not enough. nowhere near enough you've got to not just have a distribution channel but really carefully think about how are you going to distribute and how are you going to connect and engage it's it's a huge part of the story it's a huge part of the story for the media industry and i think it's part going back to the point about the peter field book i think it is a key challenge for media it's a great product is just not enough it's just not enough and there are people out there who know this, understand this and a great distribution and you've got to get it right.

38:00You've got to not just figure out where to distribute but how to distribute and how to connect with people. I'm hoping I've got Hamish McKenzie coming on the podcast, founder of Substack. What should I ask him? What tools they're working on for the future, who they see as their main rivals, because I think that gives you a really interesting insight into how they're thinking as a business because you've got other newsletter platforms like Beehive and Ghost, which are offering slightly different products, but I'd be interested to know if he thinks like that way or he says something like the BBC.

38:34I saw an interesting story this week, for example, that in the UK, Substack has now overtaken CNN as a source of information. Which isn't entirely surprising because CNN is not massive in the UK, but it's just an interesting insight into where it is. But I'd be really interested to know what tools they're looking at developing and whether he's still against the idea of bundling up subscriptions. Yeah. Because obviously there's now hundreds in the UK alone, thousands of different media organisations now on Substack. Is there some sort of bundling offer that they could do? But isn't that where you just basically end up back at the newspaper?

39:09I mean, that's like, yeah, because I often used to think about this in terms of like, you know, you were doing it and if Danny Finkelstein and Henry Winter or whatever all went off and did this, you know, would I sort of buy a collective? and I was like, well, before long, you're basically at another time. You end up with a newspaper. What tools do you think, and I suppose this is a way of asking you, where do you think the future is heading with kind of like media creation? It's all about AI, right? I mean, ultimately, that's what that question is about. And using the tools, it's difficult to imagine looking forward that the traditional written story continues to exist as the main way to consume information.