Rory Sutherland | The Future of Marketing

29:37Half pints. But one of them, actually, both of them drink Guinness. One of them is a very loyal Guinness drinker, and it's my greatest achievement as a parent, that they drink beer. And I've got three daughters, all under five. Well, we've just got early. There's alcohol-free Guinness now, OK? It's never too early. Well, I just, yeah, I think I'm going to have so many big bar bills. But I just didn't want to be buying... There are certain drinks that I just find irritating, rosé and prosecco yeah i just every time you're asked for one there's a little bit of your brain which is oh for fuck's sake you know and so the fact that both both my daughters are beer drinkers and and especially guinness drinkers is a point of pride for me as a father because i don't have to do that kind of i mean they will drink rosé annoyingly um but nonetheless the fact that they're you know they're quite large by the way uh you know a small discursion on the sudden surge which I think is an interesting match of marketing and technology, the sudden explosion in alcohol-free beers, is fascinating.

30:42I was on a podcast called Cleaning Up with Mike Lieber a few weeks ago, and he made the brilliant point, which is that the profusion of acceptable non-alcoholic drinks in pubs is the kind of thing which government would have fantasized about from a public health perspective and a motoring safety perspective, okay? and yet it seems to have happened entirely spontaneously without any government encouragement or intervention, unless you maybe include the tax system, which makes them very lucrative. Yeah. OK. But what was interesting, talking to the people at Lucky Saint, they think that a large part of the reason for the success was that everybody before Lucky Saint had sold alcohol-free beer as, wow, it's alcohol-free and it's beer.

31:27And they said, this is a great beer, and by the way, it's got no alcohol. Yeah, yeah. And they thought that actually the relative framing of how they framed the alcohol-freeness of that beer was decisive in their success. And that's what they were doing. Quite often, you have... I doubt it, the alcohol-free beer is better. I mean, Guinness Zero is indistinguishable, I would argue, from mainstream Guinness. And I would argue psychologically delivers some of the conviviality of beer drinking simply... Because there's a weird phenomenon among alcoholics, which is called dry drunk, isn't it? Yeah.

32:02That effectively, if you give alcoholics a drink they think is alcoholic, which isn't, they will basically still act drunk. And I think drinking alcohol-free Guinness, I'm getting, by mental association, by my brain's predictive mechanism, I'm getting some of the conviviality without the incapacity. Yeah. Which I think is actually a psychological mind trick, which is really interesting. When did you first become really interested in behavioural science? Like, when was that? Because it is an industry that's become much bigger in the 21st century than before. Well, the epiphany was working in direct marketing.

32:38Actually, it was probably before that. My father ran a small business. The great thing about growing up in a small business, whether it's a shop or a cafe or a restaurant, if you've got a family business, it's like a free MBA. Yeah. Okay? And so you automatically start to notice. And the entrepreneurial mindset is... The bureaucratic mindset hates outliers and surprising information because it messes with their mental model. And they react to counter... What you might call counterintuitive information with hostility, just as the original behavioural economists were shunned by the mainstream economists because it was viewed to be messing with the neatness of their own artificial model.

33:21the entrepreneurial mindset is absolutely opposite if it notices anything weird it looks for an arbitrage opportunity yeah okay and the governmental bureaucratic mindset is i must maintain consistency so that i can avoid blame for my decisions by preserving fidelity to the model which i use to justify my own activities to create a spurious veneer of rationality around everything i do with the ultimate aim of avoiding blame and responsibility. Yeah. The entrepreneurial mindset is what the fuck's going on there? Hold on, if I know this and nobody else does, there's a market opportunity here. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

34:02Fundamentally, they're two absolutely opposing mindsets in the way... The detective mindset is, well, that was weird. Someone drove a van through, you know, past the house three times in the same evening. There might be an innocent explanation, but let's have a little bit of a looky-loo, okay? The legalistic mindset is that is irrelevant information because it has no evidential value, okay? Right? And so this is where I go cops in many ways are much cleverer than lawyers in their approach to information. Yes. And so, by the way, I mean, scientists, if you think about it, nearly all significant scientific breakthroughs don't start with a proof.

34:41They start with an observation. You know, Darwin with Finch's beans. Yeah, yeah. Newton with an apple, Fleming with penicillin and the funny little thing, Viagra with the strange behavior of the people on the trial. Yeah, yeah. Okay? All of those things started with a freak, in many ways, to the bureaucratic mind, annoying piece of discrepancy. And the creative act was not a spontaneous creative act. It was having the insight to see the possible implications and possible explanation for this unusual finding. Are there any podcasts that you have not appeared on that you would like to? You've done so many.

35:28Yeah, I mean, a lot of that was during lockdown where my argument was, well, there's nothing else to do. And also, if you can talk to even an audience of 100, OK, it's still a big network effect. And if you have an audience of... We don't think like this, but a podcast audience of 50 ,000, that's a goddamn stadium. Yeah. Okay? You know, 80 ,000, that's the Melbourne cricket ground. Yeah. That's Taylor Swift numbers, okay? No, I don't have the album sales or, indeed, the ticket prices or the price elasticity. But nonetheless, I think we tend to... We got so obsessed with broadcast TV... Yeah. ..that we tended to actually think, oh, it's only 20 ,000.

36:09That's an enormous multiplier. I mean, the largest physical event I've probably spoken to is 2 ,000 people. So an online audience of 20 ,000 is immense. And my weird street fame, where people come up to me and demand selfies all the time, actually is kind of proof that 100 ,000 people is a lot of people. Yeah. I suppose...

36:35The rest is politics would be fun, because I find both the hosts mildly annoying. and i would like to rile them okay but they're you know they're overconfident kind of remainery harris supporting kind of um default mode um and i you know i i do find both of them actually slightly irritating in that it is that business of you know making confident pronouncements yeah without actually considering considering the opposite well i would love to hear you on that Okay. I mean, by the way, I have a very unusual opinion on Brexit, which is that I voted Remais. I have contents to vote Remais. I don't think it was that important.

37:17I genuinely still don't. I mean, it inconveniences me personally less than roadworks on the A25. Yeah. Okay. Now, this is genuinely true, okay? Now, my only point is, if it really was that dire, first of all, why weren't the people protesting business people? Yeah. But they were teachers, okay? It was an identity problem. No one... The economic problem was a total post... In other words, the whole economic question was called into service, OK, by people who weren't happy to make the emotional case of loss of identity. But why have these cultural issues and identity issues become so much more prevalent in our politics?

37:58Ten years ago, they weren't really... They were at, well, 15 years ago. Well, you have, if you think about it, a kind of middle-class, which doesn't really come much into contact with people who don't think like that. And, of course, you could argue that social media merely exacerbates the bubbles that already existed in the physical world.

38:21You could... I mean, we are essentially trying... My argument is there's a kind of very weird attempt to kind of eradicate tribalism in one form, unless it fits a definition that suits some sort of Marxist academic theory about class, gender, race or sexuality. OK. And we are just a bit tribal. Yeah. It's inevitable. I'll tell you an extraordinary story. So my daughter does a DNA test and it turns out that she's got something like 2 % to 3 % of West African DNA, which almost certainly comes from me. OK. And the reason is not because there were a lot of Ghanaians in the north of Scotland, hence the name Sutherland.

39:07It was because there were quite a lot of Sutherlands in Ghana, and it's a reverse correlation. In fact, the country in the world after Scotland, maybe Canada, where Sutherland is the most common name, is actually Ghana. Right. Where I'm sure the Sutherland family were performing missionary work. Let's not ask, OK? Let's just not go there. But what was quite funny is that after discovering, you know, that my DNA is partly West African. My daughter was on the phone to one of her breasts. OK, I don't even discover this now before. And she said to her friend, and according to my DNA survey, which showed we were related to a lot of people in Inverness and Wales and et cetera, which all made sense.

39:46But apart from this West African component, which I think is reverse correlation, my daughter's on the phone to her friend, and she goes, and according to my DNA report, I'm 3 % North African. And I shouted to her, we're not fucking North African, we're West African. OK, no, this was an identity I'd only been made dimly aware of two hours before. But the idea that my affinity with the Ashanti of Ghana or the Eboo was now being confused with, you know, Algerians and Moroccans, suddenly it was an instinctive reaction that I was making this repel. It was, I admit, the most absurd reaction. I looked at myself going, why the hell did you react like that?

40:27Now, the point about tribalism is not that you're... Or even nationalism is not that you deny it away, OK? You find manageable, amusing and beneficial outlets for it. Yeah. And you harness it. One of the most important components to managing human difference is almost certainly comedy and humour. There's a fascinating phenomenon, which is a comedian called Andrew Schultz. Yeah. Who, if you presented his textual content to an audience of American academics. They demand that he was cancelled and prevented. However, his audiences are entirely multi-ethnic and entirely participate in the abuse, OK, which is equal opportunities abuse, OK?

41:12In other words, everybody gets it, OK? Now, what fascinated me about that is it's exactly the answer which is, that I always make about psychology, which is in psychology, unlike physics, the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. Yeah. And the opposite of hiding something is to make fun of it, to make light of it. And, you know, you might argue that anybody who has... is English but has a French friend. Yeah. Okay? Um, controversial, I know, okay. But they've reached this accommodation already. They both take the piss out of each other slightly, but actually that contributes to, rather than diminishes, the affection you feel for each other.

41:52Okay? And the idea that you pretended away is actually not really psychologically feasible. Yeah. And, you know, the solution to a lot of these things is to have people aware of things but not give a shit about it. Yeah. OK. You know, um, you know, I don't think there's going to be a day where, you know, if you're Welsh, there aren't going to be the odd sheep comments. But what the Welsh have done there, if you look at a rugby international, is they only insults and take inflatable sheep and wave them around in the crowd, okay? In Wisconsin, people wear enormous wedges of cheese on their heads because they're stereotyped as cheeseheads, so they're fans of the Milwaukee Brewers or whatever it is, or, you know, own the insult.

42:36Yeah. There are lots and lots of evolved psychological hacks which exist in the human to actually solve these problems or at least to massively mitigate. OK? And what you might call the direct legalistic logical approach, which we've often seen recently, is perfectly well-intentioned. In a logical world, it should actually work quite well, but empirically, we have to acknowledge that it might actually be counterproductive. As a final... So, if you're an empiricist, your quality of reasoning is subordinate to your quality of outcome. Yeah. OK. What we've created is a world where the outcome, you're not so much judged on the quality of your outcome, on the consequences, but on the rigour of the reasoning which led you to that action.

43:29Yeah. And that's what happens in a risk-averse or bureaucratic institution. It doesn't really matter what happens so long as my sequential logical flow that justifies my actions is easily defensible. Yeah. And whether it doesn't work or not is really your concern. Now, the great thing about business is you've got a feedback mechanism, which is the profit. Yeah. OK. You can have the best idea in the world in business, but if you don't sell it, you're out of the gene pool. OK. You can have an utterly stupid idea in business, which makes no goddamn sense at all. Red Bull. OK. OK. OK. You can have an absolutely dumb idea in business, but if somehow the public picks up on it, the quality of your reasoning is irrelevant to your ultimate success.

44:16So free market things are market tested by the end user who is an accurate evaluator of value. The bureaucratic system delivers services according to their own measure of value which is not generally what the consumer values. It's simply something that's easy to measure or defend. The way that this podcast actually makes money is that we make podcasts for businesses. And we are trying to sort of, this part of the, we're encouraging businesses to be more adventurous with it, etc. We have built... The problem you have is businesses now have a very risk-averse person called the press officer. Yes.

44:53Who is entirely focused on downside risk minimisation. Yeah. And you reach the supreme achievement as a press officer if you keep everybody out of the press altogether. With the consequence that, if you think about it, If Newsnight has a question about or the Today programme needs to interview someone about business, they generally can't get hold of a business person because the press office is having connections and it takes three days to get approval and legal, I think, as a consequence of which the whole world of business, which is, you know, the greater part of the British economy, is massively underrepresented in news media, whereas academics, who are free to pitch up any time they like and probably aren't that busy to begin with, OK?

45:37They dominate the conversation because they can, you know, some bloody economist or academic, then pitch up and sound off entirely freely, whereas the corporate reputational paranoia has caused the business interest to be fundamentally underrepresented. But this is why I think them creating their own channels will give them the security of it. I think that's why it's going to be a big thing. There are 20 ,000 people who could have done what I did. the truth of the matter is they probably weren't allowed to. Yeah, yeah, exactly. If I'm being honest about it, which is, you know, let's just, you know, business is a highly creative act, okay?

46:13Contrary to what everybody likes to think, most of the effort in business is pretending it's deterministic and boring when the reality is that it's probabilistic and exciting and creative. I know, but that's, yeah, I mean, that's what I want to do with the podcast is sort of shine light on all these different business stories. And the start of every business... When I say that the great thing about capitalism is it produces white wall tires, fins on cars, frozen parathas, by the way, which I'm going to plug. Yeah, yeah. Okay. One of the greatest products of the last 10 years. Go to the freezer aisle, folks, and I'll find the brand.

46:47I think it's called something like Shawa, is it? You would show me. I will find it on my Android phone. I will go and find this. And you just, okay, you can keep it in the freezer. Don't let it defrost. It's called Shana is the brand. It's one of the most miraculous food products you'll ever have because within three minutes, frying in a pan from frozen, and don't let it defrost, it's better if you put it straight from the freezer into the pan, you'll have something which is as good a paratha as you've got in a Michelin-starred Indian restaurant. Now, you know, that's what happens at the point, the frozen paratha and the white-walled tyres and Red Bull, that it can produce things that, if you think about it, the Soviet Union was completely wrong-footed by the popularity of denim.

47:29OK? OK? Yeah. that's what's magnificent about it the fact that it's fucking bonkers and yet it's been hijacked by all these accountants and finance people who are desperately pretending that it conforms to narrow neoliberal economic theories and everything makes perfect sense I wouldn't want to work in business if it were like that yeah yeah quite why would you want to do that? well so we've built it I want to get some live marketing advice because as all companies we could do with more sales etc so we have built a podcast calculator on this which as a podcast champion you might be interested so basically you put in all these different parameters with podcasts like how many episodes do you want it filmed i mean all podcasts are filled now but all these different things premium definitely yeah like trailer intros you notice i press premium without even knowing what it meant Yeah.

48:24You see that? I just chose the premium intro. It's exactly like, you know, there are loads of things, by the way, which nobody knows what they mean, OK? Sourdough, nobody's got a clue what it means. It just means posh bread, OK? Organic, nobody knew what it meant. It just meant posh food, OK? Anyway, sorry. Yeah, well, you are going to have a premium intro. How many social video clips for episode 10? Fuck that. Do you need a host for the show? Yeah. No, I'll be my own host. Yeah, yeah. I'm outsourcing. do I need help with publishing oh yeah always do you need artwork ah we can probably provide our own we should be able to my podcast series would cost£64 ,000 plus VAT so that's the amount of sponsorship I need in order for it to be economically desirable that is the first way of looking at it yeah that's actually a really helpful app what's the app called so I can plug it it's Boxlight on our it's our company that we've got it make b2b things absolutely fantastic by the way i mean total total um kudos for being a b2b entity yeah the thing you're going to realize okay and what we've got to get business to realize is that big ideas require big behavioral change behavioral change is difficult therefore just as small behaviors respond to advertising yeah big behaviors require it and my joke i'd always make to greg jackson of octopus who i absolutely venerate okay i think he's absolutely extraordinary man and if If this were America, businesses like Ocado, businesses like Octopus Energy, really innovative companies like that would be absolutely idolised.

50:00Greg would be stocked in the street. Wise, for example, TransferWise, Starling. Those people would be rock stars with their own trailer and entourage. But in Britain, we're almost too egalitarian in terms of our willingness to get excited about homegrown, brilliant ideas. But I'd still say to Greg, if you'd called Octopus greenecotech.com and you hadn't had a big pink Octopus's logo, you'd still have 20 ,000 customers. Yeah. OK? So let's not forget that this door requires two keys to unlock. It's a bit like those nuclear missiles where you need two separate people to turn a key at the same time.

50:43Yeah. In the bunker, OK? You need to unlock the technological door. In other words, the technology has to deliver and be meaningful and offer significant benefits. But if you don't unlock the marketing door, which is people can appreciate those benefits and feel comfortable about paying for them and changing their behaviour in consequence, then you still haven't got a great idea. You've got an invention, but you haven't got an innovation. What do you think it is about the Octopus brand that is so strong? The Octopus? Yeah. It's pink. Why does it work? OK, this is driving a bunch of bloody energy scientists completely batshit crazy, isn't it?

51:21Yeah, I know you're doing some really clever stuff with the Kraken software and the whole idea of distributed pricing is great. But actually, the fun nature of the thing means that the gamification of energy, when Octopus comes out with something really interesting, OK, our attitude is, oh, that's cute, rather than, what the hell are they doing now? Yeah, yeah. It fundamentally changes the... The big car. My kids love it, though. They play with it. Have you bought the plushie? Yeah. Yeah, I bought the plushie as well. I've got actually a big pink, you know, furry octopus that sits... My wife's not totally keen.

51:53She's a bit farrow and bald. She's English. But they've got a big pink octopus in the middle of the table. And... But it's an... You can get a dog toy as well. You know that. And then on their shop, the Octo shop, there's also a really hot chilli sauce. What's it doing there? No, no logic at all. But that fact that actually we are approaching a category which was tedious, okay, and we're innovating in the spirit of optimism and fun. Yeah. By the way, we also ought to give a big shout out to their approach to customer service. Yes. Which is entirely different to the customer service approach. Because, by the way, I come from advertising, but I would happily say to two thirds of our clients, can you actually cancel a few of those ads and invest for more people in your call center, please?

52:41Yeah, yeah. Because it's very difficult. All businesses are over-invested in acquisition and under-invested in customer retention because the former is easier to quantify than the latter. Very hard to prove what difference a really good call centre person makes. My contention is there are organisations where my propensity to repurchase goes up by a factor of four because of a single really good call centre experience. And nearly all businesses are under-invested in this. And then you see the Financial Times writing an article which says, how did customer service get so bad? Well, I might say to the Financial Times, if you actually acknowledge the importance of marketing occasionally, which you don't, and actually admitted that there might be something important about a business other than its quarterly financial results, then maybe business wouldn't be in this shit place to begin with.

53:30So physician, heal thyself, if I may say so. But Octopus Energy. That's horrific in the UK. Okay. The Financial Times pays no attention to marketing. the economist had a marketing um uh correspondent who hated marketing because all economists hate marketing because all their economic models assume perfect information yeah and therefore they operate in a world in which marketing wouldn't be necessary so they see it as a poisonous distortion of consumer preference you see whereas of course um you can't change behavior without it yeah yeah um i i always but i think part of it with octopus energy and the octopus brand more broadly is is they do have personality and they do try and do things differently whereas you know a lot of the other energy companies like you there is no differentiation between them differentiation no no and actually ovo we ought to credit i mean yes yeah similarly seems to be innovative um uh octopus is an extraordinary potential off um export story because of course it's a software company now a little like a cardo actually part of the reason they run the shop is so that the actual what they learn by doing the thing for real then becomes effectively applicable in other markets and with other with other retailers so it's just you know it's part software play part retailer who if people want to go and listen to more rory sutherland content at the end of this who whose podcast did you enjoy appearing on the most which sticks in the mind um because you do do a lot i actually enjoy all i'm chris williamson i'm always very happy yeah yeah very very happy to do yours by the way because the whole b2b arena okay b2b marketing yeah can be just as creative as consumer marketing it receives less attention not because it's less effective but perhaps because historically ad agencies judge the importance of a client by the size of its media spend.

55:27I work in Ogilvy Consulting precisely because I don't care what the media spend is. I simply care about the size of the opportunity and that you have some money to spend. But I'm not doing this entirely philanthropically, am I not? But nonetheless, one of the areas which strikes me as enormously important, because B2B is 50 % of the British economy. Yeah. And yet it's talked about inordinately less. What's a good example of a B2B business? marketing campaign you've seen? There's a company called Backhouse Jones which ensures effectively vehicle operators so it might be bus companies, haulage companies etc and the insurance they provide is they provide all your legal affairs and I think increasingly your HR function okay as a back office and rather than pricing the way most lawyers do which is we're free until you're in the shit, at which point we charge you a bloody fortune.

56:26They have a very simple pricing model, which is to cover all your legal needs, you pay, I think it's 20p, it might have gone up now, 25p per vehicle per day. Notice they don't express that annually. They express it in an amount that sounds like a rounding error to anybody who's just bought some massive Foden vehicle for 250 grand, OK? And to deal with all the possible legal ramifications of the ownership of that vehicle, 20p per vehicle per day. And the guy, Mr Jones, a fellow Welshman, I imagine, although he's actually Mancunian, but, you know, never goes away. When he markets, when he speaks at transport conferences, he goes and puts sort of 25p underneath everybody's chair.

57:09And he presents their proposition, and he says, and if you look under your chair, you'll see I've paid for the first day for you. So it's a brilliant example. Now, price framing, okay, A lot of these psychological things, which we've kind of discovered through working in consumer marketing, can be not transplanted, but translated into B2B. Yeah. So let me give you an example. I'm always horrified when I see a B2B company offer a price reduction. Okay? And my argument is don't reduce the price, offer a rebate. Now, that would be true if you're ASOS, right? If you give people£5 back when they buy something, they're going to buy something else.

57:47Yeah. I always say, don't reduce your price. Give the finance director an annual rebate conditional on something or other to make it feel of high perceived value. A finance director would much prefer a rebate to a cost reduction. Why? Because it's money which he can put wherever he likes. He can go, oh dear, we're a bit behind on this little pot. Let's just take this rebate and move it. Because that's what they do, finance people, isn't it? They basically just move money. They don't actually create any value. They just move money around to make it look more impressive. now it's not i'm not gonna get my expenses signed off for the next five years now okay i'm teasing guys okay no no but what i'm saying is that a rebate will be much more attractive to a financed person yeah an annual rebate will be much more attractive so the same money has a different value depending on how you pay it yeah okay that would just be one example um what is how do you describe your actual job here at Ogilvy to a sort of 15 year old what I try and do here now is maintain particularly as we're paid by the hour in advertising um uh we have become a little bit over procurified in that the problem of payment by the hour coupled with a client procurement department is that the most valuable things you can do for clients as an advertising agency for the most part are probably things they didn't ask you to do.

59:13Yeah. OK. And that would also be true, I think, of legal firms and everybody else. Yeah, yeah. This business of payment by the hour is based on the presumption that ab initio, the procuring company, knows exactly what they want. OK? Very similar to the assumption in economics, by the way. OK? And it is simply the job for you to satisfy their initial specification. Nearly all processes are iterative, OK? and you decide what you want as a by-product of actually doing it. It's like going shopping, right? You go to TK Maxx, you don't go with a shopping list. You effectively, your preference function is amended by the knowledge of what's available, okay?

59:56And your utility function is continually updated according to your exploration of the market. And consequently, I think a lot of professional services firms, including management consultancies, ad agencies, by this dumb payment-by-the-hour thing, which is an appalling, stupid way to actually charge for what we do, we've become too linear. And my job, I think, is to basically continually provide the hinterland. And actually, it means being a bit of a pain in the arse, because part of that job, to a linear mindset, that means you're derailing things. You're throwing a spanner in the works. but actually as long as I can be, I can judge my moment.

1:00:39And by the way, derailing something at the beginning is much less annoying than derailing something at the end. Okay. You know, one of the worst things you can do on any creative project is start work straight away. Okay. There's a kind of messy preliminary phase where it is absolutely correct to dick around with the brief, not least to ask the question whether the objective of the brief is the right one even to begin with. Yeah. my example that you know if you give them the brief for high speed two to disney rather than to engineering firms they would have said i don't we're not interested in all these questions about time speed duration and capacity the question we want to ask is how do you make a train journey so bloody enjoyable that nobody wants to go by car right yeah i don't know how disneyfied the solution would be but that's a much much more interesting question because psychology allows you far more potential for breakthrough moments than engineering does.

1:01:34Ultimately, engineering is constrained by the rules of physics, which are annoyingly strict. You know, gravity, the fact that air resistance will increase exponentially with speed. All those things are fixed. If you start going into saying, let's operate by the rules of psychology, not the rules of physics, your actual opportunity to resolve a paradox or to escape a trade-off is much, much greater. You can make the train really, really slow, but make the journey fantastic. We had William Hague on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, not to name John, but one of the most interesting, terrifying...

1:02:09Actually, brilliant man who got everything right except timing. Yeah. But he thought... Literally, mind-bending thing he said was that the next phase of warfare will be cognitive warfare. And how... Well, it's already happening. Well, quite. Yeah. But, like, yeah, it just sort of... It was pretty terrifying. But, yeah, you're right. But although I don't think... I'm not sure he ever wanted to be Prime Minister in the end. I don't know. It's a very funny business, isn't it? I mean, the people I... Because we're weird in politics about ambition as well, because in politics you can say you're ambitious and you want a top Cabinet job.

1:02:49Everybody's fine with that. But as soon as you ask somebody if they want to be Prime Minister, if you ask one of these new Labour MPs... Well, Margaret Thatcher famously denied it, didn't she? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. But it's just... It's a British problem about ambition that we have, I think. I think, I suppose... I mean, you could argue that the... I think it was the Hesseltine ambition that people always joke, sort of kiboshed him, that when he was at Oxford. Yeah. And there is that very strong thing of don't tempt fate. Yeah. So there's a company I dealt with, which is really funny, OK, which is actually a very brilliant company called Airporter, and I spoke to them.

1:03:30They collect your luggage from your home in the home counties and they basically check it in at Heathrow or Gatwick. It's flying on EasyJet, British Airways, a few other airlines. And actually, that's sometimes really, really useful because you can now take public transport to the airport. You get your luggage collected a few days beforehand. If you've got a really early flight, you basically can go straight through to departures. I've used it quite a few times. I had to ask the question. Have you ever lost a piece of luggage? No. They said, maybe you should tell people that. And they go, we're too frightened.

1:04:00It's tempting fate. You see what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, that actually, you know, they've never had a single failure, which is pretty damn impressive, but it's something other... It's a bit like claiming to be a design classic, okay? Or using the phrase luxury. Other people can say it of you, but you can't say it of yourself. And so that would be similar. Should be Prime Minister. That's very effective marketing. would make a great prime minister, brilliant marketing. I want to be prime minister, terrible marketing. It's a bit like someone declaring themselves a car manufacturer, the Peugeot 205 design classic.

1:04:39Everybody else can say that. You can't. You can't say it. Yeah. And it's similar. You know, I am funny. Doesn't work. OK? Doesn't work. OK? You can either prove it or you can get other people to verify it, but you can't actually claim it of yourself. Yeah. Rory, thanks so much. It's been a brilliant combination of comedy, marketing, politics, technology, everything. Thanks so much. It's been great. Anytime. Absolutely delighted. Thanks ever so much.

1:05:21Thank you.