#735 - Rory Sutherland - Hidden Psychology Of The World’s Best Advertising

25:38There was a wonderful thing I saw actually on I think it was the A299 and East Kent, which was one of, you know, they sort of hotted up Citrus, which are like the hot hatch with enormous kind of unnecessary, really large tail pipes and a ludicrously large woofer that takes over the hole of the boot. And while this, on the A2 and I decided to take on a McLaren F1. Okay, and I have to say, it was comical to watch. The guy actually acquitted himself in the first sort of five seconds reasonably well. But I felt a bit like that, you know, talking to Jimmy Carc, because you know, you work in a business way.

26:16You were the citron with the big, I was the sitron with the unfeasibly large tailpipes. Ah, and similarly, I've always been in awe of Andrew Schultz for the crowd work. Just has a speed, which is just terrifying. Yeah, yeah, mate. So someone asked me the other day, who are the easiest people to speak to, and who are the most difficult people to speak to on the show? And I definitely find that comedians are the ones that I need to be the most switched on for. Mark Norman, in particular, Mark is so it's such a game of it's not a game of tennis it's a game of ping pong yeah, but ink but ink but ink but ink but ink but ink but it's that it's that kind of pace and You're right.

26:58He rides the crest of now. It's only a Sam Harassian sort of type thing He's just living in the perpetual present and just deploying thoughts as they come to him and the lack of filter and the Precision of his speech just allows him to just things just fall out of him. And there's always this weird debate about creativity, which is it kind of comes in two forms, one of which is what you might call, share in eight genius, and the other one is hyper -accelerated rationality, which is just in the same time that the other person is getting from A to B, you're already at F. But I mean, what interests me also is if you look at political movements, given the fact that psychology is often quite a bleak, the way to solve a problem.

27:44This is what really bothers me about politics at the moment, which is, in fact, is what my next book is about if I can give a taster, which is, the question is, do you want to win arguments or do you want to solve problems? Because the mode of thinking you adopt if you want to solve a problem is much more open -minded, much less dogmatic, okay? it's much more oblique and creative than the mode you would adopt if you want to win an argument. And what we've done is we've selected for our leadership, for our politicians, in some cases, for our business people, and we've educated for, and we've promoted for the ability to win arguments.

28:24Okay? And actually winning an argument and solving a problem are two completely different skill sets, I'd argue. So there's what always fascinates me about Andrew Schultz is okay if Andrew Schultz said you know 5 % of what he says on stage in a corporate environment or a Yale Okay, you know if you consider you know Rob Henderson's experience at Yale Okay, you know they practically have the place shut down for defumigation Okay, and he's a contaminated zone and yeah, his audiences are completely mixed in every sense I mean if you want to really if you want to really really diverse group of people genuinely representative and diverse, and Andrew Schultz's audience is pretty much as good as it gets.

29:08And he solves the problem, which is interesting, okay, not by pretending, say, race or gender don't exist, okay? But by highlighting the distinctions and then taking the piss out of them, yeah, okay. Now, from an oblique kind of creative point of view, you have to ask the question, is that actually a better way of solving the problem than, for example, the extreme dogmatism of say the politically correct move, not in that using the word woke particularly. Okay? Now, you know, is part of the solution that, you know, in other words, do you actually make people pretend not to notice ethnic differences and as a consequence, become incredibly anxious in the presence of any of those differences?

29:50Okay? Or do you actually acknowledge them, make light of them? Because... Well, both of them are trying to tune down the seriousness. Both of them try to say, okay. But the one of them works precisely. And here's a question I want to do some empirical testing on this. Okay. You do occasionally at comedy clubs, you do occasionally get a pissed guy who heckles and everybody gets really angry, okay. But do you get violence ever outside comedy clubs? Outside. Well, inside or outside? I've seen one video in the last few years where a heckler has tried to start on a comedian, but unbelievably rare. It's unbelievably rare, especially given that you're pointing out people and saying stuff about them or their wife or their relationship or their chastity or whatever.

30:34I mean, I recommend it. I couldn't make it to Andrew Schultz at the Royal Albert Hall, but I recommended people went for the limited visibility seats, not only because they were cheaper, but because given his crowd work... The blast radius, they say. The brilliant thing is I could hide behind a pillar, and it's very unlikely I'd be single out as like the whitest guy he'd ever seen or whatever it might have been. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, you know, what's interesting is those comedy audiences are really fascinating just in terms of their demographic constituency. It's teaching people as sort of a degree of intellectual humbleness, being able to cast off the tension that you have when watching something occur by laughing.

31:15So I've noticed this, I'm preparing for my first live tour, which is happening around the UK and Ireland in a couple of weeks' time. And as a part of this, I did a ton of work in progress shows. And we could feel, I could see in the room and feel in the room tension arising as I'm talking about whatever the thing is that I'm talking about dissection about Confidence or this section about regret or this section about whatever and there was bits where You needed a laugh almost kind of like how a dog shakes its coat when it's wet and what's the loss? Passed it off. Yeah So here's an interesting analogy, okay in terms of being right versus solving the problem, okay?

31:53Now, if you want to win arguments or if you want to win the respect of a peer group who hold a particular set of political views, what tends to happen is you get into a virtue spiral. I think that's what it's called in the book. Purity spiral. Purity is thank you. Purity spiral. You become absolutist. And then because conflict is inherently interesting, an argument is inherently interesting. So if we hear outside some people having an amicable conversation, we won't even bother to get up. If we hear a fight starting to break up or two people shouting at each other, we'll have a noses press to the window to see what's happening.

32:26And journalists and newspapers and media know this. So they focus on those areas where there's the greatest polarization, which means you're focusing on the part of the problem which is most difficult to solve. So the example I give, because I'm going to move away from politics, because when you mention politics, everything suddenly drives people to this polarization, I aspire to be the most left -wing person on the alt -right. which is, I find the conversation of the outright, inherently interesting, but I try not to become part of it. And I occasionally write for the spectator, but I occasionally write about the virtues of Henry George or the insights of Karl Marx, just to shake the whole thing up.

33:07But interesting guy, Marx, by the way, okay, right? I think the actual, the way I put it is, the diagnosis is fascinating and the prescription is terrible. Correct. Now, okay, the perfect exemplar of where this problem goes wrong, and this is very difficult if you're working at advertising and marketing because quite often you're not criticizing the intentionality or the aspiration of the person. You're merely saying that the way you're going about this isn't working very well, okay? So yes, nearly all the aspirations of, say, the diversity and inclusion movement are those which we should all generally support.

33:46And I don't want to ever get into that kind of weird, you know, weird thing where you start getting angry about trigger warnings because if you give it about 10 minutes thought, you realise that trigger warnings, although they're a bit funny, and it's a bit weird when Netflix says, may contain nicotine use, okay, which, you know, never put anybody off going to the cinema in 1946, you know, imagine if you had to do that, cast of blanka, warning, nicotine use. It's a bit weird, okay? But it's a great idea, okay? Some people may be deeply upset by certain forms of content and you should at least give them the opportunity to kind of opt out or to avoid it.

34:22And you know, okay, we can debate what is triggering, but nonetheless it's broadly speaking an intelligent principle, I think. Now, so the example I'll choose won't be from politics because politics automatically leads people to become tribal and therefore they have to take a side. Another example I think is perfect, he's cycling Mikey. Cycling Mikey is a YouTuber, okay? And he goes around, he stands at a place in London called Gandalf Corner and if he sees a car ducking around the wrong side of a keep left island, he just stands in front of it and refuses to let the move, takes a photograph, reports them to the police.

35:01He's got Guy Richie. I think he got, did he get a richy band because he photographed him using a mobile phone while stationary waiting for a set of traffic lights. And he sends his film footage to the police, he puts it up on YouTube, okay? Now, I basically support what he's trying to do, okay, because I think cycling safety is incredibly important and these people are doing bad things, okay? We've all done it, let's be honest, okay? We've all used a mobile phone when driving, we've just been lucky enough to get away with it and I wish I'd never done it, okay? Where cycling like he is less effective, however, is his mode of delivery, which is so competitive and so effectively polarizing, okay, that it actually becomes counterproductive.

35:47Now where he, you know, he's well intentioned, which is he wishes to increase cyclist safety. No one's disagreeing with that, okay? Where he's less effective is in disabusing people of the well -established stereotype that all Afro -Canas are bastards. Because he does things which are inherently, first of all, he's a little bit unfair because when he catches, when cyclists misbehave, one you can't report to the police because they don't have a license plate, secondly, he claims that if you stand in front of a cyclist or a motorcycle, they might fall off. So he can't actually stop motorcyclists and cyclists performing egregious and illegal acts, So he concentrates entirely on the motorist.

36:26But then he basically goes, stands in front of them on the road, and then effectively does things which are... I mean, we don't really have a massive culture of vigilantism in this country. Reporting other people to the police is something we're pretty reluctant to do. You know, it's not a hallmark of a nice culture when people are blagging, you know, basically, you know, lagging to the screws used to be called in prisoner of cell block H. Right? Okay, it's something you just don't do. But secondly, I'm there as a marketing guy going, look, I support what you're trying to do, but you've been driven into this extreme position where your purity spiral is so extreme that actually it's counterproductive.

37:05And so you know, you're very, very good at feeling confident in your own opinions, but actually your ability to bring, if you notice in advertising, it's very rare that you're nasty to users of your competing product. Okay. You don't get four ads going if you driver voxel, you're a twat. Yes. Because genuinely, people want to win over people who are either undecided or in a rival camp. And it's not a good idea. And you won't see much. Patronize them. Not mock them. Patronize them or to effectively becoming credibly sanctimonious as he does. I mean, extraordinarily sanctimonious. And I think it's a kind of example of a pattern you see where people's desire to be entirely on the right drives them to practice counterproductive behaviors because I mean, there's, you know, for example, I think as a marketing guy, I can't help watching this go to the thing and say, if you're actually very nice to those people and you handed them a leaflet which it produced yourself, you know, just warning them of cyclists safety, I think it'll be probably quite effective.

38:11I mean, I was actually, I went on a speed awareness course, I don't know if you had that. I had to do it once, but I had the pleasure. I turned up thinking this is total arse, but I'm doing it to avoid the points. It was pretty worthwhile. In the end of it, I went away going, okay, I have rethought quite a bit of my driving pattern as a consequence of what I learned. It's a reeducation pattern. If you turn it, so there's this huge problem, okay, which is that everything, now I think Douglas Murray says this, which I thought was interesting. It was actually at a dinner, which he said, the real reason he gets angry about the culture wars, which I think is the right reason to be angry about them, is not because somebody's wrong and somebody's right and goodness says what, it's the extraordinary opportunity cost that while we are arguing about these things that are very difficult to decide in which automatically polarise people, there are 100 problems we could solve, okay, which would actually appeal to everybody.

39:01Yeah, as he says while the barbarians are at the gates, we'll be debating about what gender they are. Well, this is an interesting one because I'd also argue, let's take cyclists and motorists, okay. In everybody's interest to effectively foster hostility between these two groups. Even though, of course, quite a lot of people straddle both groups outside London, it's quite rare to be a cyclist who doesn't alter in a car. Not totally rare, but most people outside London, most households have access to a car in some shape or form. And Martin, there is that... Imagine what you could have done if instead of fostering cyclist, motorist hostility by focusing on the areas where there's the most discord and the most disagreed.

39:44Imagine if you both said, okay, there are two things that, one thing that motorists hate and cyclists hate even more potholes, right? Now find them together over this. Yeah, find them together and say, look, potholes are really annoying to car owners because you've got to get your tires replaced, which by the way is environmentally bad as well. Oh, fucking mortal terror to a cyclist. And there's two little terror to a cyclist. Particularly if you're one of those narrow, tired, you know, titanium -rich, thingy -wobbs, you like, and everything else. And so it's kind of interesting, which is the point is that the opportunity cost of this focus on problems that divide, you know, problems where the solution acutely divides people is has a huge creative opportunity cost because the thing to do if you have two people who disagree about something is to change the question.

40:33Obviously we're not getting anywhere here. So let's just solve something else. There's a quote from Scott Alexander, which is really great. It says, if you're interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponent's arguments. But if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponent's arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter, you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse. Well, let me get... I'll come back to you with a quote which is Thomas Sol. As I said, I'm the most left -wing person on the alt -right.

41:06I'm a very big admirer of quite a lot of the people, Sol included. Thomas Sol's phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal guy. Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society is a hole. Okay. Now, one of the weirdest things about this movement. One of the most tiring things about being politically correct as a Brit is weirdly you have to pretend you're American because if you think about it, there are loads of problems you can solve at the local level, this place here, sought out the fucking signage.

41:42I mean, first of all, you come into a place to find it and it's like the Valentine's Day massacre. You come into this weird news where the only thing you can imagine happening there, It looks as if the interior decor has been done by Pete Dockety. And then the signage and the numbering is completely batched in sane, and you can only read the actual number of each door if the sun is at a particular angle. So all these things we can do to solve problems locally at a smaller level. But if you want to feel self -important, you concentrate on the problems at the top. Things like effectively politics.

42:16I mean, if you look at actually even things at the level of kind of, probably not London, actually, but if you look at, I don't know, why do we never get any coverage of say the mayor of Manchester or the mayor of the West Midlands? We get a load of coverage of Scottish politics, right? Okay, because why? Because there's a massive divisive issue there which gets people worked up, which is Scottish independence. Where, by the way, we're asking the wrong question, anyway, the question should be what kind of independence do we want? Not do we have independence or don't we? Completely lacking in new ones anyway.

42:48You know we got any coverage, no coverage. Now, bear in mind the population of Scotland is smaller than the population of Yorkshire, okay? Most people don't realise that. They think because it's kind of large geographic area, there are about 15 or 20 million people living in Scotland. The abandoned. It's very small population because all the really talented ones moved to Wales in the 19th century. Sorry, that's just my own ancestry. So, you know, in search of people who weren't permanently angry about nothing in particular. And so my great grandfather moved from K for S to the South Welsh values because it was going to, in fact, as Cardiff was like the Dubai of the late 19th century.

43:25Cardiff was like the Dubai of the late 19th century. First place in the world where a million pound contract was signed was in Cardiff Docs. It was cold. So it was effectively the largest cold exporting port in the world. Wow. And by the way, not your shitty German cold, proper quality cold. Right, here's a question for you. Why is it that when we look at the export of national identities from the UK and Ireland to the rest of the world, England, English people, we have a position although we get referred to as being British, Northern Irish people kind of do, Southern Irish people absolutely definitely do.

44:04Even Scottish people do. Oh, Scottish marketing is brilliant. I mean, as a nation brand, it's absolutely potent as hell. Yeah. Why does no one? What's happened to Wales? Why has Wales not managed to establish itself on the global geopolitical branding? There's an interesting debate about this. One Welsh commentator, I don't shoot the messenger here, suggests that Welsh people who move somewhere else, very rapidly kind of lose their Welshness and assimilate anyway. That's his argument. So if you look at the contribution of Welsh Americans, okay? Now you've never heard, you've never heard that hyphen before, have you, okay?

44:41Welsh American, Scottish American. Yeah, absolutely. You've never heard of Welsh American. It includes like Thomas Jefferson, okay? It includes arguably Elvis, about 50 % of country singers, Tammy Wynnet, real surname Pew, okay? Right, if you actually Hillary Clinton, funnily enough, is I think half Welsh, okay? So you have this, but there is app, I mean, if you ask people who are American about their Welsh ancestry, they may dimly know that they have some Welsh ancestry, barely extents to knowing where it is. Whereas if they've got Scottish or Irish ancestry, it informs every fucking cell of their being, even if they're like a 16 -virus, they start wearing green things.

45:24Yeah. And, you know, to the slight annoyance, by the way, of real Irish people, I'm like, dad, okay, to be honest, okay. And quite a few people who are very proud of their Irish heritage are actually descended from Northern Irish Protestants, what's sometimes called in the United States, Scotts Irish, but they don't even know that, okay? So, you know, I think Henry Ford, there's a huge Irish American contingent of people who are effectively, um, from Northern Ireland. But again, that distinction isn't really made. There's an argument that it was at the time of the American Civil War where people tended to take sides on that basis.

46:05I'm not quite sure. But generally, that hasn't pervaded until the 2023. But the Welsh have done a bad job, and there's actually a group called Global Welsh, which I belong to, which looks at this question of kind of, I mean, the greatest Welsh American, and by the way, was Gagel Russell, Camel Humphries, who was number two to Al Capone. I cannot make this up, okay? So this guy, who was, by the way, he was known by the various feds and people out for him as the nicest man in the mob, okay? And Big Welsh from, I think he was from Karno, which is in kind of the middle, you know, kind of mid -wells, tiny little bit of parents were, okay?

46:44And he was entirely Welsh. And sorry, let's say, Murray, Murray, the camel Humphries, or Murray the Hump, he was known as, which is either to do with Humphries or to do with the fact that he wore a camel coat. But I think he would occasionally kill people, but he'd always negotiate first. And I think one of the senior feds who were supposed to arrest him actually refused to turn up to arrest him because he liked him personally, okay? And didn't want to be part of the arrest. And he was also violently against cussing, by the way, okay? So he's a killer, but not a swear. A killer, but not a swear.

47:27No, he didn't like any of that, any of that, very few written, but research him because it's really, really, it's comically funny, the idea of a Welsh guy in the mob. I looked at a study recently that showed an inverse correlation between marriage length and cost of engagement ring and wedding combined, that the more that is spent on the engagement ring and the more that is spent on wedding. Which you're almost in pure economic terms, you'd expect it to be the other way around, because the sunk cost of wedding should, skin in the game, should ensure the duration of the wedding, equally what are you trying to prove?

47:59Yes, yes, yes. What have you learned, you must have some insights about engagement rings and their heritage in their history? I mean, what is what is interesting is that there is a degree where what you're practicing there is a form of commitment device. In other words, it's an unrecoverable sunk cost, which is upfront expense being proof of long term commitment. And I've made that point that some advertising works that way. Okay. In other words, you wouldn't spend a fortune advertising this car if it were a waste of time for me to test drive it. Okay. So once Once you spend the money on advertising, it's gone.

48:36Therefore, the only possible value of advertising is that it leads to a sale. Therefore, if you are advertising a new product heavily, you are confident, rightly or wrongly, but it doesn't matter. You yourself who know the product better than the buyer does, is confident in terms of its long -term appeal and desirability when test driven. And so, you know, some part of advertising undoubtedly works through share, costly, expensive, share costly signaling. Well, wasn't you guys did a study where heavyweight paper was the most effective thing to increase charity donations? That's right. Yes. Now, you'll never ever get any.

49:13What's so interesting about some of this research is that I'm kind of things which people feel but don't even think or say. So there's this quote probably wrongly attributed to David Oglevy that he said, the trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel they don't say, what they think and they don't do what they say. Now, no everybody would say that a charity donation should be sent out on the cheapest paper possible because you should minimise your marketing cost. What we found is that when you put slightly more expensive paper in the donation envelope, it was for Christian aid week actually.

49:45Slightly more people give, but people give much more large donations. So the volume of donations over 50 or 100 pounds was significantly increased. Now, that's unconscious. It's probably, you know, if this thing's flimsy, there may be a certain degree of reciprocation in that, which is they've sent me a bit of nice bit of paper, I owe them 50 quid. I mean, you know, how it works, by the way, why it works? You could come up with four or five different possible explanations. But those kind of things are really fascinating because they are, they belong to that field of activity which you can only prove through testing.

50:21Market research won't tell you the answer. Pure theory where I'd tell you the answer, you have to test. I'm not a very prejudice man, but given my background as a nightlife club promoter, living and breathing flyers and paper for a very long time. Did you do that nightclub game where you created artificially long queue? Of course I did. Of course you did. Of course I did. Let me give you this one first. So one of the few prejudices that I have in my life is against single -sided flyers. Single -sided flyers are around about 90 % is expensive to do double -sided flyers, because almost all flies are double -sided.

50:54My second biggest prejudice are against double -sided flies with the same thing printed on both sides. You have two sides of a piece of paper. That basically says, I can't even be bothered here. Watch me put on the back, I just put the same thing. Command C, Command V, send it, I don't care. Then after that, just tiny, tiny little things that you can do, we found that if you go, there's something called, Spot UV, which is the kind of gloss that you put over the top of a piece of paper it gives it a smooth finish. If you go uncoded, which isn't that much more again, and if you go a little bit heavier GSM, you get this almost organic furry feel to it.

51:29It's like every innocent smoothie label. You know, it kind of feels a bit more raw and organic and natural. We see, what we're talking about here is this brilliant thing, which is it's very simple if you want to solve problems, which is stop trying to think like Newton and come up with universal, will universally applicable context -free laws. That's been done, it's called physics. We've done that. Instead you've got to think like Darwin. Now, we mentioned earlier this difference between effectively evolutionary thinking, which I think the evolution is a study of how things change, not how things are.

52:08That's a fundamental difference. Well, evolution come, the most banal description of evolution, but which is also incredibly insightful is things are the way they are because they got that way. Okay, which sounds like absurdity, but when you actually think a little bit more deeply, then it forces you to ask the question, well, how do they get that way? Okay, and where else could we go from here? You know, what are the tools that are disposable to get from here to somewhere better? Okay. Now, one of the things I think that is nopstickal to problem solving, I think the reason that comedians are often evolutionary thinkers Ricky Gervais being an obvious case, but John Cleese, another one, okay?

52:49Absolutely fascinated by, you know, evolutionary thought. It's a gateway to complexity. It's a gateway to thinking in terms of complex systems and complex systems changing over time. And it's an escape from the idea that there must be universal laws. I've got a friend called Jagdbala, known on the web as hanging noodles, who always argues that we monotheistic cultures like Christianity have a disadvantage in our thinking because unlike Hindus, we're prone to what he calls monothearism. We need one theory to explain everything. And he points out that actually in Hinduism, you know, we don't have that problem because we're used to the fact that there's, you know, the elephant and the...

53:31I mean, I think he said his mother praised on an altar which has an elephant, a monkey and Jesus on it. And there's no inherent contradiction to that. Now, that's why I'm quite hopeful about having a Hindu Prime Minister, because I think if we unleashed his lack of monotheism and freed him from political Donber, he could be crazy really, really quite interesting. But that complexity thing is really interesting, because one of the things that you need to lose in order to understand complex systems is an idea of what you might call discussing things that make you look important. One person called it the higher twaddle.

54:07And that's, you know, I noticed this with a former chief executive, you know, if he was interviewed instead of talking about advertising and, you know, he'd always talk about like the Fed and Janet Yellen, you know, and likely interest rate rises, okay? Right? And that's kind of an, that's a self -important thing to talk about. Weirdly, people in Britain instead of solving British problems, somehow weirdly adopt American. It's a signaling thing. And it's a signaling thing, which is, I care about these things, and I'm so important that I'm only going to debate them at the very highest level. Yeah.

54:39Okay. And so I mean, there were always people, people go right out of defund the police in the United States. I go, I'm a Brit, right? First of all, my responsibility for what I think is a terrible criminal justice system in the United States. My responsibility for that ended in 1776. Okay. I don't think it's great, but it's not my problem. Okay. Secondly, I wanted to start some Brit demonstrations going around going, disarm the police. Because it's, it's, it's what's so interesting is if you're American, this defund the police is debatable, but the idea that the police shouldn't carry guns is probably to them so bizarre that they think you're insane.

55:14Okay. Other things in the United States, four weeks of paid vacation. Okay. I've never met anybody in Britain so right wing that they think we should have less holiday time. Nobody, zero. Nobody's ever said, wing another two percent on GDP growth if we just got rid of people's holiday. Doesn't happen, never exists. If we cut maternity leave down to who not half weeks. No, no, no. Those things actually, once you have them, they're air friars, they're Japanese toilets. Once you have them, there's no going back. Everyone's an evangelist and they get grandfathered. Yeah, once you've once you've got there, you never go back.

55:45Yeah. Okay. And I'm kind of going, well, you know, first of all, you have to put down, if you look at what Darwin did to have what he's probably one of the five biggest insights, to be honest, I mean, I'm going to stand up for Alfred Russell Wallace, not least because I was born in Lombardock, which is the same village that he was born in, tiny Welsh village. And my ambition is to be, I think you've probably already succeeded, is the second best evolutionary thinker born in Lombardock. I think that's a kind of attainable sensible ambition. Okay. But I'm really worried that someone will crop up, you know, Imperial College London.

56:21Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a fledgling evolutionary psychologist from Lombardock. Exactly. And it was very sweet because I spoke at the Royal Institution and I made the prediction that I was probably only the second person from Lombardock ever to have spoken at the Royal Institution. And sure enough, I think Alfred Russell Wallace spoke there in sort of 1860, whatever it was. He's fived into the 20th century, actually. But if you look at what Darwin did and what Russell Wallace did, they didn't get, they didn't get involved in self -aggrandizing theory first. They went around interesting funny little places and they looked at the beaks of finishes.

56:57Now I think if you want to solve political problems, actually this is what I love working in advertising, because you can get down into the weeds of microscopic things like what's the effect of choice architecture on property selection or indeed dating websites. You can actually, we have a kind of mantra in our behavioral science practice which is to be trivial because our argument is in a complex system, quite often the things that make a difference may be surprisingly small. They're kind of butterfly effects and your job is to look for the point of intervention in the system where the smallest change has the biggest effect.

57:32Buckminster Fuller called it trim tab, on his gravestone it says, call me trim tab. And the trim tab, I don't know, non -Engineer, but it's the bit on the end of a rudder I think on a ship or plane, which only move slightly, but it's the greatest point of leverage in terms of turning that ship. It's like an excellent rudder on the end of a rudder or something. Right, okay. And my point is that we have, and I had an argument with someone who is that I think he was the political correspondent of the FT. And I said, went John Major, you, a lot of your listeners be too young to remember this, but I'm always conscious of this.

58:09I found myself doing things like now, explaining what a facts machine was and things like that. But when he invented the cone's hotline, he was widely ridiculed for that. So he invented this thing, which was a phone number, where you could report cones that were blocking off the road, where no roadworks were being performed. And you could also get advanced warning of where cones were going to be. At the time he came up with that, he was the prime minister. And this was regarded as the most comical and absurd thing you could possibly imagine. Like everyone was being terrorised by roving bands of cones.

58:45I'm not saying that. He was solving a problem, which, like potels, which annoys a great number of people all the time. And it was non -controversial, but it was considered absolutely beneath his dignity. Well, many argument is that probably the way you solve big problems is by tinkering around with a lot of small things. And then sometimes the big problems just weirdly go away. Okay? I think that tackling problems head on is usually counterproductive, but the argumentation tendency that people want to win an argument rather than solving a problem. First of all causes this tribal polarization, which means that people very rapidly then start saying, I won't actually argue for what's good, I'll argue for whatever path of action most and noise my opposing tribe.

59:31Correct. Yeah, it's not what's most effective. It's what signals that I am a acolyte. Yes. I'm a devoted, unquestioning athlete of this particular... Let me give you this magic. I've come up with this idea of the unreliable ally. So if I know one of your views and from it, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe, you're probably not a serious thinker because you've put your entire world ideology on as a onesie as opposed to... Dominant Cummings' great insight was he said that effectively the language of left or right is a tribal convenience for people who are into political cosplay.

1:00:09Right. It's rather like, you know, okay, most people are kind of interested in politics in the way that I'm interested in Star Wars, which is, I'll watch it if it happens to be on, but I'm not going to go to a convention and dress as Darth Vader, okay. And politics is full of the kind of people who dress up as Darth Vader and get unbelievably involved in insane details of how the federation is actually the governance of the federation. Most people are like that. The other inside of Dominic Cummings was he said, most people in reality are both more left wing and more right wing than politicians fully understand.

1:00:42So ordinary people in a way are saner and more diverse politically than the people who've been forced to take sides. They get reduced down to a dashboard, and that isn't able to fully capture. One vote from somebody doesn't fully encapsulate just how far right and how far left you are because on balance you aggregated that you are a bit left, so you voted Labour, you are a bit right, so you voted Conservative. This idea is... So avoiding that idea and to chair anything, I'm right for the spectator, Polly, because the weird thing is, it would have been completely... Actually, no, that's not fair.

1:01:12Actually, that's not fair. I was going to say that in the 1970s it would have been the opposite where the right wing press got much more annoyed about you writing something left wing than vice versa. Actually, that's probably not fair of the British, very interesting, by the way, which is if you're American, okay, there's quite a simple narrative which you can reasonably believe, which is that most progress socially, not necessarily economically, but most social progress happens under a democratic regime, okay? So you go back to say, wimp works for women. That was my cousin Woodrow, who was definitely bizarrely, he's like my fourth cousin twice a roof.

1:01:50His mum was English from a Scottish family. I just, just to even things out, my other trace, American relative is in prison in Washington state for kidnapping and attempted murder. So Swig is around about it. Right? Yeah. But the, the interesting thing there is that, you know, most of those kind of forward movements, the civil rights movement, etc. happened under in a democratic regime. And so it's very easy if you take the American narrative on board, which is basically there, these well -intentioned Democrat people who do nice things and then Republicans tend to be nasty. I don't think that maps very neatly onto the UK.

1:02:30So if you look at the UK, votes for women was actually a conservative government. The NHS was set up undoubtedly by a Labour government, actually, but actually on the recommendations of beverage, who was liberal. I think same -sex marriage was Conservative government. I think the legalisation of, by the way, if you go back, the Guardian supported the South in the American Civil War. The spectator, a right -wing publication, was about the only publication in the UK to support the union against the Confederacy. The spectator in the 1960s was known as the Bugger's Bugle for its campaigning for the legalisation of homosexuality.

1:03:10Another force that was absolutely decisive in that campaign was bizarrely the Church of England. So there's not that bizarrely I suppose if you consider that, other sex jewels in the CDA Church positions. God. Okay. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. At the time, no, no, no, no, no, no. There were quite a few, trust me. Okay. But, but I mean, actually there was an Archbishop of Canterbury at some point in the 60s who kind of needed protection because of his position on that matter. If you want to see a really advanced group in terms of being ahead of the curve on anything, it's the Quakers. I mean, if you're an empiricist, everybody would become a, you know, what we really need is Quaker Revival.

1:03:45Okay. But the thing is, you can't have a demonstration, can you? It was a quaker. What do we want? Okay, it doesn't really work. But my point is that actually, if you look at the British social progress, I mean, you know, the anti -slavery campaign has some of the motorey, okay, Shostlery was. It's actually British progress is much, much less easy to kind of stereotype than in the United States. And so, you know, you actually look at the history of different publications and their opinions on different things. The idea, actually, which my kids seemed to absorb, which was everything was horrible until left -wing people came along and made it better.

1:04:25Yeah, which is more alive and full. This sort of force of history, I think, is kind of a bit born out. I have to say, and you know, it's complicated, obviously. It's a bit, you know, you could say, well, there is some empirical evidence for that in the United States. Although you had a democratic party, which was completely weird, while the South was overwhelmingly Democrat, you had that kind of weird and holy alliance thing going on. But it's not really safe. And this business of taking American concerns because they're the most important, because it's America, okay? And getting wildly excited about them in the UK, even though our problems are different, okay?

1:05:03So I'll give you just a very simple example of this, which is, you know, if you talk about white privilege, okay? No, I'm, to some extent, the beneficiary in arguably of exactly that. The only point I'd make is that when I was at, One of the reasons I'm white, okay, I'm off of the obvious ones. One of the reasons I'm white is I was born in the UK in 1965, when I think someone correct me on this, the population of the UK was 97 % white, okay, in 1965. So, you know, the odds that I'm going to be white, it's not like, it's not a situation like the United States where you've had generations of people effectively unfairly disadvantaged.

1:05:43Okay, the people who are disadvantaged hadn't arrived at the point when I was being born to the most part, okay? Now, as a consequence, simply transplanting American history and American preoccupations and American narratives and imposing them on Australia, the UK, France, okay? Doesn't really work. And yet these people do it because they want to identify themselves with the highest profile, you know, biggest debate, denoge, or so they can take sides. And that's completely inimical to, you know, we've got, we've got other things to be guilty of, where Brits, let's be honest, okay. It's very interesting, actually, I had a great aunt who's an anthropologist called Beatrice Blackwood, who spent her her life kind of connected to the Pit Rivers Museum.

1:06:32And her diary survived. And sometime about 1923 she went to Memphis I think might have been I think was Memphis okay I thought that was really interesting to see you know how does you know fairly you know obviously it's an anthropologist fairly conventional English woman of 1923 up a middle class family how does she react to going to the American south in the 1920 and I thought her reaction we gosh this is really you know tiny bit you know it's a bit dodgy you know it's a bit off you know she was actually horrified I mean and there's just these pages of her raging against the fact that she wasn't even allowed to visit a black household because they wouldn't allow her in because if Word got out that a white woman had been in their house, there'd be trouble.

1:07:13Okay? Now, we've got loads of floors over here which we can solve and we can look at. But I don't think there's a wonderful case from your part of the world, isn't there? which is a battle where the pubs refused to deny access to coloured servicemen when they were billeted somewhere on the northeast, doesn't it? Not sure. Are you a monkey hanger? Are you a... Technically a smoggy. Or your smoggy? As it's referred to. The American audience at this point just complied with the middle three. Please have got it. Where ICI have a huge big industrial plant that spews out all manner of smokers. But I mean, different countries, you know, the situation in Canada is fundamentally different for the situation elsewhere.

1:07:54And the idea that you have to solve problems by basically looking to the United States and then just importing wholesale, whatever happens to be the fashionable topic do you're over there. Seems to me crazy. And if I were in the US, I'd be competing anyway for four weeks paid vacation, which would benefit everybody. Yeah, that seems to be the vanguard of social change should be paid vacation and a bit more maternity leave. The only person who's just that was Bernie Sanders and everybody thought he It was just because of that that they thought he was a communist, but there may be other reasons as well.

1:08:25One of my favorite stories that I've learned over the last couple of years about David Oglevie that I've never got chance to talk to you about was when Fortune published an article and titled it, Is David Oglevie a genius question mark? I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark. Is there any truth in that? That's not, gosh.

1:08:50Funnily enough, he's an interesting case in point because he's a university dropout, okay, so he didn't have a degree. He was, when he started the agency, he was former chef, failed tobacco farmer. I think during the war he'd been in MI6, someone in Washington as well. He was kind of an inflemming character in me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, he, he, he, and Fleming, by the way, was also successful in a sense, relatively late in life. And by the way, we need more of these stories because you know, you can re, you know, it's never too late. Colonel Sanders, you know, was, sorry, was 65 when he founded Kentucky Fried Chicken for them, was, okay.

1:09:29And David Ogleby was a kind of Colonel Sanders of advertising. He was relatively late and he had the advantage of surviving for a long time. There are people within Ogleby who think that his brother Francis, who tragically died young and was based in the UK rather than the US, was as much the brains behind the operation as David was. But I met him once, fortunately, and I knew his wife quite well, his widow now. And yeah, I think he had some advantages, okay? So he was doing advertising at first for fairly aspirational products at a time of great American Angle Affiliar. So he was advertising Guinness Rolls -Royce, Shwebs, the English tourist board, for example, which allowed him to do a particular style of kind of erbein aspirational advertising at a time when most American advertising was quite crashed.

1:10:20Yeah, it was too an educated audience. Yeah, yeah. It could work out the inference. I mean, famously, that Rolls -Royce advertisement at 60 miles an hour appeared only twice, and it was in the Wall Street Journal. What was that? At 60 miles an hour, the louder sound in this new Rolls -Royce is the ticking of the electric clock. What is it that makes the Rolls -Royce the best car in the world? There really is no magic about it. It is simply patient attention to detail. Says an eminent Rolls -Royce engineer. I even memorized the subhead. But it's, he was very, the one thing everybody can learn from him is writing.

1:10:53And he is closest, I think, as a prose writer, if you read his books. One of his books is terrible weirdly, which I think is called Blood Brains and Beards as autobiography. The rest of the books are excellent. I think everybody's allowed one bad book, but it's a wonderful prose style, very similar to Conan Doyle, and it's very, very simple and easy to read with every sort of 57th word being a slightly more complicated or slightly more highfalutin word, just to remind the reader that the writer isn't an idiot. And I think it's actually a great approach to communication, which is that little signalling in the role's rice advertisement.

1:11:31If you are too different to drive a role's rice, you can drive the Bentley. Yeah, I actually said you have a Bentley with a less kind of grandiose radiator grill, effectively. And so he was, it was actually, it's a probably actually, you know, other people who are big fans of that kind of pro -sock. Kingsley Amos was a big admirer of Conan Doyle, and it's a particular way of writing, which is incredibly easy to read, but at the same time really intelligent and quite her bane. Well, I really loved about at least my research that I have managed to do with David Ogleby is his approach to engendering, which you guys have obviously continued now.

1:12:09Engendering this, there are no wrong answers, creativity, kind of culture, which I think is really great. Well, it's a huge, I mean, I was saying to some clients the other day, we actually, We make it easy for ourselves in one way, which is it's one of very few corporates that this is why I'm very in the comedy world. I'm very interested in other forms of anomalous economic activity if you like where you're actually paid to be weird and You you don't realize how rare and precious it is until you move into until you encounter management consultants Okay, where the whole thing is kind of templated formulaic.

1:12:47They recruit engineering graduates which by the way is a terrible waste of engineering talent. I want engineers going and making bloody things. I don't want them bloody well producing PowerPoint decks at sort of 200 pounds an hour. What a waste, you know, you know, those people could be producing space rockets or something, but instead they're going and producing these effing PowerPoint decks from management consulting firms. And the value of actually having, so most organizations, first of all, logic is a good proxy for, in other words, the course of action that has the best argument attached must be the best course of action.

1:13:24And once unusual and advertising and comedy and a few other things, music obviously I guess, is that we don't buy that, that we don't buy the idea that whatever has a good argument attached to it must be right. Because there's probably a better idea which comes from left field, which you won't arrive at through pre -rationalization, you can only post -rationalize it. Now, that distinction, by the way, is quite interesting. I won't go into the whole thing about Charles Russell Perce, brilliant American philosopher of the 19th century, and I won't go into the stuff about, you know, the whole thing of abductive inference, being a different form of mental process.

1:14:04But if you look at actually quite I don't want to pharmaceutical progress. It actually happens backwards. It's not we have this disease, we need to cure it. Ooh, look, let's do these things. Here's a cure. Those processes generally lead to fairly, well, actually not that reliable, tolerable incremental progress over a very long period. Let's not discount that, because over a period of 80 years, we do get better at things. The real breakthrough things happen backwards. words, okay, which is Viagra, penicillin. In other words, it's almost a cure for which there is no known disease, rather than a disease for which there's no use this for, it's giving people erections.

1:14:47Well, what happened was it was intended as an angina remedy, Viagra, and there are two stories about it, one of which is that the nurses noticed that when the guys came in for their kind of people on the trial, when they came in for their kind of checkup, they were sitting in a really weird way. And the other story I've heard is that at the end of the trial, they were told, well, OK, we're obviously processing the trial results, which were pretty inconclusive as far as Angina went. So could you hand back any unused pills you have to which the response in every previous trial have been, yes, or here they are.

1:15:20And then this trial went, no! OK, right, OK. There's also a fascinating story, which is that a German pharmaceutical company got their first. noticed the side effect and immediately rejected the drug, because they failed to see the opportunity to, in other words, as any angina cure that caused people to go around in a pre -apic state of two messengers was obviously no good as an angina medication, and they failed to see beyond it, which is that, now I'll tell you two other stories of this. I was talking to some other people. One of the great things about being advised, Jim, is you can just go and talk to, I mean, to be honest, most discussion and decision making and argumentation is top down.

1:16:01Most progress is bottom up or horizontal. So we organize organizations in the absolute worst way for problem solving, which is what you need is people who know quite a bit about three different things to solve a problem. Because more and more modern problems aren't problems within a specialism, they're problems that involve the combination of two specialisms. So, anyway, here's an interesting one, which is a drugs company I was speaking to, giving a talk to. And to be honest, I think I learned, when I give these talks to companies, often I learn as much from them as they do from me. They pay me so fine.

1:16:34Okay. This is a case where they were looking at drugs to treat autoimmune diseases such as rheumatodarthritis. And what happened was that some of the drugs they tested were appalling, right? Because because they actually had the opposite effect, they boosted the immune system. And of course, if you've got a disease where your immune system is attacking your own body, it's the worst thing you want to do. So they put these on the shelf and go, okay, you know, rule that out. And then someone a little while later goes, if you're trying to practice immunotherapy for cancer, a drug that strengthens the immune system, that's not a bug, that's a feature, okay?

1:17:15And similarly, that happened with Nightness, which is one of my favorite marketing stories, where they were looking when they created nightness, and this was long before there was something called day nurse, okay. They were looking to produce a flu remedy. And they produced a very successful, they should be honest, it was treating actually treating the symptoms rather than the cause, okay. But they produced this flu treatment, so novel remedy but a treatment, which was brilliant, but the downside was it sent you to sleep. So you couldn't drive or operate heavy machinery. I don't regularly operate heavy machinery, but it's been a little bit of...

1:17:48I love that warning. Yeah, I love that warning too. Oh, fuck, I was about to do so heavy excavating. My afternoon... And you ruined it. Orchlee thriving has been taken from me. It's been completely... It's rather like that video message, which is you mustn't show this video on an oil rig. Do you remember that? Yeah. At the beginning of VHS videos, it said, this is not licensed for the display on oil rigs. And you imagine those people 500 miles out of the North Sea gang. Oh, fuck. Press the pause button. I'm about to watch speed two. This is about to watch speed two. And that's ruined it for us.

1:18:15You know, any moment now, someone's going to turn up from the copyright licensing authority, a BP again, a V &D trouble. And but anyway, the fascinating thing is that what happened is they said, okay, so it's no good, it sends people to sleep. And then a little guy, I've always heard the stories, a little guy, kind of from the marketing department, said, actually, if you position it as a nighttime flu remedy, okay, the fact that it sends you to sleep is a bonus. It's not a problem. So, nightness was born by basically reframing. And this is what I said about high speed two. I said high speed two is a terrible answer, really, in the sense that it goes at the wrong speed along the wrong route.

1:18:57Lots of things are terrible about you know, the whole thing was misconceived. But it was the first thing that was wrong about high speed two was the question they asked. And they asked an engineering question which is how do you transport X people over Y miles? at a time of Z or T, okay? Right? And so they set down those kind of mathematical parameters. Now, a marketing person would have asked a different question, which is a much more interesting open -ended question, which has far more scope for expanding the solution space to allow for creative solutions. And the question a marketer would have asked is, how do you make the train service between Manchester and London so good and so enjoyable people feel stupid driving?

1:19:37Now speed obviously, speed may be part of that. Convenience, comfort, enjoyable ability. Comfort, enjoy the connectivity, catering, okay. Variation of seating. So, you know, I mean, you remember strangers on a train, those Hitchcock films, whether you used to have the observation car, the back of the train, fuck me. Every time you watch, this is a train in the 1950s, you go, oh God, I wish I had trains like that now. They even had a smoking thing at the back, didn't they? Now, I did have a crazy idea, which is if you spent the money, okay, this is hypothetical, but this is my comedy is so important.

1:20:11It's much more easy to start silly and rain it back than it is to start boring and rain it forwards, as it were. And I said, just to hyperlateral exercise, if you kept the tracks the same and you spent all the money on both buying and recreating the world's greatest steam locomotives, right? right? And you round the trainers from Manchester, like your train at 915, we've pulled by the Union Pacific Big Boy, okay, or the Mallard, right? Or a replica of the Mallard. Now, it would be slower, okay? I'm assuming the Wi -Fi could be quite good. You wouldn't go into full, you know, kind of, you know, 19th century or, you know, mid -20th century nostalgia.

1:20:50But every single tourist to London would go to Manchester just to ride on the Fing train, right? If you had a replica of the bloody Harry Potter train, okay? You'd actually get people coming to London so they could travel to Manchester. Yeah. If you think that's by the way, Comical, I've got a friend who's the warden of an Oxford College, a former boss of mine, and the tourist visitors to Oxford Colleges basically have completely bifurcated. There are colleges which nobody visits and there are colleges which are swarming with tourists. The entire discriminatory data between those two is whether the college features in a Harry Potter film.

1:21:27Wow. So new college Oxford has a tree apparently, which is featured in one of the films, and that has tourists warming in. You for this tree. Next door you can have a fantastic college architecture, maybe if it didn't feature in Harry Potter, you know, basically it's... Pointless. It's, you know, it's what you call those things that blow through the place. Tumbleweed. Tumbleweed. Yeah. Yeah, what's your thoughts on the abandonment of this billion dollar train thing? There's something recently that's been thrown up in here You can still solve it you go and hand the job to jive said this you go and hand a hundred million pounds to Johnny Ives and I've and his mate mark newson mark newson Australian designer already has form here because he designed the quantest business class seat Which in my opinion is the best actually never mind business classes the best airline seat ever conceived by the wit of man And you say, you give them the brief, okay, we've got this stupid railway going along this stupid route.

1:22:21How do you make it just absolutely amazing? I mean, Johnny Ives back in the UK, right? I'm sure a hundred million are getting out of bed. Okay, and you just go, okay, you're in charge of the design of the train interiors, you're in charge of the catering, the connectivity, your brief, open brief. Make this journey so amazing that people want to go on the train for the sake of the train, not for the sake of the journey. That's the brief. It's the brief that QNAR effectively had, okay? So when jet jet, Jen hair craft were invented, okay? The blue ribbon, which was that competition for how fast you could cross the Atlantic, became, to be honest, a bit of an academic exercise, because if you could get there in under a day by plane, even if you had to refuel in Ganda, it didn't really matter whether the QE, the Queen Mary, was faster than the bloody United States or the Normandy anymore.

1:23:08Okay? So QNAR basically had to go, okay, we've got to stop thinking of these ships as a sort of form of transportation. They've got to be a destination in themselves. And consequently, they kind of invented the cruise ship industry. Salt up. I don't give them 100 % credit. But that idea of so cruise ships, when you think about it, you board a cruise ship, you go around in a circle and you come back. I mean, you do visit some pain for a journey. Yeah, you know, but actually the cruise ship is as much of a destination as the destination is. What would you do that with high speed too? Yeah, what would you do?

1:23:37Train twin twister is my suggestion. Solution to train over crowding is to turn close proximity to other people from an annoyance to a source of entertainment, okay? A lot of intimacy concerns there. Yeah, I did think of the legalities, but you know, your next station is head corn, left hand, yellow. Right, okay. Come on, come on. Well, you probably have to have gender segregated. That's a kind of concern. It depends if you go into Brighton or not, that might be your bonus. You've also got the issue, I suppose, I've seen a lot of the people that travel up and down. This country is getting older.

1:24:11Yeah. And I'm not sure whether you would have to have it each different stops and sort of paramedic, perhaps, or a physio that could get it ripped down. By the way, that is part of the appeal of the cruise ship industry to the elderly in the United States, which is, you've got a doctor on board. Right. You've got three weeks where your medical care is basically taking care of. If you tumble down the waterslide, it's not irrelevant. And by the way, if you're a cruise ship doctor, you're a shitting good doctor, because you've got to be able to cope with everything, right? You can't specialise. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:24:40If someone's on board, you're sort of, you know, 200 miles from land, you can't say, I'm Terry, sorry, it's not my specialism. I need to refer. Yeah, I'm a perforated e -dram, two or half, he's like, exactly, yeah, yeah. I bet you've got to be a shit hot generalist. What would you do to improve business class flights? Interesting. Yeah, I've got an idea for that for short haul, which is really mischievous. You know how they would say the biggest car company in the world, Uber, does know any cars, and the biggest, a combination company in the world, Airbnb, does know any houses. I've got this idea of a staffed airline that doesn't know any planes, okay?

1:25:14And this is, I did think of having a vaping airline, I did wonder about that. Well, you could just vape on board. You just vape on board, it's not that. Like a vaping tax, a vaping search art. Yeah, and you'd have two classes, 20 milligrams at the front. Ah, that's fantastic. But I didn't wonder about that, But actually my idea was you buy a country house near Stansford, okay? And every time you fly, okay, you park your car at this country house, okay? You're checking your luggage and the country house is, it is like the party in the wolf of Wall Street, okay? Right? It's like eyes wide shut, okay?

1:25:51It's absolute total opulence, okay? And then when you're ready to fly, you're driven in, you know, Dr. Evel's car, which of course is an S -class Mercedes, where the window's blacked out, isn't it? Okay, which is, I don't like, you know, it's kind of like Dr. Evel's natural conveyance of choice. Okay, you're driven to the plane, you walk onto a Ryanair flight, okay? And the Ryanair flight costs you 37 quid, and it costs 250 quid to use the lab. You're a nightclub promoter, right? Yeah, yeah. We could go into business today. I'm ready to go. So the whole idea is, okay, the bid on the plane is only an hour, it doesn't really matter if it's Ryanair and OV.

1:26:27Okay, you know, you could do a thing where you book the middle seat out. Okay, so you've got a bit of space. But basically, you use Ryanair and the whole aim is you make the airport experience amazing, where you're literally ferried to the plane. Then the plane bit you don't try and compete because there's a limit what you can do at 30 ,000 feet to make it amazing. Yeah. So certainly a limit to what's illegal that would make it, what's legal that would make it amazing is quite, there are lots of illegal things I'm sure you could do it. They make it more amazing. They would make it amazing, but we'll kind of, you know, we'll draw veil over that.

1:26:57Should we say? Yeah, well, so we were talking all year round about kind of this culture of creativity that you guys have managed to foster and kind of perpetuate as well. I know that you've spoken to Rick Ruben. Yes, I know that. That was fantastic. You think a lot about creativity for yourself. By the way, Rick asked me a question, which I'm going to ask you. He said, why haven't you moved to the United States? And you have moved to the United States. Now, you've moved to Austin, which I think is very clever. Yeah. because I think Austin is actually an interesting game, which is Americans are choosing it because they want to live within a cool culture rather than the cash culture.

1:27:34Okay? In a sense, the status game in Austin is slightly different. You've read that poll, Graham SA, each city whispers something different to you. Lovely. Yeah. I haven't, but I will. Yeah. He's an interesting guy. You know, you go to Miami. Miami whispers to you. You are as important as the watch on your wrist or the shoes that you wear or the car that you drive. Right? L .A. whispers to you, you are as important as you do. As your role of the entertainment industry. The people that you know and the people who know you. You know in L .A. there's a club which is only for people who don't work in the entertainment industry.

1:28:06Right. Because any other club they join, they're automatically at the bottom, you can own some business, you know, literally a billion dollar business and you can own it. But in L .A. if you go to the same club as the celebs, you're basically treated like Phil. Second class. So they have a kind of separate club for people who aren't in the film. It's fascinating. And LA, you're right, it whispers. London's very complicated because it's the bloody centre of everything from government to advertising to business to... I can't remember what he says. London whispers to you. But yeah, so the... The Washington also has the great advantage of being a democratic city in a Republican state.

1:28:41I'd people say that blue dot red ocean thing. I see no one that's liberal. Everybody that's there is in some degree based on conservative. Sorry, really? That's what I see, man. I assume that it was my idea of heaven, which is kind of, it's short range left wing and long range right wing, which is... That's probably about it. I can go out and buy really good coffee made by people with interesting body art, but then in the afternoon I can drive into the desert and fire machine guns and oil drums. Both of those things are actually true. Yeah, you can. That's Austin in a nutshell. I live in a tank.

1:29:14That is Austin in a nutshell. But definitely one of the things that's interesting. I absolutely adore Texas. So I've been having the odd dig at, you know, I said I got nothing against the United States, my cousin Woodrow was present at the fucking place. But I have to say that Texas, I find absolutely loved. Now I'm a bread, I'm a white guy, etc. Actually it seems to me, I've got a Texan colleague who says, all Texans get on pretty well because they're all Texans. They have an identity which transcends other things. Now Austin, you say that actually you find oddly that you don't find that kind of blue dot?

1:29:50Well, I don't know, man. I don't know how much of it's selection. I love my visit there. But I love Dallas. I love Dallas. I don't know how much of it's a selection effect because the people that I'm around are going to be people who have maybe achieved a degree of financial freedom that's caused them to lean more right or whatever. But there's definitely... And low taxes. Correct. There's definitely a freedom to and a freedom from culture. So there is a freedom to do the things that I want and there is a freedom from any of the fucking interventions of the people from Washington, et cetera, et cetera But going back to the creativity thing for the people who want to try and get a They want to artificially inseminate their creativity muscle.

1:30:25Yes What are some of the things that you advise the guys that you work with in the companies you work with to do to engender a creative culture? Study biology not just sort of physics and maths in other words study complex things I have a kind of weird theory which might form a chapter in my next book which is in a weird kind of way Cops a better scientist than scientists are Okay, now let me explain okay if so one of the things I recommend is read a lot of true life crime Okay study that kind of stuff by the way. There's a fantastic Andrew Schultz Routine on this on his wife's propensity to watch films about serial killers The female obsession with serial killers is never going to make sense to me.

1:31:08But do you have it? I have it as well. It's great because my wife and I both, I think she likes it because there's a lot of psychologies and I like it so I guess killed. But no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm only joking. Bond over your love of true crime. There is a really interesting thing about reading about a true life crime, which is it's one case where you get an extraordinary amount of detailed study into the life. If you've read those, you know, books about, say, Peter Sutcliffe in his family, you're an extraordinary amount of detail into a family which in many cases is completely ordinary, except for the obviously the outlier that somebody kills somebody or a lot of people.

1:31:41So you do get that weird thing which is a very deep study not into a major historical figure except in the worst possible sense. But no, it is interesting, but what it is about detective work is you're kind of working And okay, there's a Conan Doyle piece. So I actually, one of the, I think one of the sources of my creativity was obsessively reading Sherlock Holmes short stories as a fairly young kid. Okay, my behavioral science thing was probably weirdly reading Esop, who is really the first behavioral scientist even though he lived in the sixth century BC. You know, Jesus was also a pretty good behavioral scientist.

1:32:21If you look at it, you know, the parable of the lost sheep is basically loss of version. You have really interesting things like the parable of the vineyard is perceived equity. Actually, there's a hell of a lot of behavioral science in Jesus. So that's my third book. You know, there's that book, Jane Austen, was a game theorist. My third book, Jesus, was a behavioral economist. Right. I wonder how that one's going to go down. I don't know how that's going to go down. But actually, what Conan Doyle talks about through the mouthpiece of Sherlock Holmes is this business of reasoning backwards. And he said that everyone knows how to reason forwards.

1:33:01This has happened, so this is going to happen next. And it's the natural mode of thinking. Reasoning backwards is not actually that difficult to do, but most people don't do it. And that is, if you think about a detective, a work of detection, it's, this thing has happened. Now we have to find out what were the pre -existing conditions that led to this outcome. And in advertising forward thinking creativity, we want to get to this place, in the words of Roger L. Martin, a very brilliant business guru, what would have to be true for this to come about? I think that's the question, by the way, a lot of political movements don't ask.

1:33:35They have a hypothesized ideal future, okay? And they don't subtly ask the question, okay, what needs to happen between now and in other words play the hand your dealt We happen to be here. We want to get there Let's not just ignore where we are and immediately Effectively fantasize into existence a perfectly neat Society because change doesn't work like that you have to start where you are you have to play the Yes, yes, yes, yes, it's very very easy to say why did it take them so long to you know give votes for women, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, if you look at the reality of it, these things take time and also persuasion is slower than legislation, but it's persuasion that actually makes things work.

1:34:21Have you got the, I'll just make that distinction within regard to drink driving, okay? The breathalyzer, penalty points, license bans, for driving, for Americans, we don't have a distinctly driving under the influence and driving while intoxicated. If you're basically intoxicated, you lose your license, okay? The legislation sort of worked, but a lot of people in my parents' generation thought it was a bit naughty to get caught over the limit. My parents didn't drive drunk, I just wanted to absolve them of that. But some of their contemporaries did, and my parents wouldn't stop someone leaving the house if they had too much to drink.

1:34:54They'd encourage them to stay, but they wouldn't like grab their car keys. Now, when something makes it where it's way from being imposed to being adopted, what you see in my children's generation is, they would wrestle one of their friends to the ground before they got a new car over the limit. So America is so different to this? I know. So different. The attitude of Americans to people that drink drive is like, you'll be at some bar or something. So we're going to go to such and such a place. Do you want to come? I was like, oh, right, OK, brilliant. I'm presuming that there's noober waiting outside and someone gets into their Ford F -150.

1:35:26No, no, no. I've just watched you sink three margaritas over the last hour. And no one really bats an eye. I saw this amazing video. I'll find it in our society. L .A. is like that as well. L .A. L .A. Yeah, I mean, Uber has probably reduced this to some degree. But the extent to which people used to drive around L .A. and talk to you. My brother -in -law who lived there for quite a few years just couldn't get his head rounded at all. There was a great video of when they first introduced the, you can't drink and drive. Drink and drive. Not drink then drive. You can't drink and drive. And they're talking to these guys and girls from the deep South in America and they're all in you know beat up Chevy trucks or whatever and They're interviewing them through the window and this dude sat there and there's another one with a woman who's sat there Child on passenger seat without seat belt on beer between legs saying I don't know what this country's coming to that a guy Can't finish his hard day at work and you know have a beer when he's on his way home You know this country's being run by communists these goddamn commies is trying to take our beers away from us.

1:36:30And I'm like, you're drinking and driving. You're literally drinking and driving the same time. The only thing I think in New Orleans, or certainly in Louisiana, I think, is it, isn't it, where you can actually have drive through Margarita stands. Phenomenal. So you literally put a Margarita in your cup holder. Nothing in America is beyond being drive -thruable. The bank, CVS, fucking Margaritas, everything is drive -thruable. That, by the way, I never answered Rube in this question. why I never moved to the United States. And the two reasons, one of which is I'd probably make a million dollars, but then I'd start shopping at Whole Foods, and I'd be back to where I started.

1:37:07Hey, rat. Okay. So the one thing I can't get my head around. This fucking individual, Malthusian trap that you've got yourself into. We had this LA guy who came over, and he was LA -created guy, wonderful guy. And he was in raptures about weight throws. Now, this won't be funny to American audience apologies, okay, but he said, the food is such good quality and such reasonable price. Yes, it's okay. You suddenly realize he grown up on whole foods or Bristol farms or those LAs. And it's completely bipolar American grocery retail. German grocery retail is all about price, really. Okay, American grocery retail, British grocery retail is really all about brand actually.

1:37:45Very interesting. And then you have American grocery retail, which is just like you have a choice between two absurd extremes. It's like having first class and standing remotely. It's kind of weird. I think what happens with British supermarkets is that they are woven into the class structure as well. Yeah, right. You know, little system is not bad, you know. Let me explain this. Okay. One thing which I think is problematic about the British class system, but it's also quite nice. Okay. Is you do reach escape velocity relatively soon? Okay. If you prove yourself reasonably successful materially.

1:38:18Okay. So, okay, this is a total stereotype. Okay. But if you're a Brit, you're not going to do this, right? You're going to come back to the Brit Britain with some money, which I hope you've made in the colonies. OK, right? Slowly. And you're going to buy the old rectory in Minchin Hampton, a flat in London, you'll have a range rover, a Lambrador, a wife called Polly, and two children at private school. A membership to Soho House in the cartels. Basically, at that point, you can stop. Because anything more than that is actually evidence that makes you suspicious. You're probably a drug dealer.

1:38:50though, you know, if you've got a private gent or something like that, people go, it's probably up to no good. Yes. Okay. It's probably a bit shady. It's not really respectable. And so there is that kind of weird thing probably, which is the royal family summary laws, which is because we had a royal family who actually, in many ways, their pleasures until recently, we're extraordinary, walking around muddy fields. Yeah. Yeah. There's a culture of sort of a elite modesty in some ways in the UK. You know, look at a Land Rover Defender. Yeah. It's a, every single person. I have a weird thought in the come market, which is once you produce the electric Land Rover Defender, there can be no more prestigious vehicle than that in a weird way.

1:39:34Why? Because it's hard to explain to the Land Rover Defender is unbelievably beautiful, by the way, the latest iteration of it is fantastic. If you made that electric and therefore, you've got a big tough versatile vehicle, big heavy thing with a huge battery, quite a lot of range, the performance is going to be fine, right, because it's electric. And generally, it doesn't matter what the electric cars, the performance is going to be great. Why would, if you had the money, why would you have any other vehicle? The only other vehicle I can imagine, by the way, is will the proportion, so I'm, as a georgist, I believe that there should be a single land value tax.

1:40:14I believe that an awful lot of technology exists so that people can escape from the rent -seeking depredations of landlords and landowners. And that's one of the great advantages of places like Texas, okay? You've got a super abundance because Austin, like, say, Vegas or, like, say, Phoenix, okay? They were basically built after the car was invented, okay? So living eight miles from the centre of Phoenix doesn't matter because you can just drive in. Retro -affected to have the automobile. In Phoenix, what I love that. Do you have, do you have, go there, Phoenix Scott still, Santa Fe is a fantastic guy.

1:40:45I'm going to Scott Stale in a couple of weeks time for the first time. You can stay at the Hotel Valley Ho. Okay. It's kind of hotel where the rat pack would have hung out. It's really, really cool. Okay. Okay. But I obviously love the place. Now, bear in mind, okay, as a Brit, okay, the two most pointless cities in the United States to visit the New York and San Francisco because they're a crap attempt to recreate a European city. Whereas Brit's love places like Austin or Houston or LA or Chicago because they're really different. They allow you to have a completely different life to the life you'd have in London.

1:41:18And I'm going to make an accusation, okay? Deep down everybody wants to live in suburbia, okay? But in Britain living in suburbia isn't cool. But if you live in LA, you can go and buy effectively a suburban house, you know, up in the kind of, you know, just off. What's that place called? the Wonderland, you know, the Valley thing that goes up towards the Mulhorn Drive. You can basically live in a glorious suburban house because it's LA, it's totally cool. So that's one of those little games. You see, if you move to Bexley Heath, your friends will start disowning you, right? If you move to LA and buy a nice suburban house, totally different.

1:41:56Yeah. So I was thinking about the rebrand of it's speaking about that sort of West Coast phenomenon, this rebrand of Twitter to X. What's your assessment of? It's a very weird thing to do because I would wait until he creates the everything app before you rebrand it. Yeah. That's what seems strange to me. Bundle, Neuralink and SpaceX. Yeah, yeah. Bundle payment vehicles. I mean, if he built, I'll forgive him everything. If he builds in a content payment mechanism Twitter. How do you mean? There is a fundamental, there are lots of holes in the ecosystem, the digital ecosystem, which haven't been plugged because they're natural monopolies and therefore it's very difficult for them to reach critical mass as network goods unless they have monopoly status.

1:42:46Now, looking at the Royal Mail, which is the first real network good, the penny post technically, not the Royal Mail, okay? The penny post was an extraordinary thing because there'd been one penny postal services in London for about 150 years. And this guy, Roland Hill, with the mathematical hellpuff Charles Babbage, the kind of inventor of the computer and one of the 10 greatest mathematicians of his time, managed to do the maths to say, actually, you can scale this up to a national and subsequently an imperial level. So there's an imperial penny post in 1910, or whatever, you know. So when Ramonooj and wrote to GH Hardy and Cambridge, he paid a penny for the land.

1:43:37Now, the mathematics there is to say that in a network of the postal kind of network, the efficiencies in trunk routes, in other words, the cost per mile when you're transporting 50 ,000 letters at a time, the cost per mile is so low that all the costs basically are in collection, sortation, and then last mile delivery. So as a consequence, the distance is actually more or less irrelevant to the cost of carriage, and therefore we can have a flat rate for postage. And it required Babbage to do the maths to prove it worked. Even then, it lost money for the first few years because people weren't in the habit of writing to get the 500 miles away because they didn't know anybody.

1:44:19Okay, right. A thousand of the else. You know, it takes time to develop the print. It takes some time. It's been like, if you own the world's first fax machine, it's not really very useful. Yeah. Okay. And I think there are lots of things and I think two of them are a locker system for e -commerce delivery. And what the government should do is basically license them a monopoly for 10 years. So, okay, if you offer an open access locker system, we'll give you 10 to 15 years of Schumpeterian rent. from your monopoly. And, by the way, it has to be open access so that local shops, I can ring up a local shop in seven oaks, okay?

1:44:54And say, can you drop off a copy of this book in my locker when this locker, you know, sometime this evening after you shut, right? Not just e -commerce, but actually all forms of local commerce and indeed peer -to -peer sending. If I want to send something to my dad, if there's a locker in his village, she's 93, I can basically pop it in my locker and if you send it here. because then you remove the last mile cost of delivery, which is causing environmental costs, it's causing transportation congestion, and it's also, it's not ultimately scalable because as I spoke to someone at PNG about the delivery, the subscription model for things like razors, they're in gelette, right?

1:45:28And they said, the problem with this model is it works at a limited extent. But if we bought everything that way, our homes would turn into a delivery hub. You know, your house becomes the logistics hub, and every time you open the window, So it's B, B, B, B, B. Okay, it just does make sense. At ultimate scale, it doesn't make sense. What's this got to do with Twitter and X? Right. Okay, so there's a similar problem, which is with micropayments for, now I've got a friend called Dominic Young who's in a company called Axate, which is also looking at this problem, which is most people don't want to subscribe to most content.

1:46:02Okay, pay to subscribe. Okay, now there isn't a single case, there may be one case in like Finland, okay, but that's it. There is barely a single case in the world of a tabloid newspaper making a success of the subscription model. What Twitter could do is launch a micropayment system where I keep like 20 quid on my Twitter balance. And every time I want to read an article in, well I do subscribe to the New York Times, but I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal and I bugger if I know I subscribe to the FT, right? Because the FT, there are lots of articles in the FT. I'd pay a pound to read.

1:46:37but I'm not paying 35 quid a month or whatever. I mean, most people claim the FT, I guess, or at least it's tax deductible. Okay, but also the FT, there's a psychological thing going on here, which is that there are certain things in the FT, which I would love to read. There's some fantastic journalists there. We'll just go, go, go, go, go and finish something or other, brilliant guy, okay? But equally, if I pay 40 quid a month for the whole of the FT or whatever it costs, that's 500 quid a year, right? Okay, well, I feel that, you know, 70 % of the money is going to produce articles on the prospects for central banking reform in Ecuador, which are of no interest to me at all.

1:47:18Not sure, though, that much interest to FT readers, but nonetheless, okay, I don't want to pay for the stuff I don't want. And it's a psychological thing, even if the net value to me of each of those articles added together might add up to 20 pounds. I'm not paying for the whole thing because I feel I'm paying for a lot of value that other people are getting but I'm not. So if you centralize the payment ability through Twitter, you could then distribute this. I keep my Twitter balance at 20 quid or 20 US dollars and I go and then FTRT look a bit interesting or pay 50 cents to read that. Yeah. Now you can really monetize high quality and the same goes for video content by the way, the same could go for musical content, okay?

1:47:55Although Spotify has made that work fairly well. But I think for high quality journalism in particular, but equally tabloid journalism, the people who buy the sun, buy it in the way you buy chocolate or crisps or a packet of cigarettes, right? Next to do. Yeah, it's next to the tail. And you go, oh, I feel like a bit of a treat. I'll buy a copy of the SuperSaurer Away Sun. And it's XP and then you take it with you. Those same people do not want it. Just as there are people who will only have pay as you go mobile phones, even if they would be better off on a contract. I won't buy a train season ticket, because my argument is there are two days of the week where I don't take the standard journey.

1:48:36Now, I might actually save money overall on the three journeys I do take, but it pisses me off that I'm getting proportionately worse value than the people who travel in five days a week, but I'm still paying the same. So that feeling of pissed offness prevents me from subscribing to a season ticket, and it prevents me from subscribing to a lot of publications where I would give them 10 quid a month if it was pay as you go. So would you, if you had been either? Also, by the way, if I subscribe to every publication that, you know, I think I subscribe to the Atlantic, I think I subscribe to the New Yorker, but let's add, okay, wired New York magazine, let's add Harpers, the new states, okay, I do subscribe to the spec, but I write for the spectators, so that's obviously.

1:49:18Should have got it free, basically. Exactly. And I subscribe to the Times and the Telegraph, I think, okay, and then I read it. You're probably accumulating what, at least a grander year. Well, this is the point that I've basically reached peak subscription. Okay. Subscription saturates. So in other words, there is a limit to the number of direct debits people have prepared to have. And therefore, you cannot grow the market for paid high quality content or paid entertainment content. Tell you what an interesting business that I found out about recently. I think it's called Rocket Reach. And this company, they go through maybe linked them to your bank or something.

1:49:51I don't really know how it works. but they go through and they look at all of the debits that you've got that are kind of lapsed or pointless or fucking something like that and they get rid of them. Yeah, so if you've been Elon would you - By the way, also, I would also add legislation here, which is it is too difficult to cancel a recurring credit card payment. I was paying for club penguin for my kids, when I was picking them up, pissed from all bar one, a one o 'clock in the morning. I was still paying for club bloody penguin. Now, I mean, you know, I probably had a little sneaky visit to the, no, no, I didn't.

1:50:25Don't worry. But um, I did not go on clubbing. The only time I went on clubbing was an adult. Is my children when they were younger would make me play the games to earn points to decorate their igloo. Fantastic. So they'd outsource to me to get me to play the next. Dad, go to work, please, virtually. Yeah. I wasn't doing anything else. I don't want to end up in the nonsense wing of Wakefield Prism, okay? I'm going on for any other purpose.

1:50:53I'm fucking hell. Look, let's get back to, sorry, get back to ex. If you'd been Elon, would you have waited until you were able to bundle everything underneath? Right. Yeah, because there's too much equity in that. I'm nobody, everybody first do it as Twitter brackets ex. Yeah. There's a hell of a lot of equity in that. It made perfect sense as a name. You had a tweet. It's a very, very bizarre decision of Elon's. I mean, you know, undoubtedly, you know, well, I mean, the most bizarre feature of Elon, okay? If I may say so. Which is, if you take a comedic viewpoint, one of the great things you do, you take this sort of Darwin mentality where you look at little things and suddenly you discover these absurdities everywhere.

1:51:32And Elon's greatest absurdity, okay, is he's in favor of driverless cars, but man's space travel. Now I don't want to be rude, okay? What he means by man's space travel is people who have no obvious aeronautic ability should be able to project themselves as humans into space. But cars, which obviously benefit from being driven by a human, have to drive around autonomously. Now, I don't know where we rude, but isn't that the wrong way around? Okay. Shouldn't cars be driven by people and spacecraft be autonomous? I don't want to be, you know, how much input do the humans in spacecraft have now? No, my brother is an astrophysicist.

1:52:07If you want to get astronomers and astrophysicists, absolutely driven to a point of apoplexy, just mention man space travel, okay? Because they regard it as per dollar spent an extraordinarily bad way of discovering things about the universe. It was described by one colleague of my brothers as spending $300 million to find out how mice rank in zero G. The kind of experiments you've performed on man space travel a kind of absurd compared to something like, you know, a space telescope or something of that kind. Whereas if you look at what those probes do, the non -human probes, it's just, that's just joyous, absolutely joyous.

1:52:56However, I do have a colleague in the advertising industry, Trevor Beatty, whose lifetime dream has been to go into space, and I think he's done this with Virgin. I get it. What is it now, 250 grand? I think that was it, yeah. And he, and all credit to him, He's not some rich, dilatant -y guy who decided it'd be cool. I mean, he's probably quite rich, but he's been an absolute lifetime space obsessive, literally since being a child. So it's perfectly good use of his. I can see where he does that. Each time that we speak, you have become an evangelist for a new category of product. I think this is maybe your fifth or sixth time on the show.

1:53:31Each time that we've spoken, I feel like the first time was the Japanese toilet, the second time. Air Fryer. I was the John the Baptist of bloody airfriars. I can tell you that much. I mean, seriously, I went to Phillips who at the time had a monopoly of air, on a airfriars. Now, this isn't really an interesting point for anybody who's got a business. The thing to look at at a business is not just the rate of growth, okay? You can have extraordinary rates of growth which consists of lots of people trying something and deciding it's shit. I mean, if you compare that thing, what was that Facebook thing, threads, right?

1:54:07Now, if you look at the actual data for the adoption of threads, it was absolutely, you know, exponential rates of insane adoption. If you go there, it's basically, you know, it's based on the way it's planned. Absolutely. Okay. Now the reason for that is it may, they made it very, very easy to sign up. People had a look, didn't like it. You can't actually leave threads because if you want to leave threads, you've got to delete your Instagram account, which understandably people don't want to do. So that's kind of furline trap. Okay. Now, It looks impressive means nothing. By contrast, there are things which grow very, very slowly at first.

1:54:39It's a sigmoid curve. The data you need to look at to give yourself reassurance. If that data is there, is the repeat purchase rate or the subsequent conversion to evangelism? Yeah. Not many people had air frows. Now, I had this event. The reason I went to Phillips and they didn't listen, and I said, look, trust me, you're sitting on an f -ing gold mine here. If you just promote your effective, they will be only manufacturer of air friars at the time. If you promote your air friar and you advertise it, you can create kind of move. Were they not promoting it at all? No, not at all. Didn't advertise it at all.

1:55:13I have no clue. I don't know what that is. Droopy nuts. It's now ninja, right? Ninja at ninja in the incumbent. No, no, ninja wasn't there. T -Full wasn't there. No, but now, if you look at it. No, no, no, ninja has become the Tesla. They have. I've got a 450 XL. I've got a 450 XL. Is that a double, is that a double, no, no, it's a single, it's a single, yeah, it's single, it's extra big. And it goes to 450. So here's my, I'm sure that you've done this already. Look at me teaching the Messiah how to use his own fucking aphry from frozen steak, salt the shit out of it. 12 minutes, either side, slap it on a plate, done perfectly, every time.

1:55:51Every time. I asked, I needed to eat more red meat in my diet, according to my dietitian. So I asked the only person I know who eats a very, very high volume of me, Michaela Peterson, who only eats meat. Yeah, that's a bit weird, isn't it? I mean, I have to say. Okay. I, I, I, I, my huge Jordan Peterson is a bit the same as my attitude to Frankie Boyle, which is in small doses, I quite like him, but I think he's over committed to a particular dogma. And I think what, what he says and there are very interesting insights to be derived from him, but I wonder that there's a phrase that was used to be not power.

1:56:26This equally applies to be on the left, okay? Which is your driven mad by the remorselessness of your own logic, okay? And I don't think anybody should see the world through exclusively a lens of black and white, left or right, okay? I just don't think it's helpful conducive to problem solving. An example on the left would be James O 'Brien of someone who's, you know, I call it James O 'Brien Jesuitism, which is that you're so obsessed with the rightness of your cause that you effectively construct an argument from a fairly dubious assumption and arrive at a place and therefore you go QED my position on this is incontestable okay and what's less visible about that is that the starting point or the driving assumption or axiom of your argument isn't that great your argument seems wonderfully convincing it's a bit like dating sites okay every time I make I've never been a dancer to skate my wife's.

1:57:23I didn't know what dating side I'd go on in terms of fat Welshman. There's probably a niche there, isn't there, I guess. But in any case, by the way, you mentioned that asymmetry that you said, astoundingly, that in your entire time as a nightclub promoter, and as I assume, because I can't tell there's a pretty good -looking guy who was on Love Island, which is partly a WPP creation. So we can take a small amount of credit, by the way, for your incredibly deserved elevation and fame. But you've only actually been spontaneously approached by a woman three times. Twice, was it? Yeah, yeah, twice.

1:58:01That overcoming of approach anxiety for women, guides talk about how hard it is to go up to women. And that's true. That is true. But for a girl to do it to a guy, they need to swallow something else, which is that if they are rejected, they've had to overcome a social convention that is very, very embarrassing to have done. To be rejected, it's the same reason, it's the reverse reason, actually, of why women ashamed for not performing in bed in a different way to manner, but men get ashamed for not always being hot to trot when the wife is. For some reason, if you as a guy, the guy is always supposed to be holding.

1:58:39That's the Jimmy Carjo, isn't it? that men and women desire sex to the same extent. The difference is if a woman wants sex, it actually happens. I think that's a Jimmy Garry too. I don't disagree. Go back to it. Let's round out this evangelist thing. So we had Japanese toilet. We had the... I do take my Darwinism very literally, which is don't have a sense of proportion, don't get worried about being distracted. Because, okay, I imagine on the beagle, the guy spent 10 years of his life fucking around with earthworms for God's sake. Hey, right. Mustang Machi, which made it come Mustang Machi GT.

1:59:16What was the other thing? There was something you got for your dad telephone with massive buttons. No, that was a very interesting thing, which was that the idea of designing for the disabled is actually a good business policy, even because you will actually find yourself with a target audience far larger than the one you originally anticipated. anyone who's got shopping with you. It's one of the like actually gluten free. The number of people who are actually gluten intolerant to the extent of having celiac disease is pretty small. But there are a hell of a lot of people who are trying to avoid gluten, who will also buy a gluten free product.

1:59:50And in the same way, what I mean at the example I always give is, disability legislation mandates wheelchair ramps. They're also handy if you've got wheely luggage. They mandate door handles rather than door knobs because people who have bad arthritis can't use a door knob. But actually if you're carrying two bugs of tea, you can open a door handle with your elbow, because when you're carrying two bags of tea, you effectively lost the use of your hands. And putting the shampoo bottle that opens at the top and the condition of the opens at the bottom, you can argue that's just for people with severe visual impairment, but actually no, because I'm in the shower.

2:00:20I've got severe visual impairment. Yes. It has to have had your fancy laser eye surgery. I wish I could see everything. So presumably you can see everything. What else? I can't see a fucking thing. What are you evangelizing about at the moment? That's free and sing. Actually, electric cars interest me a lot because one of the things that interest me is that if you work in the advertising industry, it practices what is makes it very, very interesting is that it's, as I said, its problem solving methodology is slightly odd. It's not the standard scientific, you know, we must have complete certainty, p value less than 0 .05 before we proceed.

2:00:59It's closer to the detective work, which is you might act on a hunch because the hunch or the little bit of anecdotal information doesn't give you a decisive answer but it tells you what to investigate more. Okay? It tells you where to direct your attention. Now if I had time, I don't know how much time I got, there are two extraordinary stories here about how the capture of Levi Bellfield effectively, a dostly serial killer. Effectively happened because a former girlfriend of Bellfields wrote to the police, I think, or content of them and said, I had this boyfriend once and there was a copy of a magazine and all the blonde women had their faces defaced with a biro.

2:01:39Okay? Now, there's no evidential value to that. You can't bang someone up for 20 years for defacing a copy of Vogue. Well, that probably wasn't Vogue. I don't... not sure the Bellfield household kind of stretched to Harper's and Queen or anything. I mean, you know, but whatever magazine it was, right? and you can't arrest someone for that, but you should investigate. Okay, similar thing happened with Yorkshire Ripper, which is effectively, there was a very shrewd cop, and I can't remember his name, Yorkshire Cop, relatively junior, and the Yorkshire Police were obsessed with the idea that he had a Newcastle accent.

2:02:12Do you remember this? Yes. Because you had that fake tape sent in, which the police... He wasn't. The police wrongly believed that there was information in the tape... It was Sunderland, technically. They'd narrowed it down to something. It was how sheels. Yeah, some fucking pit valley. What was extraordinary? There was an accident expert who placed him to within five streets. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the unbelievable thing about the accidents of the Northeast. Yeah. They have that degree of jay. But he wasn't the actual perpetrator. And one day this couple, they have to go and interview people who are suspects, largely because their car is regularly sighted in the red light district, due leads, or Bradford, okay?

2:02:46And they're all else they have some other reason to raise suspicion, okay? And they routinely have to go and interview these couples. And it's an awful thing to do because, first of all, you've got to get the wife out of the room so you can ask the husband why he's always in the red light district. Okay. So you have to go all my throat, slight sandpaper, make us a cup of tea love. But they started this couple of cops just started with this kind of break the ice riff, which was, right, Madame, now's your chance to put your husband away for good, to get rid of your husband for good. And so they made lighter the fact that they were making inquiries into the Yorkshire Ripper, but by starting with a joke, They kind of detoxified the whole exchange.

2:03:21Okay, they were saying don't worry, you know, you know, you don't need a panic It was a wonderful little joke, you know, you know, you know, you're chance to get rid of your ass, okay, and Every single person they played that joke on about 10 % of them got angry and 90 % of them laughed as you might expect, okay, some people just don't have a sense of humor Which is what's slightly weird about that, you know, woke comedy, which is, you allow comedians to be policed by people with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever, which doesn't seem to make much sense. Yes. But they don't have a sense of humor.

2:03:55When they interviewed Suckcliffe, that was the only occasion where they told that joke and they didn't either laugh or get angry. They just took it as a dead path, kind of statement to find. Now, then they noticed, okay, he had a gap in his teeth, I don't know, he was a Laurie driver, the pattern of wear on his footwear, because you're a long distance Laurie driver, match some footprints that I mean found near the scene and they immediately went up to the head of the inquiry and said We should look at this guy and the guy said does he have a Jordi accent? No, he's a local man right forget it And they this guy really bothered them for being suspicious.

2:04:26Yeah, I don't want to see anybody. I don't want to see anybody without a Jordi accent Yeah, yeah, yeah, and So now what's interesting about that is it's as I said it's it's reverse reasoning It's kind of okay and also it involves to some extent a degree of nose. I think there's something in this. I'm not quite sure what but let's explore it a bit further. Now you might argue. Maybe that's how we should actually pursue some pharmaceutical research. There's come to gold helix and Cambridge which effectively is aiming to do pharmaceutical research backwards which is find interesting compounds and see what they treat rather than define an arrow disease and find a way to treat it.

2:05:06Now, it's what you might call post -rationalized science rather than pre -rationalized science. Now, a lot of advertising works through that way. It works backwards, which is you come up with some weird idea through some mental process of inspiration that you're not quite sure about. And then you reverse engineer the reasons why it might work. Now, a lot of people see that as cheating. Just as the German, you know, German said, well, you know, we designed a drug to treat angina and it makes people penises of facts, okay? This is clearly a failure, okay? Well, actually, no, it's the right answer to a different question.

2:05:39And it worries me that we discount. We discount it so often when we come up with an interesting answer to a different question. Now, the advertising industry is probably relatively tolerant of that. You know, you know, we say, look, don't apologize for post -mationalization. If it's an answer, it's an answer, okay? How you got there, This isn't like a high school maths exam where you have to show you working out. And sometimes at the place you get his, by the way, weird. I always say, look, in psychological issues, in physics, the opposite of a good idea is wrong. But in psychology, the opposite of a good idea might be another good idea.

2:06:14It's a bit like the difference between, you know, if you like policing conversation on the one hand and Andrew Schultz on the other. Okay, they're complete opposites, but they may actually, in a weird way, be, you know, solutions. in some kind of strange, well, and we, you know, the psychology of humans kind of fascinating, because it is kind of harmless play. I mean, you know, all primates, all mammals kind of engage in kind of play fighting, and we do it verbally as well as physically. You know, I'm not going to start wrestling with you now. That's a very completely weird, okay? But we can engage in a bit of verbal banterers.

2:06:49Yes. And, you know, and it's kind of like, you know, the tone is that there's also a that abuse forms in friendship and British English is slightly more high context than American English is in that not that Americans don't do it, but British English is very much, you say, the opposite understatement, that in other words, tone of voice determines meaning or context determines meaning more than it does in American English. And that's not me speaking, that's an American, by the way, maybe Jonathan Height. And so that kind of verbal play, which is, you know, if we weren't friends, I wouldn't be able to be rude to you like this, which is kind of, again, it's kind of reverse reasoning.

2:07:29But those kind of games exist all over the place, which means that actually the opposite of something can be just as valuable as the thing itself, if you like. And I think it's important in problem solving, because I think it's an additional string to your bow, just as I think that solving problems psychologically, rather than technologically, is an extra string to your bow in terms of solving difficult problems. Make the railway enjoyable, don't make the railway fast, etc. Okay. I think that's an extra, that expands the solution space. And there's business of allowing people to imagine and then work backwards, which, according to interestingly, the scientific method, and of course the method of scientific funding, would be unless you've identified an absolutely clear problem, you're allowed to do anything.

2:08:22You have just experimented by anything. Now you'll get some funding because you have demonstrated the absolute clarity of your way ahead and the single point of your destination. Now if you look at someone like Andrei Gaiim, who came up with graphene, you know, no, first of all, he discovered graphene with equipment you could have bought from staples or double -aged swits, which is just taking bits of pencil graphite and endlessly pulling them apart with a bit of celilate. But he actually, himself says, I don't like that kind of research. I like what he calls, hit and run research, where you just find an interesting angle of inquiry and piss around for a bit and see where it gets you.

2:09:02And then you discover the use subsequently. I think that's a good strategy. I think that's a strategy. I just wonder about our world where you have to win an argument before you can act. In other words, you need approval from complicated bodies of people before you can do anything. You've got this thing about how all creatives have to justify their ideas to rationalists, but no rationalists. It's never happened. Let's bring this one home, mate. We've got lunch to get to with you. Okay. And George, every single time you come on, I absolutely love it. Thank you for joining me. What can people expect next couple of months?

2:09:32Well, catch up again, but can I also say, I mean, nothing gives me more pleasure than to see how this entire series is just flourishing and absolutely brilliant. I think it's thank you. It's a great quote from Jimmy Carr on your interview where he says, YouTube became the biggest TV station in the world and nobody noticed. And I think, by the way, we'd be wrong if we didn't end with a bit of a pin. There's a wonderful article in the FT saying that YouTube is the jewel in the crown of the internet. One of the things I recommend to everybody, by the way, you said, what am I evangelizing for? I'll tell you, YouTube Premium.

2:10:06Oh. Oh, okay subscribe to YouTube premium and secondly watch YouTube on your TV, right? Yep, I don't understand. Okay, my kids, right? They want to watch they want for fuck sake, right? Okay, everybody in your whole childhood was how big is your telly? Yeah, okay. There's a by the way lovely joke about that which is Okay, which is wonderful thing which is only a value to Brits. So I really apologize So Kenneth Williams' mum was obviously pretty similar to Kevin Williams because they were sitting back backstage waiting for some filming to finish on a caravan film. And someone said to their neighbour, which is one of the other relatives of Charles Hortry or something, you know, what television have you got?

2:10:48I've got a 14 inch console to which Kenneth Williams replied, Kenneth Williams' mum replied, 14 inches, that would be enough to console anyone. Okay? So clearly there was a kind of family tradition to absolute smut. And now you're in there. And now you're in there. And now you're in there. And now you're in there. And now you're in there. this sort of pathetic little letterbox. What's YouTube on your big, Kelly? It's broadcast quality, nearly all of it. It's 4K. There's 250 ,000 hours of content where I think the title starts with the words how to. Yeah. If you want to repair, now what I think has happened.

2:11:25Is first of all, we've had several YouTube revolutions in that several things, okay? There is a problem with certain technologies which is when they're new, they're not quite good enough. So they hit the hype cycle at the wrong point. That was true of video conferencing, okay? When it was hyped, it was a bit shit. And by the time it stopped being shit, it was too late to hype it. Because you looked a bit like that guy on the fast show, when he's an electricity brilliant. You know, premature problem. It's premature problem, okay? And I think that happened a bit with YouTube. You know, it was a bit sort of flaky.

2:11:57It was all filmed on crappy phone cameras. You know, it was all a bit pixelated and wobbly. And now actually it is the only part of the internet which has no an eye. If you have the YouTube premium, it has no an eyeing qualities to it at all. No, and the algorithm is shit art. But if I keep on following you around the internet, I'll consider that a win. Yeah, Rory, I love you, DeBets. Thank you very much for joining. Likewise, mutual.