Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Jess Butcher MBE on the age of distraction

27:30And therefore, if you know that if anything important had happened, my spectacles would have told me about it so I can now relax and go on a walk. My argument is that actually a large part of this is the advertising model, which I think I, as an advertising person, I can't really hold myself fully responsible. But that old comment that effectively, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product. There's a really interesting debate in subscription publications where most of the user base pay for the content, which is to say we don't have to go for all that clickbait or nastiness, simply because they've already paid.

28:08Our job now is to entertain them. Their attention is effectively irrelevant to our business model. And consequently, we can focus on doing the proper job of a journalist or the proper job of an entertainer, rather than having to create scandal or mischief. And the third one, when I said about other formats, my perfect phone would be a Samsung flip phone where the outer casing was basically a feature phone. It was simply a black and white screen on the outside, which enabled me to do all the really urgent, you know, very urgent stuff, or simply receive calls, and that you could limit the number of times you could open it in a day.

28:49And so it would turn into a tablet. And a lot of what we're talking about is batch processing versus constant interruption, isn't it? Which is, in the good old days, when my computer was upstairs, which is where the ISDN line came in. So this is getting really nostalgic. There was literally an ISDN line upstairs. I had a large computer upstairs, and I went upstairs, and I used the internet, and then I came downstairs again. And the great thing about that is that the place determined the focus. So in the old days of the 1980s, in the working environment, when you're in a meeting room, you had a meeting.

29:25When you're in the photocopier room, you photocopied. When you're in the pub, you had a chat. And the smartphone kind of fucked it all by effectively being... You didn't mention the toilet. Well, then you read the newspaper. Yeah. In my childhood, you read Giles cartoons on the toilet. Oh, my father had them all. Wow. That's a bit of nostalgia. Everybody under sort of 45 is going, what the fuck is he talking about? Or if you're a bit down market, George and Lynn from The Sun. But the point about that is that the place determined the performance. And so you were forced to focus by dint of the specificity of the place in which you found yourself.

30:08And the smartphone came and effectively smashed through that. Now, it's not all bad. I mean, you know, I would broadly speaking say I'm a bit of a TikTok fan, but maybe the algorithm has just been kind to me. I can't, you know, because TikTok strikes me as being the age-old, you know, 200 ,000 years old human practice of people entertaining other people for the sheer pleasure of doing it. YouTube Premium, I think, is one of the greatest things to have happened in my entire lifetime. And there are other channels like Pinterest, very interestingly, which I don't think... The very interesting statistic about Pinterest is that they found at Pinterest that people scroll Pinterest at about the third of the speed that they scroll everything else.

30:53So it is actually a kind of, how would you describe it? Qualitative scroll. In other words, it's driven by pleasure, not desperation. Yeah, it's an enabling. I love Pinterest as well for similar reasons. I'm actively courting them at the moment to join the Alliance. because they enable real world hobbies and pleasures, whether that's interior design or fashion or fitness or exercise. And this is where it's really important to make that distinction. So much of what I scroll, I love. You know, I get a huge amount of inspiration from it because I've curated who I follow, whose opinions I respect.

31:29But then suddenly three hours has gone. And it's almost like junk disappears almost as quickly it's come into my head. And I think, well, how have I just wasted two and a half hours of my life in doing that? And it's not just that, it's what it's doing to our attention and our focus. So my two biggest concerns, the time opportunity cost, which is a business model, it is a business model thing, the attention economy. And it's entirely that because it's predicated on mining for attention. It's the attention, it's the time, and then it's our ability to focus and concentrate. This is profoundly worrying.

32:10And I say this as a 40-something woman who's grown up without this technology, whose brain does this now. You know, I've got about 63 open tabs on my laptop at the moment because I can't finish a PDF report anymore. You know, I'll open up something and if it's longer than about four pages, I'll start it and I'll go, oh, I'll come back to it because something's pinged or I've got to do this and I'm multitasking and I'm checking everything. And if that's happening to me, somebody who has managed to harness their attention to get degrees and read long form books and even in a book now, I really struggle.

32:46I'm very actively going back to old literature to try and brain train myself back into focus. Longer, more in-depth language and old fashioned. Now, my interesting AI theory is that AI could solve the problem by effectively getting rid of those switching costs. I think in algorithm design, it's called a switching cost, that once you switch from one process to another, there's fundamentally a cost in terms of energy, time, all manner of kind of mental things. And apparently it's true of computers as it is true of humans. Yeah. And it strikes me as, for example, where AI could help, it is a fucking abomination that my email app is a different app from my calendar app.

33:33Okay? I want a single app that answers the question, what should I do right now? Okay? Claude's doing that now. The fact that I have to look at an email, then look back at a calendar, then go back to the email, because I've forgotten the fucking date, then go back to a calendar is just simply ludicrous. Now, a very classic example of this is the human ability consciously to consciously do two things at once is basically zero. That's the miracle of intuition and all of those unconscious processes is we can actually resolve simultaneously incommensurable things to arrive at a decision. Whereas, consciously, you can only look at one thing at a time.

34:19And I always think the perfect example of this, I know I bore people with this, the London Overground, where they simply added it to the tube map, right? Now, if you think about it as a nice analogy, making a journey from two maps, planning a journey would be almost impossible. Let's imagine you had a rail map and you had a tube map, and you had to refer between the two to work out what mixture of train and tube you should use to get from, I don't know, Richmond to Stratford. Mm-hmm. Okay? Be a total mindfuck. Yeah. That's what's happening right now. If you put the things on one map, then you can, in a very short period of time, you can very rapidly see what needs to be done.

35:01Mm-hmm. And I think there's this appalling kind of Swiss Army knife mess, which is the smartphone. Which is, it's... Effectively, it has 17 different things. And maybe it's better in China, where they seem to have this one app that does everything. If I'm right, there's this one bloody app in China, where you book a taxi, find a wife, you know, do your banking. Which, okay, okay, you know, so whatever. You know, all within the space of an afternoon. And, but the mess of the Swiss Army knife, which it effectively has, You know, someone said of Swiss Army Knife, it has, you know, 17 different increments, none of which is particularly good at the task in hand.

35:48And I'm convinced that, you know, what I want my calendar stroke email to do is to block out time in my calendar to read the email with the most urgent ones first. Yeah. And the funny thing about that... And it's the same thing. It's an answer to... There are two devices in an answer to one question. The fact now that when you log in to read your gas bill, you then have to do two-factor authentication. So the ludicrous business where three apps are involved in a single task. And the reason I'm saying this is it's partly a rant, but it's partly an analogy for the fact that this shit isn't very well designed, actually.

36:26It's not really designed around a human need or objective. It's designed around a technological capability, and it falls to us to string it all together. I totally agree. And I do think, I think the original point was that could AI help correct some of this stuff? And I think it will. It will make life more efficient and it will streamline. But that's a different, I think it's solving for a different, those are all different problems than the problems that the attention economy has created. Your fundamental problem, by the way, the opportunity cost problem and the secondary one, but the opportunity cost, of course, is all the more important to focus on because it's opportunity costs are invisible.

37:05Because we're never conscious of what it was we could have done. And, you know, maybe we're even optimized to minimize our perception of them, because we don't like regret very much. But it's the old phrase, no one ever lay on their deathbed and said, I wish I'd spent more time in the office. Or on Instagram. Or Instagram. It's the same principle, which is when you look... There is a kind of reframing there. When you look back on your life, if there was a meter which showed the percentage of time you spent. Or wasted. Or effectively wasted, which could have been something else. Well, there was a lovely Polaroid campaign that lit up New York over the summer, which had those no one ever will ever wish they spent more time on it.

37:46Another one was AI can never help you fill the sun between your toes. And I think tech has to get better. And it does already make our lives much, much more efficient. This is why I'm a lover of technology and why, controversially, apparently in my circles, my 12-year-old has a smartphone. Yeah. Because I know safe tech for kids. So his phone, he's got calls, texts, his GoHenry card, Google Maps. It's like a really cool app for kids where you can budget and you can pay for things. Live 360 so you can track him, I hope. He can earn his money. They've got Live 360. I haven't got that. They haven't?

38:21Okay. I will look into that. And it's got Spotify because he loves music. Yeah. And I really want to empower that love of music. He's listening to Bottleneck right now? Is it light? I didn't realise it was light. This would be on the outside of my flip phone, see. Those things which are actually useful things, which, let's face it, we all carried with us before we had some, you know. You might have had a Walkman or whatever back in the day. But there was, you know. And I think that awful thing, which is you have to leave the house with nothing or with everything, is a bloody catastrophe. I totally agree.

38:56So his is an enabling phone. That's the point. and as and when he gets older and there are apps that he wants we can have a conversation by conversation you know well if he loves chess i have a problem with him playing chess you know it's great brain training and it's it's you know it's a nice way or the kindle app if he's if he likes reading digitally i don't have a problem with that but the point is he's not going to have a time and attention and focus zap on his device anytime soon until he's old enough to be able to understand what he's engaging with until he's a little bit more resilient.

39:30So yes, technology is one solution. I guess the solution, and whether it's a solution, that might be a bit optimistic to call it such, but the other thing that I think is really important is how the culture needs to shift around our perception of technology. And that's very much what we're seeking to do with ScrawlAware. You know, the mission, in a nutshell, is how do we make analog cool again? Yeah. Like Christopher Nolan. Because it is cool. It's really cool. Yeah. And Gen Z is a really interesting generation to watch right now. Mm-hmm. Because, you know, there's all these... My daughter asked for a gramophone player.

40:08Exactly. Yeah. I have to say, having spent... You know, I was born in 1965, and finally we reached this wonderful apotheosis of music where you could carry a small device and listen to anything she wanted. And she wanted fucking vinyl. Now, you know, this to me was an act of pure Ludism. I did buy her the bloody thing. To me, it was incomprehensible, by the way. I might add that. It's because there's this word, have you heard of it? Anemia? Ammonia? And it means, I've probably mispronounced it. Anemia. Is it a Chimian anemia as a concept in sociology, which is a sort of lack of, almost a kind of lack of feel.

40:44No, no, I'm going to stop you there. Ammonia, Greek word, and I believe it means nostalgia, for a world you've never known. Oh. Which is lovely. That is so deep. Yes. And it's Gen Z basically saying, hang on, we missed out on our childhoods. Yeah. You know, they're watching Friends. I see that. All this nostalgia is coming back. Even the music is like... Because they're seeing a world before phones. There was this big video on TikTok of a graduation ceremony that somebody had filmed in one of these hand cams in the late 90s. And all these kids shared it on TikTok going, oh my God, I'm so jealous.

41:24I wish that had been my high school. Because look at them. They're all walking around, chatting, you know, dancing in the corner, the music. And there was not a single phone on display. And that's what's driving this move towards nostalgia, apparently. Although the marketers blame your industry. Apparently it's nostalgia now. We need a new word for it. Oh, it's nostalgia. Yeah, nostalgia. There's a new word for it. And, you know, 53 % of Gen Z recently said that they support a social media ban for under-16s. You know? And that's literally the generation just below them, because they're saying, we lost our childhood.

42:04So there's this growing move of digital defiance, unplugged events and, and, you know, concerts that people will go to, and parties where the kids themselves, or young people, I should say, you know, obviously, Jen's a bit older, where they're saying, no phones, you're having it. You know, we're reclaiming our brains. And I think that's a really positive movement to start thinking about this sort of scroll to soul ratio and really investing in the moments and your own moments as opposed to watching other people's moments, you know? And that's what we've lost with the seesaw having gone so far into scroll.

42:44And, you know, all I think that needs to happen is a movement towards intentionality. You know, really thinking, stopping, you know, a few scroll-free zones appearing within coffee shops. You know, it becoming actually really uncool to have your phone out. Hey, I'm doing it for notes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When you're out with your girls or when you're having a meal, you know, these are just little shifts that happen. You know, no family meal is their own excuse for the phone to be at the table. 100 % If you're out with your girls, you know, or with your friends, if you're in a work meeting where you're seriously trying to be creative and go deep and focus, put them away.

43:27You know, we need to train our brains into knowing the phone as the bridge and the enabler versus allowing it to become this constant distraction at all times. And I think that's a very simple shift. And you can have a lot of fun with that shift as well, because there are so many antidotes in the real world that we can sell and promote. I mean, there are good little tech hacks like make sure your email only pulls the server every hour. Turn off all notifications apart from super urgent ones. I mean, they should be turned off by default, actually. Yeah. And, you know, there are one or two things where it might be useful to have notifications.

44:07Everything else is a complete shitshow, as far as I'm concerned. Well, going back to what you were saying about Gen Z terminology, the word NPC gets used a lot, right? Non-playing characters, for those that don't know. And whenever you go onto, like, the tube in London, for example, as soon as they get into the tube, it gets really quiet, and everybody's on their phones, and no one's having a conversation. I see that there's a... I did this experiment on myself, right? The non-playing character is like the kind of wizard that isn't a person. Yeah. But it's just generated by the game to sort of stand around and do weird wizardy things.

44:41Or in an action film, when the guy's being shot at, doesn't die, and then everybody else is dying. And it's almost like the insignificant, but whatever. So I guess, like, what you see there is, I do this experiment with myself when I go into an Uber, right? My experience is completely different when I go into the Uber and go straight onto my phone, or whether I go into the Uber, put my phone away, and then have a conversation with the person, right? That could change the trajectory of the day and their day, right? And often than not, you actually build a connection with somebody, right? And they always talk about the fact that in a world where we have all the tools to connect us, we've never been more alone than ever.

45:18I think they're calling it the lonely epidemic, right? But then going back to what you said, and I was noting this down about time, attention, and focus, the other thing that people don't actually realize is the subconscious messaging that's actually going on in your brain. The amount of times I've seen somebody scroll through TikTok, I'm listening to the words that are being said. And then they'll be like, oh, we need to go get some food in this place. And they don't know where the thought came from, right? And they don't realize that they're priming their brains with micromessaging that they don't even control.

45:47And that's when things get really, really interesting, from the anxiety that's forming, to the fact that people all want and want and want these things. They don't even know why they want it. So it's like, so there's like a quadruple factor there, right? That people are not even paying attention to. And I guess the flywheel or the butterfly effect of this is going to be catastrophic, if you don't realize it. I love the non-playing character reference, which I only heard last week. And I thought, brilliant, that's absolutely brilliant. And profoundly depressing. Yeah. Because the next great divide within society is going to be between that percentage of the population that has learned to control their time, their focus and their attention and those that haven't.

46:37And it will fall along socioeconomic lines as well. You know, it will entrench, I think, a lot of the inequalities that we're seeing at the moment. We don't need to look at something like the smartphone free childhood movement to see, you know, how professional parents, you know centric it is because you know those parents are tuning into those sorts of content they're reading long-form books by you know psychologists um and educating themselves about this stuff in the way that you know a single mother that lives in inner city london doesn't have time to worry about everything that may or may not be on their child's device or to understand the neuro-linguistic programming that's going on you know in terms of what they're reading And obviously, the greatest barometer of that is the fact that the tech entrepreneurs themselves don't allow their own children to have these platforms, right?

47:31So, you know, our children, or those that are effectively being lobotomized by these technology platforms, are going to be ruled by the children of the tech entrepreneurs who have learned to foster their attention. anyway it's that's far too binary and extreme of you because of course there's lots of graduation within it but unless we recognize you know the the risk we're doing and i actually think talking to parents and adults about their own weaknesses is a much more compelling way to have the conversation about children's habits and behaviors than it is to simply go ban the phone stop them having a, take them away, take them away." It's not the phone.

48:14Yeah. You know, it's the content and the dopamine and the addictive nature of what's on the phone. That's the problem. And I do believe kids are growing up in this world. Hence, them as my son is, getting to grips with each aspect of the Swiss army knife as and when, you know, he needs it to enable his independence. That's what I use it for. I want him, I believe in free-range parenting. You know, I dropped my 10 and 12-year-old off in a town four miles away yesterday, and I went, good luck, see if you can get home. And they did. You know, they found a bus sign table. They had no, they didn't have a debit card, so, you know, they couldn't do it.

48:56They had 10 pounds each, and they managed to find their way home. And they came home a foot taller. You know? Because our generation doesn't parent like that anymore. We properly overprotect and coddle and think there's danger around every corner. And that was the part of Jonathan's book that Jonathan Haidt, you know, that never gets talked about. It's all the phone end that gets talked about. But the other sort of slightly riskier behavior. Well, just the fact that we can't just take the phone away without also opening up their their physical worlds more, you know, allowing them more freedom, allowing them to get out and do things.

49:36And there being spaces for children to do that. And that's the other problem. And something I would love to address with Scolarware is there's no alternatives to the phone. The only place for young people to go to now is, you know, Burger King and McDonald's and KFC and Wingstop. That's doing really well these days. And, you know, and... I think the Hot Honey ones are the best. I like Wingstop. Yeah. We need third spaces. You know, we need more investments in the communities because the communities have declined. The high streets have declined. Community centres. Churches, you know, aren't near as bad as they used to be.

50:12Nightclubs are closing. Like 10 % or something last year closed. Clubs are closing. It's tragic. And I would love to see this in the real lives of people, both your staff and your customers becoming the next CSR agenda for business because it will ultimately solve a lot of the problems that CSR does already. You know, it's looking at inequality within society. You know, it's looking at mental health, you know, people's mental health. It's all related. And if we can turn intentional tech use into the next big CSR agenda and start to see companies investing in the infrastructure of the communities in which their people and customers live so that every grassroots football team doesn't have to scrabble around for a local pub to sponsor their kids.

51:08Instead, Knight comes in or, you know, Gymshark comes in and L 'Oreal comes in and sponsors drama clubs for kids and, you know, sort of anything grassroots in a community. Let's see business and communities working together to plug that gap in funding that exists in local communities. It's worth noting you mentioned an opportunity cost. And we don't know what physical real-world technologies would now exist if there wasn't an extraordinarily overinvestment of speculative capital in information technology. Yeah, actually, guys. It's grotesquely, you know, we'd be flying around in single-person drones by now.

51:51But the extraordinary thing was, in a way, that there were two things. There was the opportunity to capture network effects online, combined with the fact that it was comparatively unregulated, so you could do things very fast. Whereas if you try and do something in the real world, the regulatory and other hurdles are immense. And so, there is a fair point, which is, will we look back in 50, 60, 70 years' time and go, you know, rather like, you know, I suppose the Victorians had a period where they were disproportionately obsessed with railways. You know, will we look at this and go, actually, this was, in a sense, a completely imbalanced way to invest our speculative capital?

52:29Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And, um... I was gonna say that, um, I have this weird take on AI. Um, when we talked about, can AI solve this? I don't think it's gonna do it in a front-facing way. I think that every time I see, um, headlines about jobs being cut because of AI or efficiencies, A lot of the times, it's work that's happening in the digital space. So I'm thinking that AI is gonna, like, kick the humans out of the digital space and the digital jobs, and it's gonna force us to look back in the real world and start to innovate where we live. Because right now, the digital space is advancing and getting better, but the real-life world is almost like getting no love.

53:10But eventually, you're gonna have this whole generation, and you're seeing this with a lot of young people. You almost, like, call them the COVID graduates, right? All of them are finding it very difficult to get into work. So what are they gonna do? They're gonna create in the real world, right? That's why there's this push for not being in technology. There's not, you're not in the matrix, if you will, right? So you have all these humans that are living on Earth, but they're all in the matrix, building the matrix, whereas you can't even get from one side of the US to the other on a train, right?

53:41There's no advancements happening in the real world. It's almost like we stopped and we're going backwards. So, hopefully, what AI will do, because people are getting pushed out of the matrix and now into the real world, is gonna force innovation, or what it's gonna do is you're gonna have people that have a vast appreciation for the arts, for humanity, for how we used to do things. And then you'll have some people that are, like, vastly on one end, and the others that are vastly on the other end. And I think that'll be... I think some... The CEO of NVIDIA said that the next billionaires are going to be plumbers and electricians, right?

54:18So, because those skills are needed, right? Like, you try to get me to change a pipe. I can't do it, right? But you tell me to build a brand or do this, et cetera, et cetera, I can do that, right? And the other thing is, we talked about the role of brands. This is why my company and what we do is called community marketing. Actually, the best way for brands to grow is to do the work that the government used to do, right? is create grassroots centers for people to connect. And if you think about the Gymshark store in Regent Street, the reason it was built was not to sell more gym clothes. It was to be the next Starbucks, the next Modern Two Swords, to be an area where people go to connect and bond over their love for fitness, right?

55:03That role used to be played by someone else. Now brands have to play that role, right? Now influencers play that role. People like Mr. Beast play that role. because it seems like that's now becoming like the spot for anybody that's looking to grow their business as well. It's almost a tragedy, though, that they have to step into that because it suggests we've lost the appetite for communal consumption. Yeah. In other words, that bizarrely consumption has become increasingly individualistic. I mean, nearly all infrastructure spending in the United States significantly stopped in the mid-'70s. Yeah.

55:37Road building, all the major projects, you know, nothing much happened after that period. And, you know, those things are always more... It's always more time-consuming to innovate in the real world because it requires the agreement of a lot of different disparate individuals before you can proceed. And I always remember this really interesting instance, which was in terms of, you know, the future is unevenly distributed. There was a sort of Sunday Times photograph or something of someone in a kind of lower middle-class Chinese household. and they had a sort of 65-inch flat-screen TV and a satellite rigged up in the roof.

56:13But they shat in a hole in the garden, you know. And I, you know, from my British perspective, I thought slightly odd priorities. You know, you prioritize your satellite TV over sanitation. Then it occurred to me, one, of course, sanitation came first in the UK. There were, you know, public drain projects long before there were satellite televisions. But secondly, you can install a satellite TV without asking anybody else. If you want to install public drainage, it requires an extraordinary amount of cooperation. You know, you'll need to... So that's the bottleneck. And so, yeah, the bottleneck there is that we undoubtedly progress much faster in things which can be done individually than in things that require collective action.

56:53And the miracle of 19th-century Britain, in a sense, was, you know, the extraordinary ability to do things, you know, whether it was a postal service, you know, the penny post or the railways, which were effectively collective achievements for collective benefit. And there's something there that I think is, you know, it does worry me in a way that brands have to play this space because it seemed to happen from the bottom up. Yeah. 50, 60, 70 years ago. There was spontaneous coordinated action with, you know, the free, you know, the voluntary cooperation and coordination of free people being the highest form of efficiency.

57:34And that talent seems to have deserted us. Do you think that me and my co-founder have been having this conversation, and actually, my dad is the one that first taught me that the best way to actually develop a country is via a benevolent dictatorship, right? Because then you have one person saying, we're gonna get this done, and not... Look at HS2, right? That's something that everybody agreed is the right thing to do. but because you have to get so many people put into it, it almost like stopped and stopped and stopped. Well, it's literally billions spent before any track is laid. Yeah. You know, now if you contrast that with the speed at which the railways were built or whatever, you know, in the 19th century, it's kind of painful.

58:18It's terrifying. And the Tube, I was just thinking about the Tube. There's a new Tube line coming out. How quickly they built it and how long it's taken to do HS2. Oh, there's so much to unwrapping all of those comments. You know, have we lost community spirit is your question. Why do brands have to come into the fold? I mean, yes, both can be true, right? You know, I think it's the right thing for brands to do, to bring people together in person. I went to a fabulous event at the Outernet, which is brilliant. It was all about events. And do you know Fabian Riggle, who was the founder of Secret Cinema?

58:56I've heard of Secret Cinema. He's just setting up a new venue in London called Lost, which is designed to be this labyrinthine place where you kind of get, you disappear, and there's pianos and corridors, and you never know what you're going to get. Phones away as soon as you come in, and you're supposed to get lost in this place because it's an experience. But we live in this age where brands are thinking, or have been, I think, today, in very simplistic terms, how do we turn our events into Instagram content? There's a whole industry of businesses that just build Instagrammable walls now that you have to stand in front of before you go.

59:34And holidays. Every beach now has got one of those swings so that you can take a picture and put it on your Instagram. Look, tick, I've been there, done that. Look at what an awesome life I have. And I mean, people have said this for ages, but the sheer number of people watching concerts through their phones when they're in the concerts is... It's so depressing, you know, because they're never going to look back at it. No. And the most visionary people, and this is where I do feel optimism, because I think the tide is turning. You know, more and more people are saying, no, you know, these are my memories.

1:00:09I'm capturing them here. And we can take a photo outside if we want to remember the fact that we're all here together. But, you know, phones away, we're present. and you see Chris Martin asking people, can everyone please, please, this one song, put your phone away and just be here in the moment. Live your memories. Don't just capture them to show up to other people. I want to complain about this, by the way, because they said the whole business of crowd reaction, which used to be fundamental to your motivation in performing on stage. In other words, you're no longer playing to an audience, you're playing to cameras, and it's a completely different feeling.

1:00:48Comedians especially, because they couldn't test new material. See what you mean? Of course. And that was the whole point, because it could be crap, and they're on camera actually being crap, and they're like, hang on. They ban it when you go to a comedian show. Like, they literally put it away. And I also heard that a lot of the stage design now at concerts is actually built to almost, like, look good on the phone. I'm sure. Because that's the best form of marketing for the concert itself, right? So getting people to go there to actually be like promo for the band, and then everybody else comes in to be more promo.

1:01:24No one actually goes there to experience it and be present and actually enjoy it. There was one of these milkshake chains where the milkshakes were not designed by the chef. They were basically designed by the marketing director to be Instagrammable rather than enjoyable. Because how they looked were more important than how they tasted. And it is a kind of grotesque distortion. And it's really a horrible distortion, I think, caused by the fact... I do kind of blame the phone, because I think it is, by being portable and by demanding you carry everything everywhere, which, ironically, is why EE is called EE, that everything everywhere is actually a bit of a pain in the ass, that there's a huge downside to this, because our lives were healthily compartmentalized by reality.

1:02:10until that came along, including the internet, which was a thing you did at a particular place and time. And, you know, when I was, you know, when I started work, and I suddenly realized my young staff don't even have any memory of this, which is when you're in the photocopier room, you photocopied, and when you're in a meeting room, you had a meeting. And when you're at your desk, you did desk-like things. And then when you went to the pub afterwards, you had pub conversation. And they were all neatly compartmentalized by reality and kept watertight. And this thing has basically messed that up.

1:02:43It's, you know, that we forget the fact that we, to some extent, used place to achieve focus. Because when I am here, there is one thing I can do. And it is genuinely upsetting. I mean, there are other problems as well, which is probably, we talk about the scandalous content that, you know, is generated in order to get attention. So it's, you know, wildly attention-seeking behavior. But there's an opposite problem, which is the mildly controversial has been completely frozen out. In other words, there are two opinions which make sense to hold in this world, which is a totally banal, you know, politically correct, offensive to no one opinion, and then something which effectively earns you no opprobrium or censure whatsoever.

1:03:33Or you can hold an absolutely outrageous opinion. So, if you are mildly left-wing or right-wing... The same thing happens in advertising now, which is, there's a census-wide report called The Voice of the CMO. And a huge number of CMOs say, every time we produce a communication, we're basically worried about backlash. Because people will contrive all kinds of reasons to be offended. And they also think it's a massive limitation to creativity because you can't be mildly provocative anymore. You can only be boring or scandalous. And, you know, if you look at advertising, I mean, we mentioned Friends.

1:04:19One of the reasons I think Gen Z are watching Friends is you couldn't make Friends today. For all kinds of reasons. Okay. Because, you know, it would be subject to all kinds of censure. Peep show. I was watching Peep show. So another thing my daughter, who's 24, watches all the time. I don't think you can make that now. You know, you couldn't make faulty towers now. And, you know, I'm mildly worried about advertising. I'm actually more worried about comedy. The fact that it's... Now, I'll give you an example of an adversity. My brother had been in California. It's quite an interesting timeline.

1:04:51California in... So this chief marketing officer survey by Censuswide mentioned this fundamental fear that we can't actually be mildly interesting anymore. There are only two, and both unattractive extreme positions. So my brother had been in California, which was already politically correct in 1993. It was already kind of consumed by this kind of anxiety about someone somewhere might be offended. And he was missing kind of British banter. And he came back, and I dated exactly, because it would have been, I guess, 1993 or something, shortly after the death of Robert Maxwell. And he suddenly found himself on the tube convulsed in laughter, because there was an ad for The Sun on the tube opposite.

1:05:34And this was during the price war between The Sun and The Daily Mirror. And The Sun was still at 10p, and The Daily Mirror was at 30p. And the ad for The Sun simply said, The Daily Mirror now costs 30p. Don't go overboard to buy it. This was shortly after the proprietor of The Daily Mirror had basically fallen or jumped off his yacht to his own death. Okay? And my brother had felt so deprived of this kind of badinage and mischief in California that he kind of had this moment of like, I'm home again. Now, it suddenly could be you couldn't do that here now. You know, nothing, you know, some bereavement group.

1:06:09In other words, there are a lot of organizations which effectively confect offense or outrage for their own purposes. And it's having a majorly problematic effect, I think, on discourse, because what we want our children to be exposed to is, you know, mildly contentious opinions. Absolutely. And what a university should be is, you know, it shouldn't be Jordan Peterson and, you know, Andrew Tate all the time. They have their place, I'm sure, okay? But you should at least expose people to opinions that are mildly discomforting. And yet, that content doesn't really... It's very, very difficult to generate that content because, as I said, you're always drawn towards one of two bizarre extremes.

1:06:52Well, again, it's the business model. That's what the attention of business model is. It's in their business interest to keep us outraged and or affirmed in our opinions, which is why the attention economy has to, by default, set up a view of the world as a battle between good and evil people. Of course. And that's what it is. And, of course, that line runs through the middle of each and every one of us. And if you think that you can understand Middle Eastern politics on the basis of a three-minute TikTok video. You know, you've got a problem. And yet there's people marching that have done that, you know, that don't know which river and don't know which sea.

1:07:26You know, and that's just one example. And it's profoundly worrying. I mean, one of the solutions that I've tapped into is, you know, basically media literacy and actually doing that work with children to understand, it's complicated stuff, right, though, the motivations of the creator, you know, and where you get your content from. And in the media and advertising world, there was a great debate that I was at last week about the efficacy of quality media buy versus social media media buy. And apparently there's something like 15 % wastage when you buy social media ad spend. And the effectiveness of sitting your adverts next to quality journalism and, you know, all the forms...

1:08:18No, no, no. Context affects conviction, effectively. Yeah. And the extent to which, to some extent, I would argue, that the digital media world has been desperate to commoditize everything. And the metrics of marketing have been, to some extent, hacked by the people like Meta and Alphabet. Well, they mark their own homework, right? They mark their own homework, okay? And, you know, they've managed to infect, with this idea of efficiency, see the whole judgment of, you know, what effective marketing is, and reduced it to a kind of bizarre competition to throw money at two trillion dollar companies.

1:08:52And, you know, I think we should hold ourselves responsible for this, because I think it's been... I mean, having said that, okay, the clients themselves would much prefer to have numerical comparable metrics than to actually engage in any kind of subjective decision making. But if the metrics are there, which they are, and the CSR is there. Yes, I completely agree. That's when this becomes a really interesting table that the brand should all be set at. Well, the other interesting finding, if you think about it, is that influencer marketing is extraordinarily effective. And it occurred to me that's because influencer marketing is to some extent the opposite of what performance marketing has done.

1:09:29It lasts for a long time. The effects really endure. It has real humans and appears within a contextual setting. And so, you know, it's everything which the other form of digital advertising isn't. So we shouldn't be really surprised by its success, because it's filling a void, I think. But what's gonna be really interesting, though, is that Meta have just announced that they will soon be allowing people to opt out of ads and allow them to pay£4 a month. I think it's£3.99 a month to have a YouTube Premium X experience, right? Interesting. Right? Where they don't get any ads. So, what's gonna happen to you?

1:10:07I have to go back on the platform at that point, and this is weird from someone working in advertising. Because, um, if they can stop doing that thing where they go, so-and-so's just posted, and I have no idea from the email whether it's because a child has died or because their daughter has just baked a cake, okay? And I am forced to go to Facebook to find out. Okay? If they can actually, you know, get themselves back into the provision of consumer value and away from this absolutely maniacal focus on hacking attention, then I'm back in there. I mean, you know, I pay for kagi.com, which is a paid-for search engine, because I no longer trust Google to be in the business of telling me what I want to know rather than in the business of telling me what someone else wants me to know.

1:10:55And I've had enough bad experiences where you end up paying$60 for that Canadian, You know, whatever it's called. You know, the Canadian equivalent of an ESTA. Yeah. Well, the top search result is basically a company that sells you something that should cost 14 Canadian dollars for 60. Well, unsurprisingly, the dishonest actor can outbid the honest actor, in this case, the Canadian government, in effectively reaching the top of the search rankings. Now, I'm sorry, if you're a trillion-dollar company packed with Stanford PhDs, someone should have clocked this. You know, that we effectively, we have an auction mechanism which will undoubtedly privilege whoever is the highest margin or least honest actor in the marketplace.

1:11:39You know, now, you know, my argument is this is, you know, this isn't rocket science. This is basic economics. And someone should have been alert to this. And so this inshittification problem is really, really acute, I think. I think what's going to be interesting, though, going back to the argument about the fact that currently influencer marketing is human and paid media is robotic. Now that paid media's effectiveness will start to go down, will advertisers put all their money on creators and turn them robotic? Because marketers ruin everything, right? The other thing though that worries me, I actually don't think paying a premium for ads is going to solve a lot of the problems that we're seeing in the attention economy.

1:12:17Because the ads don't kind of, you know, they don't polarize you. They don't addict you. You know, they don't, they're not designed to be addictive. You know, how effective they are as a result. I don't know. Some are. I mean, I bought half my Christmas presents based on Instagram advertising, but... But the engagement that you put in, and the increased value that that has for the advertisers, does that reduce? Because they're not trying to get you to engage, because... The business model of the business completely changes if it's a subscription model. I mean, it's interesting to see the popularity of the paper publications like The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Week, etc., The Economist.

1:12:59Which are, because they're predominantly read by subscribers, their motivation is to reward the reader... Yeah. ...rather than to hack attention. Right. Because the attention is already a given. These are the people who subscribe. They're extremely successful. I mean, I asked Michael Gove, who edits The Spectator, If you closed down every single digital part of the publication, would you survive? Oh, yeah. Yeah, they'd still make money as a paper publication. And one of the interesting things is, and this is a marketing person at the FT who first made this point, which is, if most of our readers are subscribers, we have to focus much more on effectively, because we can take their attention, or at least their money, as a given, okay?

1:13:47And our incentive, then, is to keep them as subscribers by being as long-term rewarding as possible. So I would really miss having that on the mat on Saturday. Whereas if you have an advertiser-funded model, effectively, the advertiser isn't really appraised of the mood the person's in when they're exposed to the message. And so anything you can do to garner attention is sort of fair game. And, of course, that will end up with your race to the bottom. That's interesting. I mean, you know, essentially, it's sort of you get what you pay for. And, you know, I would argue that, you know, I think, you know, if we're going to be really happy about this, a world where we pay for this stuff.

1:14:32It's very difficult psychologically to get people to pay for something they're used to having free. Extremely difficult. And cynically, I wonder whether having learnt the lessons of attention, why wouldn't they just keep both? You know, if they've got premium. if people aren't complaining themselves about the attention. I mean, and let's be honest, creators do this for themselves. It'd be interesting to see, you know, how, as this podcast takes off, what you learn about algorithmically, you know, what is the most effective reel that you'll put out? Because I've noticed so many of these creators that I've really enjoyed become extreme versions of themselves.

1:15:11It's called content capture, right? Audience capture. Yeah. And they play the game now. Yeah. You know, they've all got the, you'll never guess what this person said. And the clickbait, clickbait, clickbait is... And I just think, oh, what a shame. I loved you because you were so nuanced. And now you're getting on more and more extreme guests. You're playing that clickbait game. And I'm susceptible to it. I do click on it. And I just say, I didn't want to click on that. And it's not actually a good representation of what you were... what your whole podcast was about in that moment. It's cynical.

1:15:46But it's playing the clicks game, isn't it? I was on a podcast where the headline completely misrepresented my opinion. I doubt I know which one that was. I had to get it taken. I've got it taken down. Because I said, at no point in this podcast did I say anything that was in any way equivalent to the quote you'd attributed to me. But it was simply optimized for, you know, again, anger, really. Yeah. And so one of the reasons why, when I was speaking to Rory about this podcast, was exactly that. We said, everything is about... Well, we want to know people, but then we want to be able to have almost like discussions about things that are actually happening in the world.

1:16:31And we want to do it not in a way to kind of like bait people out or to try to get people to seem as extreme. we actually want to humanize everybody, right? It's almost like the space where you get the opportunity to speak, you're allowed to speak your mind, and we have a human discussion around topics. I think a lot of the time, especially in this world, as soon as somebody doesn't align with your opinion, you almost like shun them to one side, whereas really what you should be able to do, and one thing that I learned really early on was the fact that I should be able to sit next to somebody that has a completely different opinion to myself, but I can hear them out and try to understand why they think that way.

1:17:07And I think that actually the human bottleneck that's happening in society right now is that people don't even give each other the courtesy to do that, right? We always did that in pubs. I mean, a standard pub table would have around it people with opinions verging from fanatical Marxists, you know, to, you know, rabid right-wingers, okay? And they accommodated each other, partly because each of the people, particularly those with extreme opinions, knew that there was a limit to how much you could bang on before you became boring. But, of course, when you can effectively, one, find a completely receptive audience, or secondly, you can continually find new people to bore, the usual constraints on being a kind of single-issue fanatic, which were simply social censure, okay, no longer really applied.

1:17:58Another one that interests me, fascinatingly, is trolling. People who just go online and just randomly rude, with no constructive point to be made whatsoever. By the way, I wouldn't see any objection to taking that content down, because it's worthless. Okay? You know, if it's just a gratuitous insult, I don't think it falls under free speech. It's pointless. But a very interesting thing, in the 18th century in London, the people who traveled along the river on the riverboats routinely used to shout abuse at people on the bank. Just random abuse. Okay? And they just out, wanker, fatso, whatever it might be.

1:18:33And we know this from Boswell's Life of Johnson. And the reason was, if you think about it, in order to do that, to abuse someone without the risk of consequences... There were very, very few situations. You know that Monty Python scene, your mother was a hamster, whatever, your father was a hamster, and your mother smells of elderberries. You can do that because you're in the wall of a castle, and no one can get at you. There weren't many situations where taunting was possible, because either you were in a small community where people knew who you were, so they'd bump into you again and then beat you up.

1:19:07Or, you know, in a large city, they could come after you and beat you up. But if you're in a city of a million people, which was London in the 18th century, and you're on a boat in the river, there was no way they could get to you. So there's this awful, terrifying thing which occurs to me about human nature, which is it somehow in our nature, when it was rare to be able to abuse people, that was our natural instinct. There were these rare occasions where you could abuse people without consequences, and we naturally found that amusing. And then you end up with, for example, anonymity online. I mean, there are various people, I think Scott Galloway makes the point, which is, yeah, you kind of have the right to free speech, but not to do it anonymously.

1:19:47Yeah. They've always been anonymous. Graffiti was an anonymous, you know, vehicle. but the extent to which people can just drift around anonymously in this world without any effectively reputational consequences attached to their actions. That's a stretch on free speech. In other words, you know, yeah, you have absolutely right to say what you like, but you do live with the consequences of what you say. But that ability and the temptation that then comes across, effectively just to turn yourself into a mindless abuse engine. You know, it's not something we evolved to cope with. That's what I'm saying.

1:20:26You know, whereas we have evolved all kinds of mechanisms for dealing with ourselves in non-anonymous groups of 150 people, you know, those are self-policing to a large extent, as are smaller online communities, of course. You know, they're self-policing and perfectly amicable. Yeah, when you look at, like, platforms like LinkedIn, for example, there's a billion users on the platform, but only 1 % of the people on the platform actually engage, or post, right? Well, I think it's 40 % of the people actively engage with posts on LinkedIn, but only 1 % actually create. It's because of that very reason, not only is your name there, your picture there, your job's there, right?

1:21:03So you're a little bit more conscious about what it is that you put out there because there's consequences, right? It's not like you're driving in New York and you can yell at the person and then keep driving because everybody's just yelling at people. It's almost like you're at the stop and people know who you are. And if you really want to say, is because you actually mean it, right? When I go down to East Kent, far enough away from London, if someone, if you're, you know, if you're driving along next to a row of parked cars and someone waits for you, and you don't give them a wave of thanks, that's a pretty major social infraction.

1:21:37And so, levels of politeness and general sort of concern for each other undoubtedly seem to correlate to degree. In other words, the likelihood that... I'll tell you something. I used to travel in first class by train from Sevenoaks on the train, okay? You would never see anybody who boarded at Sevenoaks or Tunbridge or Tunbridge Wells sitting in a first-class seat without a first-class ticket. Because if they got called out, okay, you know, it was a matter of social embarrassment. Someone on the train would know who they were. Once you got to Orpington or Bromley South or something, all bets were off, okay?

1:22:13Because you'd reach that level of population density where nobody expected to encounter anybody ever again. And so, I mean, we're not really designed for worlds. I include big cities in this. We're not really designed for worlds in which we don't expect to meet the same people more than once. Yeah. And it always struck me as... There was also a friend I had who used to travel to Petersfield. I think there was one train a day on Southwestern which didn't stop until Petersfield. And the people who lived in Petersfield or beyond loved that train, because the level of courtesy and kind of deference to each other on that train, because it didn't stop anywhere with a high-density population, was just delightful.

1:22:57You know, it was like the railway children. It was a charming, old-fashioned train atmosphere. And so, you know, there are, you know, we've undoubtedly suddenly exposed ourselves to effectively not just an informational environment, but a social environment, to which we're, you know, our evolved brains have left us completely unprepared. And, um... And, you know, you're absolutely right to say... I mean, you know, we have to... You're right also to be healthily ambiguous about this. Because I'm always... You know, I always make this point that, you know, it's very easy to want a black hat, white hat, everything.

1:23:35And if you take something like Airbnb, Well, there are areas where I think Airbnb is absolutely wonderful. You know, there's some farmer who's got some crappy outbuilding which you can turn into a source of revenue and people can spend the weekend there and it's all wonderful. And then you go to Barcelona and you kind of go, it's more profitable to rent a two-bedroom apartment for nine weekends of the year to Airbnb-ers than it is to actually rent it as a full-time residence to a local Barcelona. And you go, that's actually kind of shit, isn't it? You know, that's actually... And then you go to Barcelona, and effectively, all it is, is people wheeling suitcases through the streets to go to their various Airbnbs.

1:24:14And so, you know, this is the interesting thing. Now, maybe we can use technology to... You know, we can ultimately start to self-correct. But I think the problem we've got is, I mean, weirdly, although I'm, you know, politically to the right of most people at my office, they're much more naive in their enthusiasm for free market capitalism than I am in some respects. in that, you know, it's automatically assumed that the purpose of a company is to reward its shareholders, which I don't accept, in fact. And in fact, I think the companies that pursue that route aren't actually very good at rewarding their shareholders in the long term, because they tend to neglect their customers as a consequence of that.

1:25:02And so, 10, 15, 20, 40 years ago, everybody in television, in advertising, etc., would have moral discussions about the consequences of what they did. And what free market economics has created is a kind of very narrow utilitarianism, which effectively makes it possible to sort of justify more or less any self-interested position you hold. And David Ogilvy didn't believe he thought that billboards were immoral. So, he was the most prominent advertising person in the 1950s and beyond, until the 70s. And his argument was they broke the contract with the public. Because if you advertised on television or if you advertised in The Washington Post or The New York Times or whatever, you were funding the surrounding content.

1:25:47So everybody won. The advertiser benefited, the consumer benefited, the publication benefited. It was part of a kind of benign feedback loop, which was, you know, essentially a win-win for all three parties. He argued that the billboard benefited the landowner, and it might have benefited the advertiser, but to the detriment of the passers-by who had to cope with an uglier environment because of the billboard. Now, you could actually, I mean, digital billboards you can make useful, by the way, technologically. You know, you can have weather forecasts and tube information in amongst the ads. So you might argue that a digital billboard could actually, you know, meet David Ogilvie's moral criteria, certainly if it's a bus shelter or something, you know, rather than the middle of an area of outstanding beauty.

1:26:30But nobody really has, I mean, part of the problem of the sort of neoliberal consensus is that nobody really has these moral discussions anymore about the second order consequences of the things they do. We need a chief philosophy officer, particularly in these AI companies. You know, the ability to actually think through the ramifications of where these models would go. I'd like to give the attention economy the benefit of the doubt that they didn't intend to become the addiction economy. the more that this evidence comes out and the more we see our most base human behaviors monetized, you know, and the proof continues to mount up and up and up as to what it's doing to loneliness and mental health and anxiety and sleep deprivation and polarization.

1:27:18And, you know, then... I think it's mostly unintentional in a sense. But what happens with a large company is you compartmentalize it. and everybody's responsible for their own narrow part of the hole. And when you get a whole bunch of people optimizing the parts, the hole can turn toxic. So it is a problem that other than the CEO and maybe two or three people, there's no one there who's rewarded for taking the holistic view of what this business is about and what it does because everybody else has their own little weird... I'll give you a lovely example. Someone who does retail advertising was asked to stop advertising because it was very successfully selling premium dog food.

1:28:02And they said, well, you've just told us it's very... And he said, I know, but I'm bonused on margin, not on profit. And the margin on our own brand dog food is higher than on the premium dog food as a percentage. Consequently, I get a bigger bonus if we sell a lot of low-priced, low-profit, but high percentage margin own brand dog food, whereas if we sell the premium dog food, every single case is... So you literally end up with these utterly stupid forms of gamification of the system. And it's all a product of this idea that you have to effectively construct a company from individual parts. I've argued about online retailers for ages, that they would sell more, a lot more, if they gave people a choice of who delivered.

1:28:49Because people have strong preferences, Some people have stronger versions. People like to know. Sometimes I'd pay Amazon extra quid just to put the fucking thing in the post. If I'm ordering a USB cable, I don't want a van coming up the drive, you know, just to deliver it. It's not really zen. You know, a postman's coming anyway. You might as well drop it off. And yet, because that decision is taken by a procurement function within the company, which is principally motivated by the amount of discount it can negotiate and would not be rewarded by the fact that you had 20 % more customers as a consequence of this decision, you end up with this fundamental thing of things that are micro-rational but macro-stupid.

1:29:29And companies are becoming... And, of course, very, very large companies, effectively, these individual silos run away with their own daft metrics. And so a lot of it, you know, there's someone there who is basically, you know, incentivized on the basis of attention who has no concern whatsoever as part of their job description for the quality of the attention or the mood the person's in while that attention is actually being earned. I think the conversation needs to be had much more seriously. And I think the one part of society that's not at the table to have that conversation, bringing it back to why I'm here, is, you know, how do we bring the brands and famous individuals together to have a seat at the table and say, look, what can we do about this?

1:30:17You know, how far are we responsible, or can we help drive a more healthy way of living our lives? You know, where we sell the benefits of community. You know, we just fell down that rabbit hole around, you know, polarization and the lack of mixing and trolling online. The antidote to that is people colliding more and making more eye contact in the real world, you know? And I think that is an antidote. I think more sport is an antidote. More art and culture is an antidote. More events is an antidote. You know, hobbies. And the irony is that so many advertisers and brands in the world are selling embodied real-world experiences, right?

1:31:02You know, they're selling venues. They're selling... Well, live music is an extraordinary phenomenon. Live music, events, food and drink, hospitality, hospitality, sporting goods, these are all products designed to be enjoyed in company, you know, or in place in the real world. And yet the brands are spending 60 to 70 % of their marketing budget to keep people further addicted for three to four hours on in these platforms. Now, you could actually, if you describe the problems of the modern world, excluding things like war, famine, etc., not my area of specialism, A large part of it is two things.

1:31:42It's that the cost of property and real estate soaks up too much of our discretionary income and screens soak up too much of our discretionary time. You could find a solution to those two things. Well, I think the point where the brands are concerned is not to scare them and say, stop spending, stop buying your media there. No one's an idiot. You know, there's great content there. It's where the eyeballs are. There's great engagement. There's great relevancy. but there is a question to say we'll come together and let's talk about what responsible looks like let's talk about you know where how we can drive trusted media and work with them as advertisers perhaps we can start putting end screens you know around our content let's say now get offline and do or take a break you know almost like the drink responsibly campaign because everything is fine I mean, in moderation.

1:32:35It's addiction that we need to watch for and create more boundaries and breaks around. And it's just boundaries and breaks. It's not bands. It is difficult to recreate the kind of Jonathan Haidt acceptance of risk in childhood, that your child would come home having fallen out of a tree. I mean, what was weird is that when I was about nine or ten, I'd cycle eight miles to Monmouth to see my grandmother. When I was about 15, my parents couldn't believe that they allowed me to do it. And that was, you know, in the space of about five or six years. There were things I did... You know, I used to climb up on the roof of the house and just sit on the apex roof, climb out of a skylight, barefoot, and just scuttle all over the roof.

1:33:25Okay? When I was just literally when I was like, you know, eight or nine. My parents didn't know I was doing it, admittedly. Okay. But they wouldn't have had an absolute heebie-jeebie fit if they'd known I was doing it. You know, they was just accepted that... And that seemed to happen, and we don't quite know why. But, of course, it's very difficult, because the level of blame you're exposed to... Do you see what I mean? Mm-hmm. Previously, if something bad happened to your kid, the default mode would be sympathy. Yeah. And now it's blame. You're a bad parent. You're a bad parent. And of course, the fewer people who allow their children to run around in the streets, the vastly more at risk those people are.

1:34:06There's a lot of arguments, though, that parents are waking up to. The fact that the paedophiles are not on the street, they're all on the internet. You know, the overprotection in the real world versus the underprotection in the online world is absolutely paramount. And there's statistics like you'd have to leave your child outdoors on their own for 150 ,000 years for them to be abducted. Yes, I know, I know, I know. But statistics are no good when we live in a doom economy and one abduction is wall-to-wall coverage for, you know, three months. And then, and I think it was Jonathan who wrote in his previous book the fact that it started in the 80s because they would put missing children on milk cartons.

1:34:45And you think, what a brilliant idea. You can publicize children that are missing. But it put the prospect of children being abducted... That's a massive thing. ...on every breakfast table in America overnight. and suddenly, kids stopped being allowed out. And that was around the time that we started to get news channels, where, obviously, to fill their schedules, they follow these stories. And, you know, so we lived in this heightened sense of... It was called the doom economy, and that happened even before social media. And social media has now recognized that the doom economy really works. So we put more and more of the doom into social media.

1:35:20So we have this very, very warped sense of the safety of the world that we live in, whereas the statistics are minuscule and negligible, and parenting has changed massively. But I'm having a lot of conversations with my generation of parents who do over-parent massively about these sorts of things, and I'm arranging... How frightened were you when you dropped your children off, what, five miles from home, with£10 each, and told them to work out how to get their own way home? I was a little anxious, But we've been... I mean, I've been trying more and more of these experiments, because I'm very familiar with the data on it.

1:35:59And I have to say, the fact that my eldest has a phone gave me a lot of reassurance. So this is where the phone actually plays into these opportunities and trends. Did you ever find my iPhone? Well, I knew that he could. And this is what parents are asking, even on dumb phones. They said, we would get a dumb phone, but we want tracking. Yeah. And actually, I think that's a good technology. Yes, I think tracking is a really good technology. It's peace of mind to know where they are. And the fact that, you know, he's got to go Henry means, worst case scenario, he can get on the bus. Also, by the way, it means you need to ring them up much less.

1:36:32Yeah. Because you can basically interpret where they are and what they're doing. And if you need to go and fetch them, you don't have to have five coordinating phone calls about where they happen to be. Yeah. Which was usually all bar one in Tunbridge Wells, in my experience. But, and actually, I think there's also an interesting point which someone needs to make, which is these kids are going to leave home. They're going to go to university. And in my experience, it was their most helicoptered children who went most catastrophically off the rails. Of course. Because in a sense, you haven't actually learned boundaries, or you haven't learned a kind of sensible risk tolerance.

1:37:08Yeah. And so, if at that moment you decide to reject your own parents' risk values, Yeah. Rather than just going a bit over the line, which is a totally healthy and sane thing to do, there are people who just go bonkers. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we don't even let... we don't let kids make mistakes as small children. You know, all these middle-class parents shouting across the soft play, share! Share, Johnny! And it's like... Eight place croquis. Actually, let them be a little shit, because they'll learn the hard way that no one will want to play with them. We don't have to intervene on everything. Yeah.

1:37:41Let them fall off unless there's going to be a serious head injury. But soft play itself has changed, apparently, the way that bones break. Because kids don't steal themselves for falls anymore. You know, rubberized playgrounds. I think it was Jonathan Hight's book. It was someone's book where they were... No, I'll remember his name in a second. But one writer in America was complaining about the fact that underneath climbing frames, there was sort of padding and it was rubberized. It was cuddling the American mind. I remember having a climbing frame in my local village where the ground was concrete, which actually, even at the time, struck me as a bit extreme, because there is risk of serious brain injury.

1:38:23Let's face it, in the ancestral environment, we'd fall onto grass or leaves or something. And the concrete, you know, I'm trying to remember who it was who wrote about that. It was a fascinating writer. And he's very much in vain against this culture of effectively not giving people the opportunity to test their own risk tolerances, which means their instincts for what's sensible and what's crazy don't really develop properly. I thought he was a bit extreme in that. But, I mean, it is very interesting how... Also, it's worth noting, of course, that, let's be honest, to a lazy parent, the one-eyed babysitter is bloody convenient.

1:39:02Because you plump a child with a tablet. And basically, you've got two hours to yourself. Yeah. Yeah, it's the square repair. But equally terrifying. And I have found since opening up this conversation that I've become like a priest in a confessional. The first 10 minutes of every meeting I have involves them saying how horrified they are at seeing these devices shoved into pushchairs, and how worried they are about their own attention and focus, and depressed they feel walking around the world and sitting on a train and everyone's eyes down, and their children, everyone talks about their children and their risks there.

1:39:44And I used to stop them and say, yeah, I know, that's why I'm doing what I'm doing. And I thought, no, no, no, no, let them talk themselves into the problem area. And I say, I cannot keep having this, everybody worrying about this on a personal basis and not being prepared to jump the chasm into the professional conversation. And that is what needs to happen now. And as we're demonstrating amply, I think, within this conversation, we don't know what the solutions are. But we do know we need to come together to think and talk responsibly. Because it's only by coming together that we can have a voice that can ask these questions, that can sit down in collaboration with the platforms and say, you know, what can we do about this?

1:40:29And how can we, as the people that do impact culture so significantly, with our fame, with our passion for what we do, with the eyeballs and the fans that we attract, whether that's Ben, who you're talking to tomorrow, and Gymshark, and their great, you know, huge number of fans, or it's the influencer that does, you know, street dance, or whatever it might be. how can we use our influence on culture to actually say this stuff, analogue is cool, you know, and we need to reclaim time for it because the street dancing is analogue. Yeah. You know, the content about it isn't, but the street dancing is.

1:41:12Don't just watch it, do it. You know, or it's gardening or it's cooking or it's bird watching. You know, we've got to get these things back into a healthier balance for our own sanity. and take some of this overwhelm out of the world because the businesses will find there's productivity gains in their own people as well. You know, there's CSR value in it, but there's also brand and marketing power because this zeitgeist is shifting. You know, with Gary Vee saying that 26 will be the year of unplugged. That's his prediction, that next year will be, that will be the biggest trend of 2026. Gen Z is waking up to this.

1:41:54So there's only opportunity, opportunity, opportunity. But people need to come together, I think, to have that conversation. And that's ultimately what I would love to convene in some way. In full acknowledgement, we don't have all the answers. But it has to be a positive conversation, antidote-based, positive, bringing soul back in as something that's actually cool to talk about. I've also got a weird one, which is, I think driving lessons should start at school. No, no, no. I know it sounds very weird, but I think the car is an anti... You know, one of the things that always bothers me is that if you...

1:42:35The car is an extraordinarily important kind of rite of passage. Being able to drive, being able to move around, your parents accepting that you are going places on your own. And, you know, I think there are all these kind of weird problems which, you know, we've demonized the car, or, you know, other forms, mopeds, whatever they may be, okay? But actually, you know, one of the things I think would be quite beneficial is maybe if we had a kind of 15-year-old vehicle that people could use to get around. In France, I can't remember, you can use a moped. Yeah, they are bloody dangerous, I'm going to acknowledge that.

1:43:08But you can use a moped younger than you can drive a car, can't you? that's one of the reasons why there are a lot of French people buzzing around on these things. I mean, something like that, so that they could actually, you know, people could socialize autonomously for three or four years earlier than they currently do. I love this conversation, first and foremost, especially as somebody that probably like made my career in the digital space. The more that we're having conversations like this, the more we're giving brilliant people like yourself, the platform to be able to have this conversation.

1:43:39It's been amazing. Really opened my mind. It would be great to have you back. Anytime. I can't talk about this enough, but it's more in the spirit of us all having this conversation more. So I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to chat about it. If everybody thinks about the opportunity cost more of the time, because I think the concentration of conversation is all about the evils of the thing itself, which doesn't quite land. Whereas once you mentioned the opportunity cost, the other words, what you could have been doing, when you were mindlessly scrolling? Time and attention. Our ability to focus.

1:44:17Focus, yeah. So important. We lose that at our peril as a society. Those, to my mind, are the greatest risks to us as humanity. And yes, there's harms, but time and our attention, it is so precious. And what we give it to dictates the lives that we will have or won't have. Well, and at that, that's perfect. Amazing. I love that.