Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Jordan Schwarzenberger on scaling the Sidemen

21:43Jordan Schwarzenberger:So they're reliant on that system. YouTubers and creators are not reliant. In fact, that system is actually financially a sacrifice. They're going to lose money doing it. So it has to be worth their while. That's a whole other thing. But anyway, so we speak to the boys, things like 15 different things we proposed for them to do. And they were like, yeah, let's go for it. So left YMU, we started Arcade in the beginning of 20, well, April 2021. And we basically spent the first six months rattling through the ones that passed the voting system. So we put them all in a spreadsheet. They all voted on them one to 10.

22:09Jordan Schwarzenberger:We pumped out a number and a sort of color coding of the ideas they wanted to do. And the top two were restaurant and alcohol brand. We had in their membership club. We had a hotel. We had trading cards. All this different stuff. Very much thinking like, how big can you go? What can we do? What would you love to do? Let's try and make it happen. And then, yeah, like fast forward now. This is into the fifth year. We've done a lot of those things. All the things that passed, actually, I think we have actually now done. So we have Sides, which is a fried chicken chain. It's going up to its eighth store in the UK.

22:36Jordan Schwarzenberger:Got 15 coming in the UK this year. Launched in Singapore last week. We've got XX Vodka, which is one of the highest sellers in Wetherspoons. and all-around retailers, best cereal, cereal brand, which is in retails like Morrisons and Tesla. Where's my nearest sides, if I want to go try that? I'm quite keen on food and delicious. Yeah, you've got to check it out. We've got Blue Water, we've got Merri-Hill. Okay, I'm on the way. Blue Water. I'll try not to leave Kent where possible. Yeah, there we go, there we go. And Lakeside as well, Lakeside, not far. Yeah, couple for you. That's it. That's it.

23:03Jordan Schwarzenberger:We've got Membership Club Side Plus. We've got VC Fund, Upside. We've got Production Company, which is the home for the reality show Insight, which went on Netflix, and got number three globally, which is great, and hopefully building out more with them. Yeah, and then obviously the charity matches, done three charity matches together, 90 ,000 at Wembley. The last one, I think it was 180 minutes, which is great. Fastest selling football match ever at Wembley, thank you very much. The word football is debatable, but we'll take it. London Stadium prior to that, and then Charlton in 2022. Yeah. And then beyond that, beat Mariah Carey at Christmas with Christmas cheerleaders.

23:33Jordan Schwarzenberger:I mean, I say nothing beats that. It's the cherry, the icing. We beat the queen of Christmas at our own game, thank you very much, in 2022 as well. So we've basically been on this journey of what I would call, obviously, the brands, scaling the team that's now gone from one employee when we start to 50 people in Cyber Entertainment, building out moments, I would say, that are kind of on top of their core, which is YouTube. YouTube's always the core. Cybermen Sunday goes out every single week. By the way, this is a momentous week in which to mention YouTube because, of course, it's now the UK's second most watched channel on the TV.

24:04And it's only getting started. It is. It's only getting started. It is. It is. We should have predicted. I mean, I did predict it a bit. But I mean, it's amazing how this has taken people by surprise. Jimmy Carr's great phrase was that YouTube became the biggest TV channel in the world and nobody noticed. Yeah, and it's absolutely true.

24:19Jordan Schwarzenberger:I mean, like, again, if you're in this space, we've been seeing it for a long time. It's no surprise at all. I was on BBC on Thursday talking about it on BBC News and saying, like, for anyone who's been watching with their eyes open, why is anybody surprised at this? Of course, YouTube's the biggest. And, you know, I think one thing that the numbers skew a little bit is, you know, the biggest driver on TV screens is parents putting it on for their kids. 100%. That's actually where the biggest amount of traffic is coming from. It's Peppa Pig, it's Miss Rachel who gets billions of views of video now, obviously, with Netflix.

24:46Jordan Schwarzenberger:Like, that's where people are sitting down and they're just on for hours and hours and hours. But nonetheless... So autoplay is a really, really... Yeah, but also, you know, especially with like the nursery rhymes, I mean, if you've got the young kids, like, you know, some of that content, it might be an hour and a half, two hours long, and they're just churning, churning, churning. The watch time is obscene. and it's why Miss Rachel literally has billions of views. Her video, I think her lowest video maybe is like 250 million, 300 million views. I mean, that's obscene, but that's where the traffic's really come from, on the TV screen.

25:10Can I briefly interrupt with my favourite Peppa Pig story? Because I have to tell you. Okay. So there's an episode of Peppa Pig called Mr. Skinny Legs, in which George mischievously hides a spider in the bed of Peppa's doll's house. And Peppa goes upstairs, discovers there's a spider in the bed in the doll's house, and gets deeply alarmed, and Daddy Pig, who's the kind of voice of reason in most episodes of Peppa Pig, Daddy Pig reassures Peppa and says, don't worry, Peppa, spiders are very, very small and can't possibly hurt you. Now, the episode went out unedited in Australia. So there were literally a million Australian, like, preschool kids being held.

25:55Spiders, nothing you are. Is it true? Sorry, and I suppose that's more of a problem when you have YouTube content, because of course, sometimes you need to edit it for a specific climatologist. That's so British. Sorry, Australians, I shouldn't find that funny, but I kind of do. In a very evil way. But if you think about, like, YouTube's been, like, the thing that sets so many of the emerging brands apart. Like for example, with a brand like Gymshark, a key factor when selecting creators to work with was, are they on YouTube? Because it's how much is that audience invested in them and how much time are they spending?

26:37You see that with streamers now as well, right? The longer you can get people to spend time with you, the longer the dwell time, the longer the watch time, the longer the commitment, the greater the advocacy usually. By the way, I think if they want to, they can sees another land grab by creating, as well as YouTube music and YouTube kids, they can actually create YouTube audio. By which I mean is, if you're in the car, where it's generally not safe to watch a screen, they could actually cherry pick content which is perfectly consumable, well like this, I guess, I hope, I hope, okay, without video.

27:11And so they could actually make a grab for the ear as well as the eye if they want to. Well you have YouTube Premium, right? So YouTube is the best investment of all time.

27:18Jordan Schwarzenberger:It feels expensive at the start and then you use it and you're like, I'm never going back. No, no, what happens is when you don't use it. Oh yeah, you're like, no, no, no, no, no. I think we should take 3 % of the UK's education budget and buy the entire population YouTube premium. Thank you very much. Australia would not agree with you. Don't worry. Sutherland Australia would not agree with you. They've just banned it for under 16. YouTube? But there's YouTube kids. I know, but between 13 and 16 you can have an account, but still they banned it. But how will my kids learn how to de-scale a washing machine?

27:47Jordan Schwarzenberger:If it's bad, these Australians are bad. They're worried about vaping as well, aren't they? They're completely bad. I know. What you've got to remember about Australia, by the way, is it's a mixture of a totally free and easy culture and one that's surprisingly oppressive. And one Australian explains this to me. He said, what you've got to remember is that some of us are descended from the convicts, but some of us are descended from the guards. That's very good. Okay. Right. And I hear from a lot of Australians, into the resentment, specifically to Australian politics, there's this extreme, sort of, you say, thread that carries through in Australian politics often.

28:22Jordan Schwarzenberger:And you see a lot of people, maybe the prison descendants, who push back quite heavily against it, and they're not happy about it at all. It seems like Australian politics is never happy, never content. Not that it is, most places, but definitely not there. But they've banned it. I mean, they said that, you know, they want to protect the kids from the wolves, and they use quite extreme language to describe YouTube. And I'm like, have you ever been on YouTube in the last five years? It's actually incredibly safe. There's hardly any really out there dangerous content. I think there was also, as with TikTok, when my kids told me, I'm old, right?

28:49When my kids told me they use TikTok as a search engine, I was like, what? Okay, because I just assumed you let the algorithm go. And I like TikTok. I mean, it depends on who you are, whether TikTok's malign or whether it's just entertaining. It depends on the algorithm and who you are. But there was a weird threshold which was crossed, a kind of tipping point, where YouTube became so unbelievably abundant with content that you could actually search for something with the confident expectation. If I want to see an animation of the Battle of Thermopylae, by the way, I don't know if that exists.

29:26I haven't actually searched for it, okay? I'm pretty confident that there's someone somewhere in the world who's produced some sort of animated description of a battle that happened in the 5th century BC or whatever, okay? And also, it's glorious because a whole load of people discover forms of entertainment which television had neglected. This isn't my most embarrassing confession, okay? About 4 % of my YouTube viewing is watching people solve mathematical equations. And it's just someone, it's usually an Indian guy, and it's a pen and a bit of paper. And they talk you through solving an interesting maths problem.

30:05Now, if you told me a year ago that that would be a form of entertainment, I would have had you committed, okay? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But TV fundamentally didn't experiment very well, because it's very format - But it can't, though, right?

30:17Jordan Schwarzenberger:Because you can't get into niches, because niches don't work in terms of ratings. There's a whole group of people, it's like 50 ,000 people, for whom train-spotting is much, much too mainstream. They're into elevator repair and servicing. It's crazy. There's some people that watch people chop grass, right? It's absolutely crazy. What's wrong about that? No, it's not. Are you playing it? I was like, go ahead and get into the issues. Hey, if you're into whatever you're into. Drain-up blocking, come on, we all enjoy that, right? Anti-satisfying is the category, apparently. It's funny, I remember when YouTube was something that people searched for, so how-to videos was always at the top, right?

30:53So I remember whole videos, try-on videos, it was always like a search for something. And then I remember there was a member in my team, I think it's now like seven years ago and he was like, I actually don't go to YouTube to search. I go to YouTube to discover. And I was like, that's interesting. I never thought of YouTube in that almost like framework. And now TikTok did the reverse, if you will. They started with the discovery and they realized that actually it's more of a confirmation tool. So people would go on Google, look for a restaurant, a hotel, a location, get the list of what's the best locations that have been rated by people on TripAdvisor or whatever, and then go on TikTok to confirm.

31:32from people that have actually been there.

31:34Jordan Schwarzenberger:Yeah, because TikTok feels so authentic and real and ultimately rewards authenticity more than any other platforms. And obviously YouTube, the problem and the challenge is, you know, and this is why it's so absurd to call it dangerous or whatever else, because it filters... So what's the idea of the danger? Because I've just got this brilliant solution to the British economy, which is we let the Australians ban YouTube, right? We give everybody in Britain YouTube premium for free, okay? And then in 10 years' time, whenever an Australian needs a drain unblocked, they'll have to call a Brit. Or state VPN.

32:05Jordan Schwarzenberger:Get a state to build a VPN. Because, I mean, it's like, have you not heard of VPNs? You can just bypass them. I know, I know, I know. This is where it's absolutely bizarre. And also, they're letting kids, so you can technically watch it, but you can't create an account, which is the most absurd thing. So you can't produce any content, right? And you can't make any libraries or playlists. Isn't one of the most important skills of today being able to create content, being able to experiment with videos. Why are you stopping that bit? Especially with AI. By the way, when I write to The Spectator, it's a very fractious audience, okay?

32:31The only one of very few things I ever say which gets universal agreement in the comments is that YouTube premium is brilliant. Oh, yeah. I think it's the great, you know. OK, my father died last year in 93. It contributed very significantly to the happiness of the last 10 years of his life. OK, it's not demographically narrow. It's it's genuinely. And actually, The Economist did a survey which said basically it's also quite low on toxicity.

32:59Jordan Schwarzenberger:Yeah. Unless you seek it out. Yeah, completely. But also, you know, they had the apocalypse in 2017, and that was when, you know, they were having ads shown against videos that weren't being put through any filter system, and ultimately their ad system wasn't mature enough to manage the types of content that were going on the platform, but also the advertisers that were starting to spend, and they had a massive crisis, obviously. You know, advertisers pulled millions and millions out, and they had to totally change the system. But since then, especially in the last few years, what risky, dangerous, you know, toxic content are you really gonna, on YouTube, not at all, because it's so well-centered because of the advertising that relies on brand safety, right?

33:35Jordan Schwarzenberger:Yeah. Which is an absolute top priority for them. And also two things, of course, if you appear, you're not anonymous. I agree with Scott Galloway's comment that a lot of the toxicity of social media is just created by anonymity. Yeah. But also, it requires some degree of effort and some degree... It's a bit like the thing that I don't really support postal voting, because I think you should go for a bit of a walk before you vote, right? Only 100 yards. I don't think you should vote by text. Because it's kind of impulsive. And actually, by the way, there's the risk of coercion and all sorts of other things.

34:07In-family coercion. But in the same way, before you say something, you're probably going to record it, you're going to watch it, you're going to have that little moment of, do I really want to say this? You know what I mean? And so, the problem with a lot of social media is that there's the knee-jerk, the knee-jerk, boring response. But YouTube is not social media and this is the big thing, right?

34:29Jordan Schwarzenberger:You alluded to it, it's a search engine. I remember going in for meetings with them 10 years ago and they were drumming that home. The YouTube is not social media, it's a search engine. It's the video equivalent to Google, effectively. And I think it's important to remember that, which is why it's also, it's all about the ranking. Comments, yes, you might get hate, you might get people doing whatever they're doing and saying whatever they're saying, but it won't get ranked, you won't see it. Same with videos. If the videos aren't good, if they don't check past, click-through rate, average rate duration, satisfaction, which is the key three things for any YouTube video to do well, it won't get seen, it won't get ranked in any way highly.

34:58Jordan Schwarzenberger:So it incentivizes and rewards good content and incentivizes and rewards effort to make content that satisfies, et cetera. And that's a totally different thing to every other platform. And going back to your point, because the game has, it's not changed, it's always been the case, but then because more people are also investing in YouTube premium, more content creators in the place, the bar is a lot higher, especially for brands that are being left behind, right? So we're starting to get into this entertainment era where we're always talking about the fact that actually this is a fight for attention and brands are not just competing with each other or people that are selling the same thing, you're competing with everybody, right?

35:29Cat videos, memes, YouTubers, everyone's trying to compete for exactly the same thing, right? So with that in mind, there's a lot of brands or there's a lot of creators that are amassing these massive, massive followings. And obviously you've seen success of brands like The Sidemen, et cetera, et cetera, making that transition from just being entertainers to also being great business starters, right? Why is it that so many creators that have a massive amount of audience, like they have millions of followers, they still can't make that transition? What are they getting wrong?

35:59Jordan Schwarzenberger:This is my big sort of controversial point. I'm very passionate about this concept, right? That most creators are cooked. The economy that's coming into the world of content and social media does not actually support high value for individual creators. And what you're seeing right now is a lot of creators get squeezed and squeezed and squeezed in terms of value. Why? There's so much saturation. Like with any economy, when you have too much supply, what happens? The price goes down and that's what's happening. Except there's usually a winner-takes-all effect, isn't there? So there will be a small number of people.

36:29Correct.

36:30Jordan Schwarzenberger:But the cream is decreasing, but the, what I would call the working class creator set is drastically increasing. And even those that maybe were doing okay before, when they were relatively close to the top, they didn't quite get up to that scale, which creates that intrinsic value of just super-sized audience. For example, the Mr. Beast of the World, the Sidemen. But you could probably count the number of creators who have that super scale globally on maybe two hands. I mean, that's the sort of universal law when you have network effects. I mean, the famous example of this is what happened to opera singers when they invented the gramophone.

37:03OK, so beforehand, if you were the fifth best opera singer in Denmark, you know, you'd make an OK living. OK, because there were lots of times when the four better opera singers, you know, weren't free. and Aarhus Opera House, if such a thing exists, okay, needed an opera singer, and you came in. In the world of recorded records, everybody wanted Caruso, okay? And so Caruso, basically, in terms of the record sales, as opposed to opera appearances, absolutely coined it, and everybody else wasn't also ran. And, I mean, one of the things is there's probably room for a winner in quite a lot of categories, because the great thing about YouTube is there are a lot of, you know, there's going to be a winner in the drain unblocking category, you know.

37:47Jordan Schwarzenberger:Correct. But specificity is now more important than ever. So to go to that point, the Broadchurch Entertainment banner, if you will, has been so squeezed. But also because, and this is, and YouTube's obviously one element, but YouTube is very difficult because to make content that can build enough value requires a lot of volume. A lot of creators, I think, also got stuck with the Mr. Beastification, if you will, style of content, which require bigger, bigger, bigger, more scale, more scale. And the economics don't match up to YouTube, which is that, you know, the RPMs, what you're making per video, generally are okay, but they're not, it's not life-changing money unless you're able to do enough volume.

38:21Jordan Schwarzenberger:Volume comes obviously with being able to fund the volume, but if your videos are so big that they require months and months and months of planning to get up to that scale of making it, you know, what you've trained your audience to expect, which is big in scale and grand in terms of concept and idea. How do you top that? How do you top that? But also, how do you afford that? How do you pay for that? Because you're not going to make the money, you're not going to make enough of the money back from the videos you're making. So it's this visual saga. So I think a lot of creators are actually trapped in that sort of scale up point, where they also, and this is the other challenge, because YouTube is for most of them their primary revenue stream.

38:49Jordan Schwarzenberger:Your payroll is funded by the type of content that you're making and consistently producing to create, to build enough of an audience to pay your bills. What does that mean? It means you're trapped creatively. You can't experiment and take risk. Because, hold on a minute, my payroll is actually funded by the type of content I've set my audience up to expect. If I change that, maybe it'll dip and come back up if you were to do five more of them over time. Who's willing to take that risk? Who's willing to take that risk? Who's funding the gaps? There's a massive funding and bridge financing problem, I would actually say, for risk taking, which will allow those creators to scale up and get bigger.

39:19Otherwise, they're trapped on a treadmill. But like, if you think about the size of the creator economy, the size of, the sheer amount of money that goes through creators, still the finest companies, the business world still just don't understand it. Why is that?

39:33Jordan Schwarzenberger:I think because most of them don't watch YouTube. I think it's one thing you keep finding out and you speak to TV production companies broadcasts, they're not watching it, they don't understand it. TV people are obsessed with the TV world of narrow celebrity. In other words, someone who's on TV on breakfast time in their particular pantheon, okay, is vastly superior to someone with an audience of like 5 million on YouTube. Completely. Narrow celebrity, but also institutionally backed names and voices that have that kind of cultural credibility tick, if you will, that is, you know, in the newspaper, on the big screen, whatever, maybe by ITV, BBC, whatever it is, rather than the audience.

40:09By the way, there's also a status thing. I always tease people in radio that everybody in radio secretly wants to work in TV. And I always joke that working in radio is actually a joy, whereas working in TV is a pain in the ass. But you have this thing which is TV, in a way, turned its back on people in a room talking. Not, I think, because the audience didn't like watching it, but in a weird way because people wanted to make drama or they wanted to make, you know. And I think there is a weird thing that what gives you status within TV world probably isn't very well aligned with necessarily what people want to watch.

40:47Jordan Schwarzenberger:Totally. But also to the point of, you know, TV and linear specifically is obviously on the massive decrease. How can they in any way compete with the Netflixes, the Amazons, those that have literally infinite money to invest into content? By the way, really critical thing, which nobody talks about, but I'm a behavioral science choice architecture nerd. two things have fundamentally happened with a household TV. Let's forget about actually laptops, mobiles, tablets, okay, the household TV. One of which is when you turned on a TV 10 years ago, it defaulted to linear broadcast terrestrial TV, okay?

41:18Your skybox would turn on, okay? Now, one, Netflix and YouTube probably pay quite a lot of money to have a unique button on the remote control. But that's not even that necessary because now when you turn on a TV, the Samsung hub appears and it says, do you want to watch YouTube? Do you want to watch Netflix? Do you want to watch iPlayer? Or maybe you want to watch TV. A second thing happened, of course, which is that in a lot of rooms of the house, okay, if you want to watch linear broadcast TV, you've got to connect it to something. Whereas OTA, you've only got to connect to your Wi-Fi, which assuming you've got, you know, you don't live in Chatsworth, okay, basically covers the whole house.

41:59So there are going to be a load of people who are just going to install a TV in the kid's bedroom and going to go, do I want to pay Sky for a whole separate multi-room package? This is what Sky is doing with Sky Glass, okay? It's a desperate attempt not to be depositioned, okay, or intermediated by effectively the Samsung, what would you call it? The Samsung choice architecture. The hub. Yeah.

42:23Jordan Schwarzenberger:No, totally agree. And to your point, how much of TV just relied on the default option? And again, this is the thing, we're in a world now where the TVs and the platform, you know, the actual tech itself is engineering choice. Everything is driven by choice today. And that's the bit that they can't compete with and catch up with because they've been used to just being the default. If Sky 1 had been allowed to be Channel 101 on Sky, which they weren't, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105 are reserved, okay? I mean, I always thought they could have been clever and just put it one up at the very bottom of the thing and then made it visible on the EPG.

42:57Okay, but we'll park that one up. You didn't think of that, Sky, did you? Okay, but I think it would be, you know, I think it would be one of the major channels, you know, if they'd been allowed to basically make it Channel 101. I think the biggest thing that still keeps businesses like Sky around is sports, right? And the live streaming of sport. And I've heard some news about like the Premier League trying to have their own streaming system, right? What is that going to do for broadcasting? So one of the early ideas I had when I first, this was like 2015 time, I was like, well, if you look at Meta and like Instagram, a lot of the conversations around teams happen on the club's account, right?

43:36Like people follow their favorite club. Why didn't they make a big purchase to try to get streaming on the pages in which you follow anyway? That would literally make that transition from almost like traditional TV to digital happen. But Netflix have got it. They made the big move with WWE, and that's been massive. Not only did they do the streaming of WWE live streaming, they also did the storytelling around it. And now I can't get away from it. And I love the WWE. So I grew up on that. It's never been higher. And now if you're looking at the storytelling that's happening and going back to the whole play around Being the landlord.

44:11I can see Netflix making that move. It's looking at YouTube Seeing what are the best shows that are happening over there? We saw that with the side with the side show show with pop the balloon that's happening as well, right? They're starting to see okay who are better entertainers than us If you were if you will who are more connected than us and how can we level them up to like our space now? And I think that's what's gonna be happening in the next couple of years

44:34Jordan Schwarzenberger:So it's about necessity, to your point, who can connect more than us. They, I think, realise that Netflix are brilliant partners for us, but you can see that from a top level they're realising they aren't as dialed in to culture as they were when there was far more of a monopoly around culture. Of course. So who is owning and winning audience? Go to the audience. Go to where the audience are turning to. And they're turning to streamers, they're turning to formats on YouTube and social, and they're turning to people like the Sidemen. And that's where the audience are. So therefore, we need them on the platform because they are clearly connecting in a way that traditional production just simply hasn't been able to do.

45:05And if you think about it this way, because first you'd have to go on to these like bidding wars to win these shows from other production houses. And what would happen is they would create Netflix own shows. And what would happen to Netflix's profits, like what I saw the trend is, is like they're either really high and then they go down, but that's when they're producing stuff. Whereas if you can fill that gap with like shows from like highly connected creators,

45:25Jordan Schwarzenberger:you can just keep going on the up and up, which is phenomenal. But also the notion of content efficiency is now one of the biggest phrases that you you can see in all the reports and everything else that Netflix put out. I'm not saying it was directly linked to Inside. I don't think it was, but they definitely, it was a light bulb moment for a lot of people that, hold on a minute, we can get a show here that costs 10x than this big, huge, splashy production over here, but drives 10x more reach and engagement around the world. Why are we not just doing that each and every day? We probably should give a bit of a high five to Channel 5 here.

45:53I love Channel 5. I'm obsessed with Channel 5. If you think about it as a terrestrial, they know their place. They know what they are. they do what they do very, very well. You know, every now and then we all have a thang that will cause us to go there. Totally. And I have to say, you know, given the fact that, you know, in a sense, in terms of choice architecture, it was the most unpromising slot on the dial. They've actually played a blinder with it. They've done unbelievably well.

46:20Jordan Schwarzenberger:And that's because they know their place. And also fundamentally, they know their audience. And I think the problem with TV is it's been traditional linear broadcasting has been deluded around who the audience are and who the next audience are coming up. The reality is there isn't one. So go to the audience that are there and are going to ultimately die with the technology in 50 years time. That's okay. That's enough of a slow burn. But satisfy the audience who are actually there. Stop trying to appeal to people who aren't watching the form of TV that you're producing. By the way, I mean, interestingly, that point about knowing your audience.

46:47We did a survey, a bit of work we did professionally with a major broadcaster. And one of the things we found is that, by the way, this is also true of people who work in marketing. Okay. they're in terms of their personality type they're not very well aligned with their audience i mean in marketing one factor in marketing is everybody in marketing myself included okay is massively high on what's called openness in terms of the big five personality values what is it conscientiousness openness agreeableness neuroticism and um extroversion okay and everybody in marketing is massively high on openness to and and they then work in a culture that's massively high openness, which is keen to display effectively.

47:31I mean, in a sense, you know, humanity is always this battle between do I fit in, do I stand out? Okay. Right. You know, there's that deep down in our humanity. Broadly speaking, if you want to survive, you fit in. If you're dating, you want to stand out. Okay. You know. And people in TV are massively high on this openness thing that, you know, in other words, they don't want to buy a mainstream car, you know, and then it's true of marketers as well. And it leads to this extraordinary misalignment with what they think people want. Yeah. Oh, I always used to say that the marketing world is filled with a lot of people that don't want to lose instead of want to win.

48:09Right. So it's almost like we'll wait for the winners and then we'll copy. Right. That's typically what tends to happen because everyone's scared to fail. Everyone's scared to lose. but then what happens is it's filled with a lot of performative acts where you do things that make it look like you're actually gaining progress but really you're not right it's like you will say that you want to invest in an unskippable ad on youtube but the first thing that happens when you go home is that you skip those ads by going and doing something or spending your time somewhere else so you don't create or produce like how you consume right you almost like put on your marketing brand hat on, get into this almost like main character syndrome, believing that the world should care about you, but really you have to earn that, right?

48:52And I think that's the difference between what you get from like creators versus what you're getting from the production side. It's like they're outperforming because they're out connecting because they're thinking about the end consumer and producing for the end consumer as opposed to producing for themselves.

49:05Jordan Schwarzenberger:But it's about incentivization, right? I mean, those bigger cruise ship companies, whoever it might be, of course they struggle with pivoting and risk because everyone's incentives are based on steady security growth and obviously that's why CMOs have such a high amount of churn and that's why people are constantly scared about being fired and of course that that spills into the traditional TV world too you know you're there to collect your paycheck to get your bonus to go home and make sure you don't crash the whole thing risk taking is seldom uh valued and obviously it doesn't go for every company but Gymshark you guys were rocket ship because you took risk you tried things and you were aggressively open about that that principle rather and obviously it's easier when you're going up than when you're there.

49:41Jordan Schwarzenberger:You have to sustain, especially when you're traded publicly and, you know, the other factors which then determine your profile for risk. But of course, it's very difficult to make those shifts. But to your point, of course, when you're a content creator, when you're a YouTuber specifically, but any creator really, you're entirely governed by how you satisfy your audience and how you show up again and again and again to get people to click into your videos to stay and be satisfied. And ultimately, you get paid off the back of that. So if you don't do that, you don't get paid. The incentives are all around the audience.

50:04I'm also intrigued by the creative nature of, let's say, in-content promotion by influencers. And I think one of the interesting things is presumably you sign a contract, and I've never done it, you know, but you sign a contract and you are expected to say certain things. Okay. I've always thought there are ways in which you could embed the, I mean, famously, when TV advertising started in the US, go back to that. They say, and now a word from our sponsor. Okay, right. And radio programs were brought to you by. And we're still in that period. Okay. It's almost like the 1940s in the United States in terms of the way in which you're watching some review of something and then suddenly the guy starts talking about VPNs.

50:54Because of the NBA and you'll just hear it all the time. This is brought to you by gallery. Totally. But I would say, though, that... I think there are better ways of doing it. One of the things I would say is I would give permission to the person to include a few negatives.

51:08Jordan Schwarzenberger:Okay? Because one of the things we know about persuasion is if you say... 4.7 out of 5 versus 5 out of 5. Yeah, yeah. You've got it exactly. Yeah, yeah. If you actually say, look, to be honest, it is a bit expensive. And the one downside is there isn't much boot space. But in every other respect, okay? You know, I'm looking at electric cars at the moment. And weirdly, one of the most powerful selling messages is a negative I don't care about. Okay? Now, I'm Welsh. I'm about five foot eight. My wife's tiny. My kids, they're 25, but they're actually miniature. And one of the best selling points is, oh, there's not much rear head rub.

51:41My kids are about three feet high. Okay. Who cares? And so, you know, little things, little moments of candor. You can actually turn advertising into a service. Yeah. Okay. It can genuinely be useful if you do it really well.

51:54Jordan Schwarzenberger:Go home today, and watch Sidemen Sunday on this week, which was the Storage Wars equivalent, which had a Lego partnership in it, which was the first time, this is exactly what, because we believe the same thing. I need to see this, I need to watch this. It is the first time that, from our knowledge, that a YouTuber has bought or sold media through publicists on a YouTube channel as a media buy, in a very traditional way, but in a way that has created an integration into the content itself, wrapped around the content too, and what they did is they had a LEGO, they had storage walls essentially, that type of concept, but imagine one of the whole units are full of LEGO, and it paired in with, and it was a total reaction, the boys opened up, they were like, oh, this is amazing, they had like LEGO versions of themselves, and then we did a giveaway on site as well, and we had this full campaign around it, but it was, I mean, for the giveaway, for example, this is how authentic it is when it's in the content and then layered in with some other CTA.

52:47116 ,000 competition entries. 116 ,000 off the back of it. It's super important for brands to be co-creators with the creators, right? You should, an approach that brands keep getting wrong, and we'll touch on the ins and outs of like actually running a creator-led business. I really want to understand that. The problem is that brands always say, this is our message. We want to force it down in this way. It should really be, here's who we are. Here's what we want the audience to know about us. Let's go to the best creators that can articulate in the best way and we can co-create with them. And the best form of marketing is a dramatic demonstration, right?

53:20So how's the best way that we can co-create? I used to remember the guys at Manscaped, right? They would always have a very like a joke about balls, right? In their ad reads, right? Because that's what the brand's all about. It's lighthearted and it was always integrated into the podcast content. And I used to tend to see the best brands that best communicate and collaborate with creators are the ones that actually like co-create with them. They leave the feeling of the brand in the content, but they let the creator take the lead on how they articulate.

53:49Jordan Schwarzenberger:I always think one of the best examples of this was that early podcast sponsorship boom when you had like Casper mattress And Casper mattress were everywhere all the time But in such an authentic way, no surprise, they're the number one best-selling mattress in America within not very long Because they had a total, to your point, co-creation approach They gave, it was all podcast, they gave the reads to the podcast host, they let them do their thing with it They had, yes, of course, the beats and the script But then every time you heard it, it felt authentic Yes, you know, it was an ad, but it felt like it was authentically translated and that gave it They're actually waiting for the ad Yeah, and by the end, you're like, yeah, maybe I'll get a Casper Ratchis, you know.

54:21Jordan Schwarzenberger:It worked. It worked. So one of the big things there is like, obviously, we talked about the big following. We talked about authenticity. We talked about co-creation, et cetera, et cetera. But then what is the difficulty about having, like starting and growing a creator-led brand? You've created multiple seven-figure businesses. What's the biggest challenge that comes with it that other maybe remits don't see the same challenge? I mean, it's one of those things. I feel like sometimes where, you know, the young kids who go into these traditional market industries and then get hit with the reality of them, which if you'd asked somebody, they would have told us straight off the bat.

54:54Jordan Schwarzenberger:The biggest challenge with any product specifically that's physical, right? Digital products are different. That's creator-led is cash. Surprise. Cash to support the expectations of the retailer and cash to support the expectations of the audience as well. What I mean by that is, you know, for example, with our alcohol brand XX Vodka, you have a huge amount of demand, same with Best Cereal, any of the things we're doing, or any creator-led brand, huge amounts of demand. Retailer expectations all the way up there Two things happen, one is the expectation in terms of how much they buy goes to an unhealthy level Because they're also not necessarily from this world So they don't understand, okay cool, yes of course it goes up here for now But it will come back down, they'll have to go back up And you have to manage that without overbuying So that's a problem that you see But then also to satisfy the demand of course there comes a lot of cost in terms of You know, supporting with retail media, sponsorships around, everything else that needs to be done To look after the retailers who bought a huge amount of stock because they've expected sales to be there and sustain forever.

55:48Jordan Schwarzenberger:And the reality is, it goes on that Jacob. Everything goes on the Jacob. It's just how deep it will go. And I think, for us anyway, we've definitely learned that, you know, cash is ultimately the absolute fundamental lifeblood of these retail businesses that have tiny margins, have huge amounts of costs attached, and you have to be able to support them long-term. You look at something like Feastables, Mr. Beast, 250 million in retail sales, right? 25 million in America. Hershey's, same character, there's 6 billion. So you see the scale of that, right? So, yes, amazing. But that's the biggest in the world at the highest level, 250 million.

56:21Jordan Schwarzenberger:And the gross profit is 25 million. Pre all their staff costs, their marketing activity and everything else, maybe your net worth, I don't know, five, six. If you think about the sheer effort and the scale of the audience and everything else that's gone into getting that 250, and that's your ultimate net, you have to be... So the amount of funding you need... Does that allow for repeat purchase, though? Because I'm not sure we're looking at lifetime value there, you see. Well, for sure. I mean, this is the curse of marketing that it's held responsible for every penny of costs, but it's only allowed to claim the credit for sales in a very narrow window after the marketing activity occurs.

56:58Jordan Schwarzenberger:But repeat purchase also is about the product quality. Yeah, exactly. And that's where, again, the only measure. So, you know, I think with Feasibles, they've done a great job of reformulating because they had a lot of criticism up front. They changed the whole product. And I think, you know, they're doing well as a result. But it's just the learning, of course, that, yes, when you have a huge audience, expectations go through the roof, retailer expectations, audience expectations, the ability to actually just get the product distributed, but that comes with a huge amount of cost, let alone when you're in a business like alcohol, when you have huge amounts of tax.

57:22Jordan Schwarzenberger:I think we're paying eight pounds a bottle just to get it out of a bonded warehouse. I mean, that is obscene. The amount of money for every order that comes from anyone big, you're paying hundreds of thousands, if not millions, just to get out of the warehouse and over to them overnight immediately, right? So it's those things, the float you need to be able to run these things. And of course, that's why you go to see a Diageo and they go, you know, well, we, when we launch brand, obviously, you know, they're spending 15 million standard as a budget for a test new brand that they're trying to get out into the market.

57:47Jordan Schwarzenberger:And you see why. But also the reality of the margins of a cereal brand or anything else is they're so low on the product because obviously they're two pound boxes. You're not going to make enough to satisfy the growth. So you need to be able to fund it. Who's going to pay the bill? There's genuinely a worry I have about the future of digital advertising, which is that if you have these extraordinary costs, whether they're imposed by Meta or Google or anybody else, okay, the only people who will be able to afford to advertise are high-margin brands, luxury goods, okay. At some level, this will create a massive distortion in the economy, okay, where effectively people are waking.

58:24There was always a vague, in the old-fashioned media world, advertising world, okay, you would always see more advertising for luxury goods than was commensurate with where you spent your money, unless you were, you know, Mr. Bling-tastic, right? But I notice now that I never see any online ads for Unilever or P &G products, okay? And my problem with that is that, okay, there are advertisers who are more interested in me than P &G is because my expenditure on shampoo is not disproportionately high or anything like that. But the fact that I don't see anything online for, first of all, the world's biggest advertisers, but secondly, something I do spend sort of 40 quid a month on.

59:12Okay. In an advertising ecosystem, if it's to work, roughly speaking, we should see advertising that's vaguely commensurate with where the contents of our wallets end up. And I'm seeing this extraordinary distortion where weird categories, anything with a subscription, so high lifetime value, in other words, automatic repeat purchase. Okay. Anything super high margin, anything with high attribution gets advertised to buggery. Completely. Okay. Whereas things that I quite routinely use and buy, but where there's low attribution, low margin, et cetera, I never see. Now that's ultimately at the level of the individual brand, it's rational.

59:52At the level of the ecosystem, it's grotesque distortion.

59:55Jordan Schwarzenberger:Yeah, but it's because you can get a profitable model with the advertising very quickly. And you can say, well, actually, if we put£5 and we get£15,£20 back, depending on the margin, in the pot. You can't do that with a two pound box of cereal that has all the costs attached to everything else. So of course, they're not going to, they're just not going to be there. I mean, if you had perfect data, funnily enough, you might be able to calculate the lifetime value of a new Frosty's customer. Okay. But generally in FMCG world, you're dealing with repertoires. People have a repertoire. In VPN world, you're dealing with 100%.

1:00:24By the way, one of the most interesting things, you're not going to believe this, but a cat is more valuable to a cat food advertiser than a human is to a food advertiser because a cat only eats cat food. So you get 100 % share of throat. I know share of throat is the world's most unattractive. Literally, I'm not making this up, okay? I mean, drinks brands do talk about share of throat, okay? Horrible phrase, okay? It sounds like something a porn star would come up with. Okay, but a cat will basically, and particularly because cats are really picky, You can get 100 % of that. Actually, dreamies probably come in as a cat luxury good, don't they, on top.

1:01:06But you get 100 % of that money, okay? You're never going to, you know, I mean, unless you've got someone who's a really, really fussy eater, okay? You're never going to get 100 % share of throat of a human. Now, a human's richer than a cat. And obviously, more money is spent on human food than cat food. That's not totally true. I'm sure there are households where that's the best exception, where people starve themselves to buy premium food for their cat. But that is literally true, that at the individual brand level, you know, gaining a cat customer is better than gaining a Frosty's customer.

1:01:38But then also, I also think that it's actually much deeper than that. I would love to give almost like credit to it being more of like a, almost like a smart, almost like hedge your bets kind of like decision. But I actually think that what you get, because when you go to these pages, like the pages of these Unilever brands, they're still putting content every day. They're still investing a lot in meta ads, but they're not being creative. They're not co-creating with creators. And also because products are somewhat a necessity, they believe that people will come anyway. But I actually think that a lot of these industries are still around because they've not been disrupted yet.

1:02:12Once you've got people, creators that go into these like unsexy industries and want to create a sexiest brand, that's exactly what Mr. B said. Why don't we go to these spaces that have not been innovated and create our brand there instead of going to fashion and sport and all these like sexy industries where everyone's almost like saturated. The other thing I think we probably need to do is do more category advertising. So one of my weird arguments are, let's say you were a really evil oil company, right? OK. And you desperately wanted to discourage people from buying electric cars. OK. What would you do?

1:02:46you'd focus, I would argue, and I'm an extremist here, okay, I'm the provisional wing of the electrification army here, but I would argue that electric cars are better than gasoline cars in every respect except to range and the time it takes to fill them up. I'd even debate the second one, by the way, because when I get home, I drive up, I go plug. I don't have to stand over the plug for eight minutes and then go in and buy a house charging, right? It's actually less time consuming than filling up the petrol. And I don't have to go in and buy ginsters and pay, right? I just plug in and walk away.

1:03:20I do check it's working, but it's literally 30 seconds. So the whole charging time thing, if you've got house charging, is irrelevant. And the range thing in a country like the UK is a distraction. Now, the electric car manufacturers, by all competing on boasting about their range, have effectively directed people's attention towards the one negative of having an electric car, which isn't even that much of a negative. Trust me, okay? I mean, I had range anxiety once in four years with two electric cars. I had range anxiety with a petrol car once every four years, because I forgot to refill, and it was one o 'clock in the morning, right?

1:03:54Just the same. And actually, electric car chargers are open at one o 'clock in the morning. A lot of petrol stations aren't. I'm quite nocturnal, just to say that, okay? And it suddenly came to me. The electric car industry, by competing on a negative, nobody's done the... I mean, I did, because I did that weird thing where I said, imagine if all cars were electric and someone invented the internal combustion engine, you'd have them sectioned, right? Because the electric motor is the most beautiful thing to translate energy generated from any source into momentum, okay? And he's just unbelievable.

1:04:34Michael Faraday, you know, God. By the way, genuine working class guy who came from nowhere. Really, really interesting guy. I mean, if you want to idolize anybody, he's high on the list, right?

1:04:48And nobody's doing the category job. Yeah. Now, you know, I've always wanted to do for Gen Z a category job because I've noticed, I use soap, a bar of fucking soap, right? It's not washing properly if you put some spunky shit on your hand and rub it over your body. You need a... Anybody else agree with you? Because all young people, right, for... I suddenly realize what they think is they think soap's disgusting because you share it with other people. Okay. In fact, there's a magical chemical property of soap bars, which means that actually, basically, they're totally sort of germicidal. And also, you've only got to rinse them half a second.

1:05:24It comes off every time. Now, nobody knows this. So they go, ooh, soap, it's really disgusting. I mean, I do, as an old person. The amount of memes that are going to come out of this podcast. I do like teasing Gen Z, because what I always tease my kids about with Gen Z, if you grew up in the 80s, okay, they're going, blah, blah, blah, Class A drugs, blah, blah, blah, Molly, blah, blah, blah, Ket. And you go, okay, kids, that's enough about Class A drugs. How about a cup of coffee? And they go, no, I've already had one today. What the favey hell? They're so wussy with conventional drugs, right?

1:05:58It's like, I had two cigarettes yesterday. I was out of my head. I smoked a second cigarette. These kids should have been around in the 80s. Anyway, sorry, that's my rant. But I suddenly realized there are a whole lot of category problems. I love, okay, if you took my idea where you take 5 % of the government's education budget and you give everybody a YouTube premium, the condition is that everybody's got to watch the same 10 minutes of educational content every month to qualify for their YouTube premium. And you could bring back government public information films, like Don't Litter. You know, I miss all that stuff.

1:06:33You know, close farm gates so the animals don't escape, right? But also things like 50 % of the population have no clue about what in their home uses a lot of electricity and what doesn't use any. So, you know, just to give an anecdotal example, somebody I know with a degree got really upset because some people stayed overnight and without asking charged their mobile phones to their bedroom, okay? Which is like, you know, it's totally irrelevant, okay, in terms of a couple of pets. I don't know what it is, okay. Whereas if they left a fan heater on all night, they wouldn't have been that bothered, you see.

1:07:10Genuinely, people have no clue. And actually, if you want to buy an electric car, sorry, guys, but you've literally got to sit down for 10 to 20 minutes and educate yourself on what a kilowatt hour is and, you know, what all this stuff means. And part of the reason I bought an electric car is because my brother's a bloody physicist. and so he knows all the Maxwell's equations shit or whatever it is, okay? And he knows, no, no, no. If it's a 50 kilowatt charger, that will give you about 50 miles in 20 minutes. If it's a 100 kilowatt charger, it'll give you 100 miles in 20 minutes. Okay, now I get it.

1:07:42Right, I'm happy now, okay? And so, you know, we can, I don't mean anything that's politically sensitive. I just mean information about God and maths and physics, right? You know, genuine educational stuff. If I can spend, you know, an hour a month, which I do watching people solve maths equations, I think the public should be able to have YouTube premium in exchange for just watching things which are incontestable scientific facts, which massively contribute to your understanding of the world.

1:08:12Jordan Schwarzenberger:Well, there's this conversation... Oh, go on. Continue. I was gonna say, there is this conversation going on from the BBC, right, around YouTube. Can they have more prominence? Should public service broadcasters have more prominence on a platform which is obviously, you know, a tech business, not editorial, they don't push things generally because they fall into some grey areas around curation and around what they can and can't do if they start saying, well, we push this thing and we don't push that thing, which is a legal grey area. But there is this argument about PSBs, CBBs, BBC, you know, the kids content in the BBC has always, I think, been one of the best things about it actually, in terms of some of that stuff.

1:08:45Jordan Schwarzenberger:Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, to your point, great idea, and I think YouTube would love it, but it would also give PSBs a chance to have some of that real estate around, okay, what is being shown to kids across the country in educational capacity as part of their YouTube Premium subscription for 5 % GDP. Interesting. Every time I give a talk on stage, I devote four minutes to the pace-o-meter. Okay. You've seen it, haven't you? No. Oh, okay. So, it's a speed-o-meter. Yeah. Standard speed-o-meter. We've all got one, if you've got a car. Yeah. And then, alongside it, it shows, at that speed, how many minutes does it take to go ten miles?

1:09:17Yeah. And what you realize when you see this, and by the way, I went on a speed awareness course. I'm not proud, right? And I turned up thinking this is going to be a load of bollocks. And it was brilliant.

1:09:27Jordan Schwarzenberger:My wife did the same. She was like, I learned so much. That was so much. We'd all been driving for a few years. And you suddenly came away and went, I never thought of it like that before. I'll give you a great story. Okay, speed awareness course. Two cars, one going 70, one going 100 miles an hour. Okay. Side by side, they both come around the corner. Okay. And they see an obstacle. A tree across the road. They both break simultaneously. They're identical cars. the car that was traveling at 70 screeches to a halt six inches from the tree. What speed is the car that was going 100 miles an hour going at when it hits the tree?

1:10:03And everybody says 30 miles an hour because they think, well, it's going 30 miles an hour faster. Therefore, it's going to be going 30 miles an hour faster when it hits the tree. But A, there's reaction time during which the 100 mile an hour car has traveled much further. And braking distance is exponential. The car that hits the tree hits the tree at 70 miles an hour. So a car going at 70 breaks to a halt at point A. The car going at 100 is still going at 70 when it hits that point. Now, everybody should know that. The pace-o-meter shows you that if you accelerate from 20 to 30, every 10 miles, let me get this, right?

1:10:42Okay, if you accelerate from 10 miles an hour to 20 miles an hour, you're saving 30 minutes on a 10-mile journey, okay? if you accelerate from sort of 70 to 80, you're saving like one minute 10. Yeah. Okay. The faster you go, everything becomes worse. Energy consumption, danger, risk, serious injury risk goes up exponentially. Time saving is actually flattening off.

1:11:04Jordan Schwarzenberger:Yeah. Now, once people know that. That's what actually was like the difference when you think you're going, I don't know, 50 or 40, whatever it might be, the difference in terms of time to get to your destination is fractional. It's fractional. Versus, you know, 20 to 30, whatever it might be. that there is exponential in terms of, yeah. And I just want everybody to know that. Yeah. Because it's true. Okay, it's not political. Rory Sutherland Speed Awareness Course on YouTube preview of the Kids Most Effect. But no, I mean, physics is not political. It's pure physics. I mean, Nassim Taleb said of the Pace Omidy, he said it's fascinating because it's mathematically trivial, but it's counterintuitive.

1:11:35Totally. And actually, it was interesting because there were a lot of people on the spectator thing going, that can't be in my comments. So, are you sure that's right? The relationship between speed and time saving is non-linear. that can't be right. And then a load of mathematicians just pile in and whoop their ass.

1:11:50Jordan Schwarzenberger:But it's true, going faster doesn't mean you get to where you get to quicker, really. That's why high speed too was a load of bollocks. Because you needed to make it a bit fast. But by making it go at 240 miles an hour, it meant it had to go in a straight line. It couldn't stop. It had to go straight through the Chilterns rather than going along the M. O 'Varup wanted it to be a bit slower and follow the route of the M40. Lovely. You know, they're They're the smartest tools in the box, actually. It's either Ove or Arup. They split them. Anyway, some of those guys who are like, you know, pipe-hitting engineer, good guys, right?

1:12:23Okay. They basically said, you don't need to make it go that fast because it's then got to go in a bloody straight line. And then it's got to go through tunnels, which means your fucking Wi-Fi doesn't work because you're in a tunnel. And also, if you use high-speed one, when you're in a tunnel, it's fucking noisy. Oh, yeah, it's terrible. That's the worst bit of the deal. Once you come out of London, you come out of that tunnel section on high-speed one, it's like, ha. Peace, you know. Finally. Yeah. But like, so, and going back to the original conversation, because Jordan, we talked about the sidemen, we talked about creative businesses, we talked about it.

1:12:52It's one of my favorite conversations today. But then just two final questions. The first one being, what is it about the early days of sidemen, especially the business end, that other creator groups or creators should aim to copy? And number two, what is it that you would do differently if you had to start from day zero all over again?

1:13:12Jordan Schwarzenberger:Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, so we came in, I said, eight, nine years in, or whatever, no, seven years into their journeys. They've been doing it a long time. I think if you go back to what made them successful, it's because it wasn't a commercial venture. It was about the audience, it was about connection. They built audience very authentically. Nowadays, a lot of creators, a lot of people go into the space thinking, I want to make money. And the problem is with making money is money and value is a reflection of the quality of your audience, because you're ultimately, whether it's through YouTube AdSense, whether it's through TikTok creator program, whatever it might be, you're being paid by advertisers is to reach your audience in one way, shape or form.

1:13:43Jordan Schwarzenberger:The definition of that audience and this quality of the audience is what will dictate your value and make you money anyway. So focus on the audience more than anything else. And what does that mean? It means making content that is authentic, that has specificity, if you can, and ultimately it's content you want to make and create. Problem is, is, you know, if commercially and financially, sorry, you know, that content's expensive, you're going to probably run out of steam. So I think it's setting yourself up for the long term. Don't do it as a hobby, but treat it more as something that you could afford to do forever.

1:14:12Jordan Schwarzenberger:Don't overextend yourself financially to the point where you burn out. I think that's the big thing that you see with a lot of creators. They struggle to keep it up. So if I was looking at somebody starting again today, the advice would be go for the long haul. Keep it financially sustainable and do it in a way that is totally authentic to what you want to do. Don't try and copy others to try and make money because it will probably be a false economy anyway. One little tip, by the way, which is one of the sort of sidelines of becoming mildly famous is I can occasionally plug businesses that I really like for no reward.

1:14:44Even small businesses. Okay, businesses where obviously they haven't paid me to say this. And actually, one way to be authentic is don't just sell things you're paid to sell. Okay, so, you know, give people useful tips, useful life skills. Be valuable. Be valuable. Yeah, 100%. And then people trust you. I always joke. People get used to it too. It's kind of true, okay, that there are three roles for media, okay, which I used to call, what was it, court jester, courtesan, or, sorry, courtier, court jester, or courtesan. Courtier is be useful, okay? Court jester is be entertaining, be funny, and courtesan is be sexy.

1:15:24Fundamentally, an awful lot of content. And then the courtier thing is genuinely, as you said, just be useful. Just be genuinely useful, and then when you come along and say, and by the way, another way of, you know, another useful thing is, getting a Japanese toilet, which I've been totally unpaid by Toto, by the way, in Germany. The air fryer industry, you know, that was an extraordinary case, I think, where genuinely a whole category benefited from, effectively, it was TikTok, wasn't it? Yeah, totally, totally. I've been talking about actually as healthy as we think unless you get a glass one or something.

1:15:58No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry. Okay, you're just being misled by big oven. Big oven is the evil part of the economy that's desperate for us to... I love an air fryer. I just was told that last night. But this is amazing. That is big oven. Misinformation campaign. Who is big oven?

1:16:18Jordan Schwarzenberger:Who is big oven? It's a sinister group of people like Neth. Who are there to discredit the air fryer, the beauty of the air fryer. But Jordan, thank you so much for coming down. Thank you, bro. This is amazing. By the way, incredibly useful. So where can everybody find you? What you got going on right now? I mean, I would list out my last name, spell it out, but it's very long. It's just like Jordan. Okay, S-C-H-W-A-R-Z-E-N-B-E-R-G-E-R. Oh yeah. If you're a receptionist, Schwartz-Srattenberg, yeah, type in Jordan S. It'll probably come up. But yeah, I have my newsletter, I think, like a creator, obviously on LinkedIn and everyone else.

1:16:54Jordan Schwarzenberger:So yeah, thank you guys for having me. It's been a lot of fun. Thank you, bro. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for coming out. It's a wrap.

1:17:04Bye.