Rory Sutherland, Elfried Samba and Timothy Armoo on the future for influencers

26:05That enough of the people who will be exposed to that ad are sufficiently expert in woodworking to know if something's shit, okay? And therefore, you can't expose yourself to a knowledgeable and expert audience and talk crap. And therefore, the people in the audience who are not expert rely on the people who are effectively to police the honesty of a message. Yeah. Okay. Now, that particularly applies in your field because the people watching Hoffman, if Hoffman suddenly started saying, you know, to be honest, it's best to make coffee at 50 degrees or whatever. I don't know. Or don't grind the beans, just hit them with this expensive branded hammer.

26:50A, he couldn't afford to do it because he'd be reputationally shot. And B, there'd be 100 people who'd basically call him out. So the comments, of course, are interesting in YouTube because TV ads didn't have comments. But literally, if you... So this business of credibility. So David Ogilvie would have been a big fan. Now, just to be clear, I think David Ogilvie was a bit too hard on ads that featured gratuitous celebrities. Because that has a value, but it works in a different way. That would be my point, which is, I mean, you'll know this if you ever go to Japan, because there are loads of celebrity ads featuring Western celebrities, which never appear on American TV.

27:32So you will. And that is basically, look, we've got, I'm not sure Tom Hanks has done ads in Japan. I don't know. Does he do advertising? He does. Yeah. Okay. But I always think that's very precious, by the way. They're very, very well-paid actors who go, of course I don't do advertising because now you're making$15 million a movie. You can afford to do that virtue signaling. But the fact is, let's be honest, it's working in advertising that most, a lot of actors got their first break and survived for the first five years in Hollywood. by doing that kind of stuff, okay? But you get that very, it's a very Japanese thing.

28:13You just feature a major celebrity and it says, basically, it's sort of chest beating by the company. We've got a lot of money to spend. Therefore, we're rich rather than desperate. And we'd rather do business with people. I mean, if you were buying a car, okay, you'd feel much more comfortable buying a car from a rich person than from someone who is clearly desperate. Because you go, the rich person actually has a balance between reputation and profit, whereas the desperate person only cares about profit. Exactly. And so, you know, there's an argument that you simply do it to signal corporate success that we're doing well, we wouldn't do well if our product...

28:51So there are all kinds of ways in which advertising works. That's the only thing to understand. But your way is a great way. Okay. What you just described, so a couple of thoughts. So the first thought is the thing you've described in Japan, and probably, Alfred, you can testify to this is it's also hugely successful slash prevalent in the developing world. So like if you go to Ghana, Nigeria, et cetera, just the combination of insert semi-famous person here next to any category, like any category, you have made it. Then the second thing that you said is actually an interesting framework. I guess I can call it like decision by abdication.

29:35It's almost like you say, well, this group have said it's good, therefore there's no reason why that person will feel like he's ripping me off. Yeah. One of the questions actually for you... By the way, the fact that you invest up front in your reputation, okay, is evidence that you're playing the capitalist long game. Yeah, the long game, yeah. Not the short game. Yeah. Okay. So someone who's planning... Okay, if I were planning to open a kebab van in Sevenoaks, give everybody food poisoning and drive away, right? Drive off to Oxton and repeat the whole process. This is why, you know, we trust in a way, we trust a kebab shop more than a van because you're rooted in a community, okay?

30:16You've got an upfront investment in your real estate and in your equipment. So this is why, if you like, a tourist restaurant can often be shit because they're not expecting anybody to come back, okay? Whereas a country pub, if you're not a destination, you're out of business, okay? So you can trust a company. If you want a shit meal, go to a tourist restaurant with a great view. Because they know that nobody's ever coming back. Now, actually, okay, let's be honest, TripAdvisor's probably changed the dynamics of that a bit. Because the person... The review's terrible. But people generally didn't go back.

30:47They didn't go back home to Luton and go, by the way, if you happen to be in Lanzarote, there's a great restaurant or a terrible restaurant. Okay, so the feedback loop didn't really work. Yeah, that's interesting. So the fact that you invest up front in reputation, just as the fact that you invest up front in real estate is kind of proof of long-term commitment, that you're planning to grow your business through investment in reputation and relational capitalism. You're not just a one-off transaction business. And we trust the latter. This is why I often say to people, look, I know you can go and buy a second-hand car a bit cheaper, right, by going to the direct person who's selling the car.

31:26But there is a virtue to a car dealer, okay, Which is, if the car dealer totally screwed me over, and particularly if you make it very public that you live locally, right? And also, if you're buying a car from a car dealer, say, I will get my car serviced here, right? Okay? In other words, you suggest you're a source of future value, not just a one-off punter. Yeah, 100%. Okay? When I'm in deal, I make it really visible that I'm not an Airbnb-er, you know? No, no, no, we've got a place just around the corner, because then they go, okay, they need me to come back, right? And so that business of what you might call long-game capitalism and short-game capitalism, to be honest, if you go to a car dealer and they know you could go around town slagging them off, right?

32:13Whereas if you drive 300 miles to buy a second-hand car from someone called Dave, it's not the same reputational protection. So if you went to a car dealer and somebody asks you where did you travel from, I should say locally, because then they might give you a great deal because they're going to be around. In fact, I'm very well connected to the local community. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I run the running club. I run the running club. Exactly, you've got it exactly, yeah. Which is absolutely packed full of potential BMW buyers. But I always find that very interesting because I think we instinctively understand a lot of these trust mechanisms, but they're never quantified.

32:50So they never appear on a spreadsheet and they never appear on a database. But we instinctively understand, is this guy in the repeat business game or is he in the one-off, you know, one-off transaction? There's transactional capitalism, which seeks to maximize the value of the one-off transaction. That's your dodgy guy, right? And then there's relational capitalism, which is, I now have a customer. How can I maximize the value exchange between us over time? And the second kind is much better. I'll tell you a very funny story. A Brit friend who moves to Australia, okay? and he wants to buy a second-hand car.

33:24And the guy says, I'll meet you in the car park of the local supermarket, right? The guy goes, it's a bit weird, but maybe that's what Australians do, right? Because he's new to Australia, and he's thinking, maybe this is Australian tradition where supermarket car parks are the traditional place. He meets the guy, needless to say, buys the car, total bloody disaster. What the guy was doing is, I don't want you to know where I live. He's basically selling him the car in an anonymous location because there's no comebacks. And the guy, the British guy, was suspicious, but what wrong-footed him was basically he thought, you know, I'm in Australia, you know.

34:02We're in Rome. Maybe the whole of Australian supermarket retail is basically car dealers. No, big mistake. Interesting. But this is really interesting because I think that whole question of specialist expertise, what you're doing with the rational media, is a lot of it works because of those totally tacit and implicit trust mechanisms. Yeah. Do you remember yesterday when we were talking about how you sell perfume? Yeah. And so I've actually got a question for you, Ray, because I think, because I actually thought about this question after reading Confessions of an Advertiser Man by David Ogilvy.

34:41Oh, brilliant. Hold on. And then I also read Claude Hopkins, My Life in Advertising. This was ages ago, and I still use so much of this stuff. It's old, it's still true. Yeah, it's still true. Do you know, complete side note, but I think one of the godfathers of this whole, like, influence, social game is Edward Bernays. Like, to me, I remember reading propaganda and just thinking, bro, like, you are the guy. Like, you are the god of this, right? But the question I have for you is actually about, if you were starting, say, a perfume brand now, right? So many perfume brands, what they, you know, I never understood it.

35:22They do these, like, really amazing videos, and it's like this supermodel, and she comes in and does all that stuff. Let's assume Johnny Depp is out here doing, like, Sauvage for Sauvage Droit. You're like, what are you talking about, right? All companies are the same. Yeah, you know? But the thing about perfume that I find very interesting is... The beautiful category was Old Spice, Procter & Gamble brand. who did that extraordinary campaign, I'm on a horse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And that was brilliant, because it was total subversion of the conventions of the category, yeah. How was that? Okay, so I got two questions.

35:58Firstly, how was that a total subversion? And then secondly, how would you promote, given where we are now, how would you promote a new perfume brand using like standard or old school advertising principles, but on social media. And you can't do the supermodel, Johnny Depp, Sauvage Dior, whatever. Yeah. I think it's quite easy to do because what I would do is there are two things you can do in marketing in a way. You can find a gap in the market or you can create one. Okay. And when I say this, I mean, by the way, there's always a bit of advice I do give to people with new ideas, which is there may be a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap?

36:41Yeah. Okay. So there are categories of things which are totally undeserved. That's a great freeze. That's an amazing freeze. That is a brilliant freeze. Not mine. I wish it was mine. Oh, not yours? No, no, no. I can't remember where I first read it. That's a brilliant freeze. It's a brilliant freeze. There's a gap in the market, but it is their market in the gap. And there are certain things where, for example, at a fast food restaurant, there's a market for food that's cheap. That's usually, you know, what you might call the cheap wrap you get somewhere. And that's for people who are going out to lunch.

37:10And there's a market for things which are surprisingly a bit expensive, and that's the treat market. So there's the, I want to save money, and there's the, I want to splurge. So most fast food chains have what they call a barbell strategy, which is the food we serve is either the guy who wants to have a hot meal for lunch and doesn't want to break beyond a fiver, okay? Or it's the kid's birthday where people go, it's a special occasion, let's go a bit large. There isn't actually in between the two, it just doesn't work. Okay? So that's a really, really important phrase. But one of the things I think you can do with marketing is you can create a gap.

37:50By focusing... Now, okay. I call this... I mentioned this on an earlier episode, I think, reverse benchmarking. Okay? Now, what you do is nearly everybody in a business benchmarks against their competitors, which means they become more and more similar. And the act of benchmarking usually creates an opportunity somewhere else. But consumers may not find that space visible unless you focus their attention there. Now, let me give you a perfect example of this, which is probably the$3 trillion example of this, which is loads and loads of nerds in the late 70s are making computers slightly faster, a bit more RAM, a bit more processing power.

38:33And they're all competing with each other because they're nerds to impress each other with the hardware. Jobs comes along and basically goes, in this process, you've completely neglected aesthetics and usability. But what you then have to do is direct the consumer's attention to where you are strong and where everybody else is weak. And what we pay attention to, we tend to ascribe importance to. And by attaching people's attention, by being very, very visible about this, okay, you create an awful lot of cut-through attention and salience. And suddenly, what you've got is a USP, if you like, a unique, okay.

39:15And so this is a case where it's not enough necessary to spot a gap in the market. You actually can use communication to genuinely create one by direct... So the reason I call this reverse benchmarking, the brilliant book I really recommend, Will Godara, it's called Unreasonable Hospitality. Yeah. I'm going out to New York to, he's hosting a conference in September. What an underrated book, by the way. It's so underrated. Not by anybody who's read it. I completely agree. But people don't talk about it because people hear hospitality and they go, man, but actually the principles behind it are incredible.

39:53The principles, the patterns. So his lovely thing is he's number 50 in the world. Yeah. In the San Pellinino Restaurant Awards. I think it's 2011. And he wants to get to number one. That's him. I wouldn't have bothered. I was going, number 50, that'll do. Let's go to the pub. Right. But he wants to get to number one. Okay. I'd like that. You know, I'm a satisficer. Yeah, that'll do. Right. You know. And he takes his whole team to the number one restaurant. They start copying the, or making a note of, oh, we could do that. We could fold the napkins that way." At the end of the meal, you go, not interested in any of that stuff.

40:26He goes, what about this experience was a bit meh, a bit disappointing. And they came up with two things. That the beer drinkers, because he'd taken a load of chefs, and chefs tend to be beer drinkers, not interestingly. People who actually make the food quite often. The beer drinkers got a really shit experience compared to the wine drinkers, and the coffee was just a bit average. So he doesn't copy anything from the number one restaurant. He goes back to his own restaurant, 11 Madison Park, I think it's called, and he appoints one of the guys a coffee sommelier and one of the guys is a beer sommelier.

41:00So if you go into that restaurant... Now, most people don't. You don't go to a three-star Michelin restaurant and go, can I have a pint? But the people who did drink beer were bought literally a beer menu with pairing suggestions and tasting notes of all these craft beers, right? Now, what you're doing there is brilliant because you're taking your competitors' weak spot, you're effectively... And then in a very salient, noticeable way, you're doubling down on being brilliant at the thing where your competitors are a bit crap. And you double down on it both in terms of where you invest and where you promote.

41:36Where you promote, yeah. Okay. And I think that, you know, that's basically Apple, okay? Moxie Hotels. You know, I always rave about them. I mean, the Dutch people get really angry because they go, they stole it from Scissors and M. Okay, I'll buy that. Fair enough. Okay. But it's a hotel where you basically, the rooms are actually a bit rudimentary, but the ground floor is better than a five-star hotel because you can hang out there, do video calls in a little room. You can do things on the ground floor of a moxie that you wouldn't be able to do, and 24 hours a day, incidentally, which you wouldn't be able to do in a five-star hotel.

42:14If you did, it would feel weird, right? And so those kind of things where you reverse benchmark, you literally say, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to be really, really good. I've talked about this in cases like Buc-ee's, the Texan gas station chain, where the entire business model came from what determines where people stop is often the female passenger in the car, and it's the quality of the restrooms. We're going to build a whole business model around getting people to wait another 25 miles with a slightly full bladder, okay, to create a destination. And it's, again, what, you know, take what, here's the example I'll give, okay?

43:00I mean, literally, I think there are loads of ideas where people could do this. But one thing that occurred to me the other day is, if I book a taxi to take me home from Gatwick, okay, I'm paying them, I don't know, 70 quid or something, okay, right, to taxi pick me up and get me. They come and meet me at arrivals. And if I want them to, I don't, because I'm Mr. Democratic, but they'll push my trolley for me. And they'll meet me with a board with my name on it. They'll walk me to the car. They'll put my luggage in the back of the car. And they drive me all the way home. If I'm spending 700 quid on renting a car, I've got to do all that work myself.

43:32And then I can't find the fucking car because it's in some weird offsite car park, a mile and a half from the airport in like 100 degree temperatures, where I'm dying and I've got three loads of luggage. And I kind of go, I'd pay 50 quid for someone just to say, and also, when I get in that car, and this is, now, I've never hired from Enterprise, who are apparently better than everybody else, so I may be doing them a disservice here, okay? But there isn't even a laminated sheet of A4 that says, this is how you open the fuel filler cap, okay? There's the car. In France, hired Cadillac Lyric, the electric Cadillac.

44:10Bloody fantastic. car, by the way. But you open the charging port by pressing on the Cadillac logo that's next to it. Okay. Now, I literally could have been spending a month. I went on YouTube as it happened, right? But there should be a laminated sheet of A4 that says, these are the idiosyncrasies of the car. This is how you turn the lights on. This is how the, you know, just a few basics. I mean, I had one American car where literally it was 10 minutes working out how to let the handbrake off. Okay. I mean, so all you have to do, literally, any car rental company that adopted this saying, okay, we're going to be brilliant where everybody else is shit.

44:51Okay. And by the way, okay, the one way to do it is market research. But actually, you can use advertising to invent your own competitor weakness. You can basically just... So, this is what I mean by creating a gap in the market rather than finding one. And I'll add to that because obviously the question was, how would you almost like promote a perfume brand? Once you understand what the weakness spot is, I would let the audience do the talking, not myself, right? I'll give you an example. Nobody in years has talked about the ingredients that go into perfume, right? Now, I'm not suggesting that's a universal strategy everybody can deploy, but one person who did that, okay, there is that weird online limited edition fragrance company, isn't there?

45:38It's got Creed or something. Creed, yeah. Maybe they do this, okay? But this is the kind of thing where, you know, You can say, okay, what does everybody else do? There is no point in us being number 27 in a bonkers category. Smell and everything. Yeah. I guess... Sorry, go on. My thing is almost like, what is the outcome that everybody wants when they buy this product? Is they want people to notice that they're wearing something? It's almost like they want it to be unmissable. Usually when you wear a scent, you like the fact that people have noticed. Like, I have bought fragrances, and then I would walk out, and if somebody says, oh, you smell nice.

46:16I'm gonna buy it again. That's yours from now on. The most complimented... I'll actually go and find a page, right, that talks about sets and put a ranking of what's the most complimented sets. So I'd get other people around to just build this narrative about the fact that this product contributes the most to, what they call it, compliments, that also commits to your well-being as well, right? I'll just go that route. I'll just keep doing what we're doing and get the narrative started from somewhere else. So, this is actually an exceptional idea because... Do you remember that company, Pantan?

46:53Yes. About painting, right? Yeah. By the way, very good joke about that, which is a bit out of date because of inflation, which is, how much does shampoo cost in Romford? Pantan. Sorry, anyway. Park that one. But, yeah, even... If you look at Pantan, or if you look at, say, like the Michelin Brothers, they did the whole Michelin Guide so they could sell more tires. So actually... That's the most beautiful example of the origin. Oh, it's amazing. Yeah. Actually, the Shell Guides written by John Betjeman, which are still sort of collectible, they're Guides to the Counties of England. They were done with the same intention.

47:33Yeah, that's also the same thing, right? Based off what you just said, Alfred, actually, you could end up doing something similar. If you are a perfume brand, you could effectively create a study or a leaderboard, which is like the most complemented perfumes. And you also introduce like your other competitors, but you do it so that like yours is in the top. And the influences are all... Yeah. Every number underneath you changes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But yours is always at the top. And it's like you become the Pantene or you become the Michelin of perfumes. It's all about waiting, right? And if it's a men's favorite, I'd have women doing it.

48:14If it's the women's side, I'd have influential women doing it. Women are influences by each other. Men are usually influenced by women, right? So, like, we talked about the fact that if there was no women, we'd probably all live in cardboard boxes. I live in a travel lodge. Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't bother with all this housing stuff. It'll be like social proofing from people that have high weighting. and it's all about linking to compliments and also things that just make people, like you see there's ads all the time about like, oh, this is a thing that women are attracted to or this is a thing that people are attracted to.

48:48I would just go with that route. One area where the perfume industry has been ingenious, by the way. I mean, I know their advertising is often bizarre and formulaic and everything else, although it can be kind of magnificent as well. I mean, let's be honest, it's a peacock's tail. How much you just do a parody of those ads? Well, I think that's what, to be honest, that's what Old Spice was to an extent. You know, I'm on a horse, I'm on a boat. Here are tickets to that thing you love. But where they've been ingenious is in brand partnerships. So P &G actually was the Hugo Boss partnership. A friend of mine, Daushan Humza, was the guy who basically launched Hugo Boss Fragrances, which was a brand partnership between effectively a fashion and clothing brand and a perfume brand.

49:30So they've been very, very clever in finding brands that effectively... So those brand partnerships, one of the things I would say is that... How do you mean by that? Sorry. How did P &G partner up to create Hugo Boss? It's the equivalent of in... How would I describe it? One of the greatest examples of that is Caterpillar moving into robust workwear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you have this business, by the way, which, you know, basically, unless you've got a budget of£7 million, you can't buy anything from Caterpillar. But the brand was everywhere because of these huge, whenever you had roadworks, you had these massive great road moving equipment.

50:08By the way, it's a really funny story. My great aunt's husband's father invented the Caterpillar track. And when I was about 19, I inherited a thousand quid from her estate. And I suddenly realized he had sold the idea to a company called the California Tractor Company. And I always thought, OK, well, he sold the idea. I think he lived off it fairly comfortably for the rest of his life, but he wasn't mega rich. And then I realized that the California tractor company actually rebranded as Caterpillar. This poor guy had invented the thing that gave rise to a billion dollar company. And he had a nice life in Eastbourne.

50:46Okay. But, okay, he never really quite made the money he deserved. But what you do is you take someone who's got a brand and someone who's got a possibly, So, you've got someone who's got a brand and someone who's got manufacturing or distribution expertise in there. So, you may not know this, but the Starbucks Nespresso capsules are actually made by Nestle, who own Nespresso. Okay, right. Now, that was ingenious, because Starbucks has an unbelievable coffee brand, but no expertise in manufacturing ready-to-drink coffee or in distributing it to supermarkets. They don't have those relationships.

51:20Nestle has all of the latter, but it didn't have a ready... You know, it didn't have a premium ready to drink coffee. You could have done it with Nescafe, but they instead partnered with Starbucks. Now, one of the things I'd say for any company, before you start thinking about marketing, genuinely look at brand partnerships, because in biological terms, it's equivalent to symbiosis. You know, those fish that angle of... Well, fish that clean the teeth of other fish. It's a mutually beneficial relationship where it's the most pure form of capitalism, if you like. It's voluntary exchange of mutually complementary skills.

51:56All right. So we talked about capitalism, so I'm going to go into evil marketeer brain for a second. Yeah, no, no. You've all got to be a bit evil. So I talked about the light version of how I do it. But then you just have to find a stat. Like, for example, these stats that say that actually people fall in love with your scent, right? Pheromones, all that kind of stuff, right? So one, we like... You know how people have, what they call it, stats about some, like, pheromone, like, how many pheromone percentages is in here, right? I'll start a figure like that about, like, what your pheromone percentage is.

52:29Or you'd go with a stat that says 70 % of people, whatever the stat is, there will be a stat out there. And I'll start a dating show that starts with that. So we started this show because there's love is blind, there's all this stuff. We started this show that we get you to fall in love because of someone's scent and that knows, right? And actually, there's a stat that says 70 % of people fall in love with the nose. So now, we're gonna cover you up. And what you have to do is pick your partner and make some of their scent. And then say what you're wearing, right? And then I'd go with that. And then if you get people that are actually not attractive, quote-unquote visually, but they smell nice, everyone will be like, which scent was that?

53:07They'll start to list that out. And actually, you push the category... It's actually a bit complicated, apparently, at the very high level, because there's actually an ethnic and genetic component to it. Yeah. So there are scents that work particularly well with Middle Eastern people. There are scents... Oh, yeah. So you could actually... You could also segment that way. Yeah. I've always wondered about that, which is, you know, in other words, you know, you take a... I've always wondered why nobody's launched, like, a washing powder for hard water areas. Do you know what I mean? What's a hard water area?

53:39Well, you only know this if you move from Wales to London because in Wales, the water's so soft. I didn't know what limescale was when I was a kid. When you go to London, your kettle furs up every, you know. Oh, I'm interested. And so, actually, you do need a different chemical composition. Yeah. That's what Calgon's for, I think, basically. I think it basically stops your washing machine furring up. I think the girls are starting to, like, do a lot of ads about, like, filtering water and changing your filter so that you can actually solve them. Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, you're right. And there's actually, weirdly, they sell it as a cosmetic.

54:13Yeah. So that super filtered water through your shower, they don't sell it on the sort of basis of, you know, the usual filtration thing. The idea is that super pure filtered water has cosmetic benefits, which is rare. I met the guy actually at Heathrow who's selling that. It's a shower head which you can, it's an aftermarket fit. Quite expensive, but it basically purifies your shower water. If you change people's attention, you change what they think is important. Exactly. Consequently, you can make something important which was previously irrelevant. And I was making a point on the earlier episode that if you're a really evil oil company which wanted to extinguish the electric car market, what you do is you get everybody to focus on the one thing about electric cars that's worse than petrol cars.

54:59Well, one and a half things, which is basically range and charging time. Yeah. Okay. Now, what always amuses me is by competing on the basis of range, the electric car industry has actually done this damage to itself. Because it's got everybody going, first of all, it means the cars are more expensive than they need to be, the batteries are heavier than they need to be. There's a lot of wasted battery capacity in people who've got a car with 290 miles range where 99 % of the time they don't drive further than 50 miles. Don't get me started on all this. but The weird thing is what the electric car industry has failed to do is adequately convey to people who've never driven one that it is inordinately a pleasanter, quieter, nippier experience.

55:47And that for the first time in history, without spending a quarter of a million quid, you can have a car that's a limo and a sports car at the same time. And they can sneak up on you. Yeah. Well, I was jokingly saying that we ought to have a campaign which is saying, I think we should ban petrol cars by 2030. Noise cancellation. Not to save the environment. It's just they're too fucking slow, you know, pulling away from their lights in their useless asthmatic way, you know. But I mean, it fascinates me that because this is a case where utterly disproportionate attention is paid to this question of range and charging time, which particularly if you have at home charging is totally irrelevant.

56:24Okay? Really. OK, 99.9 % of them. Nobody with a petrol car used to say, oh, you've got a Mercedes. What's the range like? Right. Nobody talked about that. And so what is weird is that fundamentally people think important. This is how media bias works, by the way. It's not really that you it's not. Most media bias isn't what the opinion the newspaper actually expresses about a subject. It's the degree to which it either highlights it or buries it. Most really dodgy stuff that's done by mainstream media is burying things or artificially misdirecting people. It's not what they actually... It's not in the content.

57:03It's in the relative prominence. Yeah. Yeah. And I was gonna say, so you're starting to see a lot of brands. Obviously, we talked about brands like Gymshark or there's brands like Cortez, there's Jack-A-Mess. Gymshark, brilliant case. Gap in the market. Gym people, weightlifters particularly, right? totally unserved by the rest of the athletes. I'd say actually even Gymshark had a bigger innovation. You talk about finding the gap in the market. And Alfred and I talk about this, which is there were two big ones. One was actually the method of marketing. So when they started in 2015, it was like, right, we're going to use Instagram influencers, right?

57:44No one else was using Instagram influencers. But I also think, and I don't know, Ben may not agree with this, but if I think about the category of gym wear which, for a guy, makes you look bigger, and also for a woman, makes you look sexier. Because actually, before Gymshark, the whole really short shorts, tight clothing, that sort of thing, it wasn't in vogue. And they kind of set the precedence, and now, you know, so many other brands have come in. There's a Lululemon parallel with yoga, wasn't there? Yes, exactly. So that was a parallel thing. The only difference is the body shapes were different, right?

58:24So Gymshark, the big challenge was making the bodybuilding industry more mainstream. It's kind of like what the UFC tried to do with changing all their uniform. First, they used to have fighters that had sponsors all over. It was all based on the individual contribution of the fighter. And then they got them a uniform. They upscaled it a little bit. So basically, it's just about finding an audience on the rise that has no uniform and becoming the uniform and actually creating a platform for them. Brands themselves are having influence, right? And obviously, individuals have influence, brands have influence.

58:57But right now, who do you think has a better grasp on influence? Is it the brands or is it the creators? It's none. It is a... Very good answer. It's none. It is... Nobody knows anything. It is 16 to 23-year-old kids who spend every waking hour on TikTok and who understand every trend that's going on and who are creating the waves. I am now... I thought you were going to say streamers. No, because even the streamers are amplified by these 16 to 23-year-old kids who basically know all the trends, all the carousels, all the memes. They are inventing... Pardon? The clipping guys. The clipping guys, right?

59:40They are inventing new phrases and new things. And, you know, there's now this new phrase called aura farming. Yeah. Right? Aura farming, and it all came because... You'll have to help me out on that one. Go on. You know the guy that does the little dance? Yeah. So basically, a while ago, was it in Nepal or the Philippines? There was this video, which is these guys who are rowing. And what they did was that, as part of the rowing, they had these kids on each boat who basically were just in front and just, like, posing and swaying, and just looking effortlessly cool. And then the phrase aura farming came because it was like, okay, they have aura, and they're, like, farming the aura, right?

1:00:27And then they edited a rap music and a rap track on it to make it, yeah. Exactly. And so it's like, oh, now aura farming is a thing, right? And if you think about the people who hold the influence, it's that. Like, I offered this guy, about three months ago, I offered this guy 200 grand, and I just said, just come and work with me. In fact, I said, just come and work with me. I don't have a job title for you. Or a cheap oral office. I just want you to basically just like feed me with different trends so that I can apply to any of the companies that we're involved in. By the way, that's a vastly underrated form of recruitment, which is hire the person, then find the role.

1:01:08Yes. Yeah, yeah. I mean, famously, was it Vince Lombardi in NFL said, hire the best athletes. Yeah. Don't hire for a position. Don't hire for a position. Okay, just hire the best athletes. And similarly, most companies are so siloed and constrained in hiring for a role, you actually miss out on all the other stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so interesting when they say just back the founder. Yeah. If you find the founder, you'll find the place. Warren Buffett was massively influenced by the quality of the management. Yeah. Yeah. I think now, you know, like people call them the cracked, you know. So if you meet someone who is like a cracked person, it's basically a way of saying like, this is just an absolute go-getter.

1:01:51We don't know what we'll do with this person, but we'll put them somewhere and like eventually they will succeed. So I think basically, to answer your question, like, I don't think it's the brands, I don't think it's the influencers as we see them. I think it is like those like 16 to 22, 23 year olds who are obsessing over TikTok and Twitter and distribution. And then they are then like dictating what is actually then being seen. By the way, the first time I noticed I was marginally famous was among kids. Yeah. Okay. Now I get people of all age groups coming up to me. but the first time I started getting recognized was literally exactly the audience you described.

1:02:33Yeah. And it's interesting, right? Because, like, they probably saw you as, um, as kind of, like, their really smart great uncle. Who has, like... Uncle? Oh, an uncle. You mean I know that? I'll tell you that. No, right? Because, like, even from your fashion sense, it's like the dude who just reads and is kind of, like, doesn't really know what day it is, but if you asked him anything, he would know the answer to that. Like, in stories, that is like the great uncle that people want. I'm totally chronologically dyslexic. I vaguely know which month it is. Interesting. And so, yeah, and so I think those guys are dictating culture.

1:03:13In fact, I will go as far to say that I think, and I know brands are not going to do this because they're old and stodgy and they have absolutely no clue. But like, I think what every brand should do, every forward-thinking brand should do, is have a budget. It could be like 300 grand a year, right? And call it your misfits budget. And all you do is just hire these people and you say, bro, I don't know what you're going to do. Do some stuff. Report back to me when you've got something worth talking about. But if not, just keep tinkering. And I promise you, because a lot of these guys are in their bedrooms doing stuff.

1:03:52One of them will succeed. And also you may actually find out that it would be significantly easier to recruit them. If you are Pepsi, you still have the legacy brand of same Pepsi. So they would much rather work for Pepsi and be like, I'm in charge of virality at Pepsi. Way better sell. We were just talking to Jordan about the fact that a lot of creators that are not going to be at the top of the top are going to actually start working for brands, right? Long-term in the future, right? So actually, the current role... Do you have a stable, a talent stable? Yeah. The current role of a creative director, a marketing director will change.

1:04:25It's gonna be like this community misfits era. And it's going back to the whole conversation around like... The fashion industry sort of has the concept of the muse, doesn't it? Yeah. The person who is not necessarily a fashion designer, but they're a muse for the creatives. Yeah. The fashion world is actually pretty... In this space, they're actually pretty forward-thinking. If you think about how the role of how like a Virgil Abloh or the role of a... Like a Pharrell. Pharrell Williams, right? Yeah. I think that a lot more brands should be thinking that way. They should have this community person that's tapped into the culture that they create as the muse of the brand.

1:05:01And then people almost like buy into that, almost like thinking. But I guess going into like modern day influence, like if you think about who are the ones that are hijacking the feeds right now, it's actually faceless pages. Oh yeah, yeah. Who are run by those 1623 hosts. Exactly. These guys are the ones, that's what Mr. Beast, Kaisenat, Andrew Tate, all those people are leveraging these pages of people that are clipping hot topic conversations and they're just like feeding your feed. So actually, when brands talk about how to go viral, by taking that approach, you can almost like guarantee virality if you keep the quality level authentic, right?

1:05:38The issue with brand is what they will do. It'll say, okay, here's our really bad message. That's very vanilla and very safe. And let's go to that space and almost like ruin it. But really, if you say, what is it about us that people want to know about, want to meme-ify? Remember Uncensored, was it Eddie Hearn? Little clips of Eddie Hearn, the boxing promoter. He's gotten so famous because of those clipping companies, right? So they basically just saw that he just says a lot of outrageous, funny stuff, and they just created pages and content. By the way, one strategy is you create a lot of very long-form content and then...

1:06:11Clip it up. And then you find the best moments. And then that hijacks the feed. Very similar to a bit of advice from advertising copywriting, which is if you're stuck for writing a headline, write the body copy. And then quite often the best sentence in your body copy is the headline. Yeah, 100%. I think that's how they came up with the Porsche thing, right? Which is like, it's so quiet, you can hear... It's like... The Rolls Royce. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The worst thing about it is that it's so quiet or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that came because they were writing the copy and then they were like, oh, that's a good line.

1:06:43We should make that a headline. That's too good to be down here. But then obviously, the Faceless Pages, the clipping companies, these young misfits that are obviously like killing it right now, other way to go. And obviously the bridge between, we were doing some of this, but the bridge between like brands and that space is what needs to happen. And I think that the brands that actually start to step into there and have like a misfit budget to be able to try these new things are going to leverage from the upside. But I think it also depends on, so it does depend also on the founders. and more importantly, I think we are going to see this in the next five years, you know, your business or whatever would have a ton of people queuing up because now the founders of the companies that are dominating are 25, 30.

1:07:30They understand this terminology. They understand the language. Quite candidly, if you're selling to a 60-year-old dude or woman or whatever, and she's like, all they've known is media buying on TV, radio, Facebook ads, it's like, whoa, guys, we're doing Facebook ads now. That person, the leap in thought for them to go from where they are to where they should be is so high. But a 27, 30-year-old, that person can easily get it. By the way, what you've spotted here is also a fundamental failing of modern capitalism, which is nearly all chief executives and senior people within an organization are selected for their ability to talk to investors and shareholders, not their ability to talk to customers.

1:08:11Yeah. Okay. I mean, there are a few exceptions, you know, who effectively, you know, Greg Jackson at Octopus Energy would be a great example of someone who talks to him. He's a great entrepreneur, isn't he? Brilliant man. Really good. An example, you know, who definitely talks in both directions. I think he'd rather be talking to customers than talking to investors. Branson was kind of, you know, an obvious example. You know, you occasionally get that. But, I mean, fundamentally large organizations have been, I think, wrong. And this is a way to cure this. What you're doing is a way to cure this, which is actually getting companies focused a bit more on their goddamn customers and a bit less on the shareholders.

1:08:50Because ultimately, it's the customers who give you money. They're the people who determine whether you grow. They're the people who determine whether you're in and out. You can replace your shareholders a lot more easily than you can replace your customers. And I think that's a fundamental question about corporate structure. So I've actually argued that every company should have a customer board alongside the board. Okay, meeting board. Yeah, absolutely right. Yeah. Because it's, you know, the conversation in a board meeting is overwhelmingly financialized now. Oh, yeah. To a point which makes them actually utterly tedious.

1:09:27But then every board meeting is having the same conversations. And no one's having a contrarian conversation, right? And I think that a lot of it is because, so one thing that I realized is that often than not, I think I watched this on a podcast before. They said that the most dangerous person in a corporation is a smart person with a fixed mindset. Yeah. Right? They'll always find facts and figures to justify their actions, right? And then they will be right, theoretically. But if you look at from a... Until, like, you start to see changes in, like, wider culture, they'll just want to stay long enough for them to get out, right?

1:10:03They don't only care about their tenure. They don't care about the longevity of the brand. So having a fixed mindset is actually advantageous if you're planning a short stay. Short stay. And a lot of times... You pick a few metrics, laser focus on them, refuse to consider everything else. Within a very narrow time frame, you'll look like a great guy. Exactly. But that's what's happening. And I'm sure, Tim, you've been in the industry of buying and selling businesses as well. The same trend or metric or trial and proven almost like story to tell to investors probably doesn't work anymore. A lot of brands would scale up in the early days because they pumped a lot of money in paid ads.

1:10:41And now people realize that if you don't build the brand simultaneously, as soon as you switch off the ads, what's your brand, right? I mean, the fixation with out-of-date metrics is the biggest opportunity for a competitor. Yeah. It's exactly similar to that reverse benchmarking thing. Everybody gets fixated with the same shit. And then someone comes along and effectively, there's a phrase I always use to illustrate this. This is where procurement can be and the efficiency mindset and a rationalist mindset is a major block to innovation. So, my example is if procurement were responsible for buying your mobile phone, the first iPhone would never have gone anywhere.

1:11:21Because I don't know if you remember the first iPhone, the battery life was terrible, right? I mean, literally, it didn't make it till, you know, past brunch, okay? But people were prepared to put up with that because it was brilliant in some completely new dimension. If you had a procurement department with a list of pre-existing criteria, okay, they go, no, I'm afraid you don't even get through the first round because your battery life's too poor. We'll award the whole contract to Nokia as we did last year and the year before and the year before that. Blackberry. Blackberry would have been, you're absolutely right.

1:11:49Yeah, yeah. And so, generally, innovation, this is why I defend the electric car, will almost always mean you were worse in one or two dimensions than the competition. This is where benchmarking gets so dangerous. But what you've discovered is a completely new, as yet unheralded metric, which for the consumer is more important than any of the old stuff. So, and here's a really interesting thing. It's almost like you need the innovation to stand out, but then you need the procurement slash data to refine and make quick changes, right? Because if, for example, the iPhone stayed at that innovation stage with no iterations, right?

1:12:32Because a lot of the times people say, oh, we can predict that every September or every two Septembers, iPhone is going to become marginally better, right? Instead of being like vastly better, right? So it's actually, you're better off having like a really big dream and idea and get better over time, right? And actually, I suppose Apple knew that battery technology would improve in such a rate that although in a perfect world you might have launched two years later, okay, actually they knew that this is a problem that's going to go away. You know, absolutely right. In the same way, I think famously with Gmail.

1:13:05Am I right about this? They said, look, if we actually offer free online email, we won't have the server capacity to handle it. and the person did the maths and realized that over the future, by the time it became a problem, it wasn't going to be a problem. More than more, I think, is what it's called, isn't it? And there's another one, Wright's Law, which is that every doubling of manufacturing volume results in a 10 % reduction in costs or something. There was somebody who invested in Ocado on that basis, which is they said, okay, at a certain scale, this doesn't make economic sense. but our thesis is, and I think that was proved right, that the more Ocado-ing you do, the cheaper it becomes to be a Cardo.

1:13:49Yeah. Fundamentally. Yeah. So Tim, if you were going to start FanBytes again and focus on an influence company, how would you structure it? How would you approach it? What would you sell to brands? Like now? Yeah, if you were to do it now.

1:14:12So, the initial premise of Fanbytes was connecting brands to influencers. In 2025, I don't think that quite works. But you reverse it, almost. Yeah, I would effectively have a way for brands to become the influencers. And so that would involve things like the clip and stuff. It would involve a suite of products, which is based off primarily distribution. So forget the people. Let's just think about how we create really social-first content, and then also give you ownership of distribution. Because, you know... And IP. And IP. Because if you think about it, right? When we sold the company, we had four people.

1:15:00We had four big holding companies want to buy the company. and I remember thinking well why are you spending this amount of money to buy us and it was because to them they were like well you have the influencer part and then we now have distribution which we can also pair up with our paid ads with our seo etc so you have the content side of things and now we can amplify through the other stuff and I think that they were onto something and now if you can effectively show brands teach brands and create a system for them to just be able to just create content on the fly um and then deploy it through these clipping pages through that sort of thing i think that is where it wins but i wouldn't do it based on personality as fanbytes was you know like man we're having brands like pakora band pay us half a million for a campaign to like get the most influential people and the most, frankly, the most good-looking females to try and sell the perfume.

1:16:05Paco Rabanne now, if they were to be a client of fanbites now, I'd say, right, we have this idea for a dating show, which is all about that, cool, and now we're going to just get an army of clippers to do that, and that's going to be the thing that we spend 500 grand on, and I promise you that would actually last much longer and be of better value than than just like pairing up with 50 different influences. You're better off becoming an entertainment brand. If anything, if the game, if the aim of the game is attention, your competitor is now Netflix, right? Your competitor is now, you're basically now becoming Disney, right?

1:16:39And they have different sub shows. And now it's like, okay, how do we win by storytelling and baking in our values and maybe even our products inside that storytelling experience? And then maybe the people you sell to then is not a bigger holding company, is an entertainment company. I might recommend a book here. Not widely known, but also brilliant, a bit like Will Godara's. It's called Why Does the Peddler Sing? By Paul Feldwick, who was a great apathosian. Why does the peddler sing? Peddler sing. And it's the link between salesmanship and showmanship. Yeah, yeah. There has always been, he argues, there's a kind of innate thing in humanity, okay?

1:17:12So the whole question is, if you went back to the Middle Ages, there'd be people coming and selling pots and pans through your village. and they'd be kind of troubadours as well as being pot sellers. Pot and pan sellers. Okay. And he argues, I would argue, you know, one of the three greatest advertising planners of the last 50 years, Feldwick. He argues in this book that effectively there has always been this connection between the ability to entertain and the ability to sell and that a lot of people in advertising, he thinks, are uncomfortable with the idea of entertainment. Showmanship, yeah.

1:17:54Because you need to present to a load of very serious-minded people and spreadsheet jockeys, and you need to look really, really serious and talk about metrics like reach. And he would argue that, I mean, he was one of the great brains behind the Barclay Card-Rowan Atkinson campaign, which, of course, gave rise to Johnny English, so it actually created its own spin-off. Okay. And he just argues that the ability to entertain and the ability to sell basically should be considered as, if you like, two sides of the same coin. What you just reminded me of was P.T. Barnum. Yeah. And, like, what a genius.

1:18:33There's a book I read. I think it's his book. He wrote a book basically about just showmanship and sales. And I remember reading it. Thomas Edison was also a great example of this. Yeah. Colonel Saunders. Just a showman, right? Actually, by the way, nobody ever considers the extraordinary attention Henry Ford gave to marketing and promotion. I mean, obviously, everybody writes about the production line, because that's the bit that economists are comfortable with. But actually, I mean, this is my mischievous joke. My wife's a priest in the Church of England, and I always go, you can't criticize marketing, I said, because no one would have heard of Jesus if it hadn't been for St.

1:19:13Paul. Okay, right? That actually, it's not enough to have a great idea. Yeah, you need to. And actually, innovation and marketing are two sides of the same coin. Do you remember, I'm trying to remember this, and I think I've told you about this, Alfred, which was the guys who founded the lift company, like the elevator company, Otis, and they did that stunt. State fairs, they did the stunt where they cut the rope. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. where they cut the rope. So do you want to tell the story? Because I think that's one of the best stories. We forget this, because most of us, unless you're claustrophobic, well, not actually, yeah, most of us, but, you know, if you're not frightened of lifts or heights, we'll get into a lift now without thinking about it.

1:19:53The very idea of it was utterly terrifying when it first came along. We forget that, I mean, by the way, in the early days of Hollywood, if you had people going to a cinema to watch a silent film, and you had a train coming towards the screen or someone firing a gun straight out of the screen. People ducked, OK? Obviously, we've become sort of inured to it now, but people were terrified if they literally saw a train coming straight towards them. And they would hide behind seats and run out of the side. And an elevator was terrifying. So he had to endlessly demonstrate to prove how safe it was by going to state fairs, putting people in the thing, raising it up, cutting the cable, at which point it would fall about two inches.

1:20:34So he'd invented the mechanism that made the lift... Actually, to be honest, he'd made the lift safe, but more important still, he'd made it non-terrified. And there's a great thing in Wuppertal in Germany, if you ever go, there's a thing called the Schwaberbahn, which is this... It's like an upside-down monorail where the trains hang from a rail above the river and you travel along. And they demonstrated the safety of this by putting an elephant in it. Yeah, yeah. Wow, that's clever. I mean, there's a really gruesome one, which is Edison as marketer, which is the reason the US has the electric chair, okay, as a form of execution, is that Edison was competing with the rival Westinghouse system.

1:21:13Edison used DC. Westinghouse, which ultimately won out, used AC current, okay? Edison wanted to convince the public that AC electricity was dangerous, and so he managed to engineer it that in certain states, the mode of executing people was by killing them with an alternating current. now by the way I think it's an app by the way I think that is the literally the absolute nadir of marketing ideas apart from maybe torches of freedom encouraging women okay yeah I never deny by the way for one second that you can use marketing for evil purposes any any argument to the contrary I think is naive okay I think all you can do is call it out and be alert enough to notice it um and um very strange I can just say the Nazis were very good at branding and people get really angry." And I go, but they were.

1:22:05Yeah. I mean, by their own admission, you can actually go and find in museums, you can find Nazi brand guidelines on how a swastika flag, you know, the color, I don't think they had Pantone references then. But they had brand guidelines. Literally, the whole thing was designed to within an inch of its life. And by the way, Hugo Boss designed the uniforms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, well, all right. But... Yeah, I heard that. But that was literally a marketing... Because when you think about it, it's an absurd way to execute somebody, okay? I mean, you know, but that was literally devised, and it still persists, I hope, in not many states, because I think it's a terrible way to execute anybody.

1:22:48No, but they always say that the best form of marketing is a dramatic demonstration. We say this all the time. That's the only way to be able to demonstrate that something actually works and does what it says that you say that it does, right? So showcasing a dramatic demonstration, that's why before an iPhone came out, that's why the iPad was in a letterbox to demonstrate how thin it was, right? These are all ways of demonstrating that. I think... Do you know the first Walkman? Absolutely beautiful, okay? All the salesmen to sell the Walkman were given shirts with actually slightly large pockets.

1:23:26Okay? Because the first Walkman wasn't really pockets. But they were given shirts with these specially made large pockets. And I mean, what's my reaction to that? Fundamentally, sometimes to get something over the line from rejection to consideration, okay? You've got to play games with people. I'm sorry. I mean, I wish it weren't so, but it's kind of true. And usually it's demonstration or it's through weighting of who's the person of influence for that cohort group. Like, who's the person that their opinion, perception, weighs more than the other? And that's probably where the influence is. It's like, it's not just a blanket conversation.

1:24:08It's actually very dependent on the audience. Incidentally, there's a weird marketing problem with any real innovation, okay? Which is, you tend to have the early adopters of any new technology tend to be weird people, right? Okay. I mean, you know, veganism, for example, okay? I mean, the early vegans... Right, Brewer just went for vegans. No, no, no, I'm totally... He's gonna say anything! The earliest adopters of anything, you know, whether it's early stage Christianity or it's early stage air fries, okay, tend to be weird and unrepresentative. And there is always a problem that your user imagery suffers in any...

1:24:48Now, none of you can remember this, okay? There was literally a period from 1994 to about 1996... ...where if you were interested in the internet, you were considered a bit of a saddo. I bet Jeff Bezos was seen. Yeah, no, no. It was actually seen except, you know... So I was a very, very early discoverer, because by total good instance, my brother's flatmate in Berkeley had five years earlier been Tim Berners-Lee's flatmate in Oxford or something. So I got to hear about this death. Actually, it was annoying, because I got to hear about it too early. Because I would have thought of actually a business idea if I'd heard about it two years.

1:25:25But you spent so long in 1994 with people going, yeah, shut up about the internet, it's boring. Right. I'll tell you the funniest story, okay? So I was the first person in Britain to have my credit card details stolen online. You? Yeah. So nobody bought anything online, okay? And I went to an American website which specialized in hot chili sauces and ordered a delivery of three of them on a credit card. I was locked in from early. You couldn't buy that shit. Risky business. Anyway, so what happens? This is worth noting just because there was a punch cartoon. There was a punch cartoon in about 1997, which showed this darkened room with a load of shadows staring at screens.

1:26:09And someone was saying, Kevin's just found a way of train-spotting on the internet. because that was considered to combine two of the saddest, most tragic, nerdy things. Now, obviously, the internet escaped that. But there was literally, I mean, I literally had people saying, it's like teletext for the 1990s and all this stuff. So anyway, this is what happens. I get my, anyway, I buy this hot sauce. Weirdly, I never get a confirmation email. The order never arrives. But about a day later, I get a phone call from Nat West that says, did you try and buy 400 pounds worth of RAM? Okay. And I said, no.

1:26:44And they said, well, we just had an order on your card for 400. RAM was like the dodgy, it was like the Bitcoin of the 1990s, okay? Which is you nicked RAM from companies because it was anonymous and valuable. And it was like this commodity thing. People would break into your office and steal all the RAM from the desktop computers. It only lasted about three years. I don't know what stopped it. Anyway, so, and I said, no, I didn't. So they cancelled the payment, and I never lost any money. It was no problem at all. I have to mention this at a conference, okay? Nobody has done anything else I'd said, because everybody in the newspapers wanted a story that said the internet is terrible.

1:27:24Okay, because you always get this sort of Daily Mail, there's a thing that's new. I don't exclusively blame the Daily Mail for this, but there's this thing that's new, let's find a way to frighten people about it, okay? Everybody didn't want to interview me about this. And I wanted to go and... And then Radio 4 ring up. They go, I understand you've had your credit card details still online. And what they wanted me to say, because this is fucking, you know, Radio 4 for you, and it's all news media for me. I know I felt violated, right? I felt, you know, I felt that life was no longer safe for me.

1:27:58I'm still getting over the trauma. And instead, I said to Radio 4, yeah, it was no problem. Nat West called up, I just told them not to make the payment, and nothing happened. And at that point, I just said, no, no, it's no big fucking deal. Of course, I'm not going to stop me going online. What the hell are you talking about, right? And then 10 minutes later, I can say, you're no longer needed for the program. And there's an article somewhere in the Independent, okay, which refers to me having my credit. The picture of me, and underneath the caption is Sutherland, colon, still uses internet. Okay, right.

1:28:32Okay. Now, this is a really interesting thing in innovation because actually innovation brings a marketing problem, which is the first devotees tend to become fundamentally unrepresentative of the mass market. And therefore, it ends up with a kind of effectively a disconcerting user imagery problem. So that's one of the things why innovation needs marketing, fundamentally. Well, there's this phrase, which is, if you want to know what's happening in the future, look at what the nerds are doing in the present, right? Like, Apple started with hobbyists. In fact, when we were talking about this last night, we were talking about some of the most craziest innovations started from fringe groups.

1:29:17Oh, yeah. The internet, as you mentioned, but like, crypto. Helen Edwards, which is Start at the Edge, I think it's called. Yeah. You know, when Beatrice says, if you're looking to innovate, go to the fringes. Yeah, look at the fringes, right? And when we're talking about this with porn, that we said actually like porn as an industry has probably been the biggest fringe early innovator of so many things. It was the porn industry that started using crypto first because of using Bitcoin. Online payment, actually. They put their safe online payment, yeah. Safe online payments, crypto, in fact, streaming.

1:29:57So many of the latest innovations of the last 20, 25 years has been driven by them and also other fringe groups. So now, when I just finished reading this book called The Empire of AI, and basically it talks about how Chai GPT came to be, and you look at all the quote-unquote misfits, and you're like, you know, they were thinking about this in 2005. But it was in such like a very odd, like awkward, edgy way that someone's talking about AGI, you're like, yeah, bro, okay, right? And now, just through that one breakaway product, ChatGPT, now it's been like, oh, yeah, this has been the thing we've been talking about for the last 30 years.

1:30:41The future always starts unfashionable. I mean, you think of people like Graham Hinton, isn't it? The Brit, who was a great AI pioneer. And you have to spend like 20 years in the wilderness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I got a friend who was a scientist who said that there used to be this group of people, she'd go to conferences, and there was this group of people who studied prions, okay? And no one would talk to them, right? What's prions? Well, I'll explain. It's a very weird kind of thing that isn't a virus, it's a kind of mutation that spreads in the body. And it was quite niche. And basically, no one would talk to them, and they'd sit on their own at conferences, and everybody would snub them.

1:31:16And then mad cow disease happened, which is a prion, okay? And these people were suddenly rock stars, right? Every conference wanted them there. And actually, everything important sort of starts at the edges, and it starts weird. I think that's absolutely true. 100%. So, we've come to time. I could actually have this conversation forever with two of my favorite people. But I guess to wrap up, Tim, like, what you've been working on recently, where do you want to... Where can we get, right here, can everybody find you? So where can anybody find me? Well, luckily, one thing I learned from Fanbytes was that influence matters.

1:31:54And so I've grown a significant size social media audience, nearing a million now across all our platforms. So that's really good. I'm happy about that. And what's exciting right now is just like really dovetailing into these hyper niche audiences. In fact, through this conversation, and people will probably see this on video, there's been a few times where I've been like, huh. So both of you have given me some very interesting insights that we can apply to the companies, especially the perfumer and I ask because I'm just about to buy into a perfume brand. And it's a free consultancy. And it's a misshapen...

1:32:28What's the weirdest brand partnership you could do? People have done it with car brands, obviously. Well, with perfume or just... Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a completely off the flaming, off the charts brand partnership you could do. Anyway, I'll have a think about that. We love you guys. Peace. Peace. Yeah.