10 Years of Koto: James Greenfield on Leadership, Growth & Grit

0:06For the final episode of the season, I'm joined by James Greenfield, CEO and co-founder of Koto, the global brand and digital agency that's gone from scrappy upstart to one of the most talked about studios in the industry. Over the past decade, Koto has grown to a team of 125 across five cities, Berlin, London, LA, New York and Sydney, working with some of the world's biggest brands from Google and Uber to Amazon. But as James shares, the journey hasn't always been smooth sailing. We talk about what it really takes to build a creative company from the ground up, the stress, the setbacks and the sacrifices people don't always see.

0:47We get into leadership, team culture, staying creatively sharp, and what happens when you're no longer the underdog. James also reflects on how the industry has changed, why independent studios are having a moment, and how Koto is preparing for whatever comes next, from AI to shifting client expectations. It's an honest, wide-ranging chat about ambition, resilience, and the constant push to do good work in a world that's always moving.

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2:30You're the last of the season, James, so I feel very honoured to be joined with you today. Thanks for coming on the Creative Bean podcast.

2:36James Greenfield:Thanks for having me, really appreciate it. We just get straight in there, we're just no messing. Let's do it. 10 years of Koto, how does it feel? Quite surprising to be honest, yeah. I feel like, yeah, the first five you're fighting for the thing to be real so much that at some point, which I think is probably around year six or seven, I let myself accept that it was real. but the problem with that around then was Covid turned up and so you didn't have the chance to be able to kind of give yourself a minute you were too busy dealing with trying to make sure that you survived this great once in a lifetime thing.

3:16Yeah I suppose yeah halfway through it just hit us all didn't it you were probably what five years in six years in just getting going.

3:23James Greenfield:Yeah we'd really got really good momentum and we'd opened our first offices internationally as well at that point as well and so and a lot of people from London had gone out to start LA as well so it was a bit of a you know there's a point where people were looking at getting stranded on the wrong side of the world so yeah it was a difficult time. Stressful time gosh but you're still here you're still standing and you know you were an underdog for quite some time and now you're the studio everyone's talking about dare I say it how do you feel about that? I think it's easy easier to be an underdog and if anything actually I think I've felt losing our underdog status has been a bit of a tricky thing for us because everyone likes to be a challenger brand we talk about challenger brands all the time and you know punching above your weight and you know in the grand scheme of things there's networks out there that have got 50 60 70 80 000 employees and so the 125 is is is a much smaller than that and you know and we and we lose to much bigger organizations all the time when it comes to potential projects and relationships and etc but yeah I don't think we can claim underdog status anymore and so it's part of growing up it's part about understanding it part of um you've just got to be really realistic about where you are the funny thing is that we do still get people walk through the door that think we're 10 people and this small little agency and so I think that will take a while for that to really go away that kind of legacy piece yeah you were at design studio previously and back then they were kind of the big the big guns dare I say it um would you would you say you've kind of overtaken them now or am I not allowed to ask that question uh I think I've always been really interested in the way that agencies go in cycles um you know and some amazing agencies outlast that you know the pentagrams and the war fall into this world have managed to hold that top tier status for many many years and I don't think that can be underestimated I think you know that's a very very impressive thing and I think a lot of agency I guess reputation is about energy it's about people being out there willing to kind of represent that company and make sure the work stays excellent make sure people stay happy make sure that clients understand who you are and you know that's exhausting stuff that takes a lot of energy and so I'm really aware that you know for Koto to keep moving forward and for us to continue to be successful we're going to have to do that and so one of the things we did earlier this year was bring some more of the team internally and to be shareholders to make sure that that energy spread amongst not just the three of us that started it but amongst a lot of other people and so yeah I'm aware of you know I've been lucky enough to work in some good agencies before I started my own and I'll always be rooting for those agencies to be successful but I think to to be at the top of your game for more than a decade takes something special I think.

6:13Absolutely yeah and a lot of blood sweat and tears I can imagine um what what was the kind of aim when you started Koto 10 years ago what did you want to do

6:22James Greenfield:differently I've probably said this in other places so I apologize anybody that's listening that I'm boring but um for me I was always slightly kind of puzzled by this world where you had like there was big projects that big companies did um and you know it was full of great thinking but I didn't necessarily always see it all the way you kind of didn't always work its way all the way through so you know you go and look at the website after the rebrand and you'd be like well you can't really see a lot of it there or or you know you'd see something that felt very different and so what I always wanted to do is I always wanted to have a big enough agency that meant that the biggest brands in the world if they were looking but they would they would hopefully consider us um yeah but we would keep that kind of small boutique craft approach which meant that you know you're going to sweat the details you're going to make sure you see it all the way through to the end and that we want to stay in relationships with our clients so therefore we could help them beyond that kind of big piece of work and you know I've always thought it's a bit weird it's like you know some people had one agency to do like smaller stuff and then one agency to do big stuff and it's like well that's kind of working against each other and so tried to kind of create a space where we could close that gap between those two things which I'm hopeful though I think we've done a little bit there's still work to do on it but we've got there a bit stopping that kind of fragmentation which I suppose you'd have to sort of guide the clients through a little bit as well yeah totally I think you know sometimes I think as agencies we expect clients to completely understand how to hire us how to brief us how to work with us etc and you know like any background there's lots of these people come from all different places you know some of them are creative some of them are not some of them come from pure marketing background some of them come from a different business background and so for us to expect them to understand the business of creativity and for that to be effective I think it's a bit unrealistic at times sometimes and maybe a little bit of creative ego going on and so I think in that world it's also helping clients show that which is why a lot of the marketing stuff we do is about sharing information that we've learned along the way and making sure that we can put it out there and people can you know use it in a way that's useful to them in their day-to-day business.

8:23I don't think there's ever been a time and there's been a lot of disruption over the last two decades but now feels particularly like the pace of change and the fact that tech is just transforming everything we do how is that sort of being interpreted at Koto how are you are you so is it the conversation you're all having at the moment are you excited about it frightened about it I think because we've been lucky enough to work around technology for the last 10 years and then

8:52James Greenfield:I had previously had technology clients before is I'm always hyper aware of the fact that it's always a bit exaggerated and so people pick it up a bit too much and so you know an unnamed client in 2016 told me that there'd be no taxi drivers on the planet in 2019 and you know here we are in 2025 and there's still plenty of taxi drivers out there um you know the idea of autonomy in vehicles was muted and you know if you're brave enough to drive a tesla with autonomy on you can see there's been some pretty interesting results for some people in that world and okay lots of us have got a waymo and in a certain kind of grid city it works really well and it's a very clever thing that said we'll still see the scare stories about the person trapped going in circles when they were thought they were going to the airport and i think you can take that parallel and we can look at it in our industry, which is, you know, we do AI training for the whole team.

9:49James Greenfield:It's been super useful. We've had some great creative results out of it. We've got some clients that have banned us from using AI and some clients that have encouraged us to using AI. Interesting. I think we are in that kind of messy middle at the moment where we know that it's going to have an effect, both positive and negative. But anyone that will proclaim exactly this is how it's going to happen this is going to happen I think you might need to check they're not talking their own book yeah fair enough um there's a lot of talk apparently in London at the moment about independence rising up and um being on a sort of level playing field to the very lot you know more established design agencies creative agencies why do you think that is um without creating a very boring monologue about why the networks don't work I think it's to do with the fact that if you are constantly fixated on shareholder value quarter to quarter, you're not going to be doing the best for your people and you're not going to be doing the best for the clients that you work with.

10:50James Greenfield:And I think, you know, we're at the point where the internet is completely democratic for access. And so therefore, clients can find independent agencies. And so therefore, we're kind of having a compounding effect where brave clients went out, found independent agencies they did great work sometimes it wins awards sometimes it doesn't win awards but it's noted and seen and so therefore the next level of client which isn't maybe as brave but it's still pretty brave does the same and then the next client does it and people realize that actually you don't always have to go and hire whichever network of choice you would hire previously um and i think businesses are also hiring a lot of creative people and so creative access in terms of creatives is really hard and so therefore you have to really work hard to look after your people.

11:36James Greenfield:And if you're only fixated on shareholder value, then people don't want to hang around for that. And so therefore, you end up having a high frequency of change. And that doesn't create great client relationships. And so clients go and look elsewhere. And so the whole thing just perpetuates until you have a compounding effect. And so I think we're at a conclusion of probably five to 10 years of networks, not necessarily really creating the best product that the market needed. And it's really easy to find independence. And I think clients are informed shoppers, they know what they're looking for in many cases.

12:09James Greenfield:And so therefore, they know that there's good independent agencies that have the scale, have the ability. And we've seen a lot of capital come into this industry as well, you know, in different shapes and sizes, and whether that's coming from companies like Accenture that previously didn't touch this industry, or whether that's coming from private equity or wherever else. And so I think what we what we end up with is a disrupted market. And so therefore, I think it's just going to carry on and we're going to see more and more of it. Exciting. So it's not a case of it coming in cycles. It could do.

12:38James Greenfield:I think it depends what returns people are looking for. I think one thing that people probably are underestimating is how hard it is to manage creativity. I think people can see the, you know, the size of some of the briefs that are out there in the market and, you know, all of the kind of things that go with that. But, you know, great creativity is really hard. And we know that. And And that's why when we see really good creativity as an industry, I think we celebrate it because we understand how hard it is to get something that was maybe an idea on a post-it note or in a meeting room or someone had on the way to work in their car or whatever and turn it into something that sees it all the way through until it has the effect.

13:14James Greenfield:and I think you know that's just going to get even more because the one thing jumping back a topic and talking about AI is you know in the world where there's going to be a lot of automated slop I think true creativity is really going to be in demand more than ever because you're going to need to you know the access to just make slop is going to be so easy and so therefore to really stand out on top of that it's going to be it's going to be the thing that people really have to try to do. I keep hearing this it's very reassuring. Who's your biggest competition? who's our biggest competition wow i'm feeling devious this morning james sorry it's okay it's good uh our biggest competition depends where what we're doing and where we're doing it but i would say you know there's some great companies we come up against again like people like jkr done really really good work in recent times you know and i've got a lot of respect for what that company's done and achieved can't count out people like collins who i think have been creatively brilliant for many years and you know and brian's an enigmatic character that captures people's imaginations in an amazing way and people like wolf ollins you know ever present evergreen brilliant work and so yeah they're the people i probably count as my competition you're in the top leagues now i don't know about that i think that's our clients putting us in with these people but yeah maybe we are that's great what surprised you the most then about the last 10 years i'm surprised about how long people have hung around i've just given two people yellow briefcases for lasting 10 years at koto and so and you know one of them started as an intern and now he's a creative director and so that's a lovely thing and that's really really good but i personally never would have stayed anywhere however great it was for 10 years in my career and so that's probably my number one surprise is I've got yeah I was looking at your LinkedIn you moved around a lot you know if I was going to employ you James I'd be like well why does he keep moving around yeah that's probably my semi ADHD at play I think well I think it's just the way you kind of progress isn't it you have to keep moving on yeah I got to a point in my career where I knew that I wanted to start my own agency and so I actually wanted to build out more models and so it was a conscious thing where I was moving from company to company to see how everyone did it because I wanted to get as much experience in such a compound time as I possibly could um and it was tough because you know companies like ManVestor Machine it was an amazing place to work and I learned loads and it was brilliant I was working on some really amazing Channel 4 stuff places like Design Studio I was lucky enough to do Airbnb and you know as I was leaving we got the Premier League which would be my ultimate job to do which I never got to see through and what a shame yeah I know these things happen though right but it's uh but at the same time I was I knew that I was on a on a trajectory at that point yeah what was the what was the straw that broke the camel's back they decided you know you had to leave design studio and leave and go and do your own thing I think in the glow of Airbnb afterwards I felt that good projects were going to turn up and they did yeah and I knew if I started doing all those good projects then my long-held want which I'd had since I was 15 years old to own my own creative company would there'd always be a reason not to and the other thing as well is a bit of a sad story but my dad was dying and I needed him to know that I started my own business before he went and so therefore I felt that it was this kind of conjecture of two moments that came together at one time and I was like right this is it the universe is telling me so let's go.

16:46Yeah that's amazing and who was your first client?

16:52James Greenfield:oh well uh we did some very very funny stuff at the beginning uh but you know we were also really lucky there was a media company called city outdoor who gave us a very small budget which was fine because they were a startup to do uh an identity for them we did some work for a body worn camera um which is kind of all in the security space you know at that beginning it was literally absolutely anything um but the i think the first client that really kind of started to get us going as we worked with a new zealand company called empathy which was a design thinking company and they were incredibly uh incredibly helpful to kind of like give us a give us a good check and get us started apart from obviously being very you know intelligent charming and talented oh god um what was the secret i mean how did you kind of how do you think you've made koto so successful is it about leadership is it about the people i think it's a combination combination of a number of factors number one it's not me it's the the team and i think i've always been really aware that the best work was always made by a team and i think as an industry we've been very very guilty for too long of thinking that this one person made this whole thing and you know it's this kind of fetishization of design history i think that's responsible which is we think that architects we go oh you know that building was made by this architect and it's like we all know that anyone's got any mates that work in architecture it's definitely not one person making a whole building you know and i think there's certain things like you know famous artists or furniture designers or whatever who probably did do the majority of something but there's still somebody that had to put that into production and you know all those things and i think our bit of the creative world is no different which is and so therefore from the beginning creating a good team environment's always been really really important and understanding what people need you know I've worked at amazingly creative companies but the culture sucked and I felt like it was such a limiting factor because what it meant was people didn't want to be there and because people didn't want to be there then the work didn't perpetuate and you know and so therefore you have to create that great environment and I think the second thing is don't take it too seriously I think you know I've worked in some really stressful environments as well where we made great work but it was felt like you were walking on eggshells and people would lose their temper and and it's just oh you can't take it that seriously it's just not that important um you know the work you know I've always been a great believer if I'm going to turn up at work on a Monday morning I want to be making the best stuff possible but at the same time I want to enjoy doing it and not be falling out with people so been very few fallout moments at Koto ever just because it just really really isn't worth it um What fallout moments have you had?

19:36Come on.

19:37James Greenfield:What fallout moments have we had? I think I've raised my voice three times in 10 years. So I'll take that. I think that's well with intolerance. Yeah, I think that's good. Good to sort of, you know, be honest. Was it because somebody didn't bring you the right kind of flavoured bagel for lunch? No, it's normally where what we've let happen is our clients have lost their temper, all got really stressed and so therefore they transfer it to you in some kind of energy transfer way and then you it lets you affect you for like a brief undue moment so you know that's human everyone has their failings these things happen um it's it is it is always a really interesting thing which is you know I have found the more and more I've done this time I'm actually part therapist yeah well I was looking at your LinkedIn I was stalking you and I was looking at what people wrote about you and they said one of your strengths is your leadership your management skills you're good with people so I suppose that helps that's a start yeah you have to be I was lucky I was born an empath and so therefore I have the ability to kind of understand what people are thinking and I can read them pretty well I'm also massively dyslexic and that just gives me like an extra insight for whatever reason just the way I'm made I'm for unfortunately so you're very involved then you kind of like know what's going on on the floor you know if somebody's like Like, I don't know, the personal stuff always comes in, doesn't it?

20:59Somebody's just split up with someone or somebody's had a really bad sort of time with family. And you kind of like very hands on, like part of the team or are you always sort of in meeting rooms locked away?

21:11James Greenfield:I sit in the middle. I don't sit in an office. So I sit amongst everybody that's working. And I think the hardest thing about COVID was not really knowing how everybody was because Zoom was a bad medium for that. and I think you know at times we went back to the studio as soon as we could after COVID and some people were concerned about that I'm worried about the health risk which obviously we have to take seriously but for me we had some inter-team arguments during COVID which we'd never had before and we've never had since and I think it was people were just writing each other slacks rather than actually talking to each other and for me I think that showed the importance of being able to read each other's body language and understand you know whether someone's having a bad day or a good day what's happened and so I'm not really involved in the creative because it's not my job and I'm a great believer in getting out of the way um I lead the company as a whole I look at you know set the vision and make sure we're we've got you know the space to be creative and we're doing the best thing that we can and so therefore we have the best offices best teams best tools etc um but I can still spot people's body language when stuff's down or stuff's not working or people aren't connecting in the right way and so I'll always flag that and you know bring that up with and make sure that people are okay so yeah I'm more kind of in the background on that stuff these days.

22:31Yeah culture is a difficult thing though isn't it to get right I mean how on earth do you go about creating a culture at a company like Koto? So one of the

22:39James Greenfield:things we try to do is when we've started a new office each time we've tried to take someone from the home office to start it and we've also done the thing was we've never tried to recreate the company that is today, we've gone back to the beginning each time. So it always starts in a co-working space with a couple of laptops and a simple setup, because we have to create that startup culture, because it has to be earned. And, you know, we'll fund it properly, and we'll look after it. But when I was younger, I remember I went to visit a friend who was working in a London outpost of a New York agency, and they had no clients and nothing.

23:15James Greenfield:And they bought this really fancy office in shoreditch with like this insane null furniture and i remember saying to my friend i was like this isn't going to work and he's like why is it not going to work and i was like it's just too comfortable there's no grit here there's no there's no fight you're not no one's trying to make something real it's real already and so therefore it all ultimately fell and it did it closed a few years later but um and so i think that's to me has always been really key on that front and so therefore if i and i have to go to all the offices all the time which you know heavy travel schedule but if I go and sit in any of the offices I always feel like it's 50 % Koto 50 % the city and so you know Berlin has its quirks which is very Berlin and New York has its quirks and you know LA there's a garage door and it's open and there's about 25 dogs running in and out but it still feels like it's the same company and we've worked really hard to try and create that and make that environment you know make space creativity is our mission at Koto and it's really important that that comes through in a cultural way do you still sort of retain some of that startup mentality now even 10 years on you have to like i've been lucky enough to work around some amazing startup founders and you know people like brian chesky from airbnb his energy is insane and so therefore you can't help having been around that enough to know that the power that that can have and that can you know in his case he's made an amazing company and a lot of that is down to his personal energy and what he brings into a room so one of my rules is whatever's going on in my personal life is I leave it at the gate every morning and I always try and come in with my best self brilliant um what would you say then was your sort of worst year uh first year of covid basically was the toughest year I think we had the whole way through just because for me personally I really missed the people connection I was like stuck in my loft room and um it's horrible wasn't it horrible yeah and I just had my first child which was amazing so I got to spend a lot of time with him but I was in recovery for cancer which also sucked a bit um and I just felt that on a Friday when I closed the laptop and went downstairs it was like this is not the life that I signed up for I don't want this thanks very much you're obviously um recovered now better now yeah yeah thank you Koto and family being a kind of driver of you know part of that kind of recovery I guess yeah yeah definitely yeah always believe you've just got to get out there and get back on with stuff fight for it crack on and therefore what was being your best year in the last 10 years I think 2024 was pretty good we won Amazon Refresh which you know rebranding Amazon's one of the biggest things that you can do as a company and I was lucky enough to go to all our studios that year including our studio in sydney and what i found in all because i always tried to go out for a tea meal in every studio i go to was just brilliant people that i was so happy to be around in every case and so therefore to me i was like it feels it feels like we've really got somewhere here yeah it's a pinch me moment isn't it because you've you've you've Work really hard.

26:20You know, you don't just get to this level without sacrifice. Yeah. So I bet it was like, you know, a little pinch me moment for you.

26:29James Greenfield:Yeah. Yeah. I know Heathrow Airport far too well. That's the one downside, you know, and I'm a father of two young boys and the downside of it is I have to leave them a lot, you know. All those red trousers in Heathrow. It's not the number one thing I'm looking at in Heathrow. it's always my observation being a northerner blimey so many red trousers what's that all about my main thing is how i can get through security as quick as possible without getting stuck behind somebody who's acting like they've never been through the security oh gosh don't have you got like a are you very meticulous with your packing do you always just take hand luggage no it depends where i'm going but i've got i've got my way to get through it as quickly as possible and try and escape it and try and find a quiet corner to get myself away i'm always in the queue you you know, taking the belt off, putting it over the shoulder, you know, just the watch, the phone, whatever.

27:22James Greenfield:Yeah, for me, it's the classic of someone's bag goes through and then it's, you know, oh, you've got four bottles of water. It's like, yeah, here we go. Oh, my goodness. It's so frustrating. They've made travel completely miserable, haven't they? Unless you're going long haul and you can do first class. Have you sort of changed your philosophy on design over the last 10 years? Has anything changed in your opinion? Yeah, I feel like I probably used to take it a bit more seriously than I did now. I would probably, I think, slightly over-exaggerated its role in the world. It's easy to make yourself the main character, isn't it?

28:09Yeah, when you're younger, I guess.

28:11James Greenfield:Whereas now, I think I still love it. It still has an amazing power. And I think it's absolutely vital. And I think there's many companies that have shown that if you make it a central tenant of what you're delivering, then, you know, you can be very, very successful. But I think thinking about how it exists with many other factors shows that that's it's one part of many things. And I think maybe before previously, I used to think it was maybe a little bit more up that ladder than maybe it is. Yeah. You know how you said before, people tend to exaggerate things when they come along and, you know, oh, you just wait in five years time.

28:46They were saying about the pandemic being the great reset. Was there a great reset for you? Or was it just a case of, oh, no, I'm just really glad we're all back together again and let's crack on.

28:58James Greenfield:we had a moment where I think everyone was wondering on that front and I really held the line on us as a 4-1 company and it was very interesting for me because I remember in the kind of six months to 12 months afterwards where we were stood in that kind of on-off world of kind of post-covid and where we weren't even allowed to call it post-covid because no one knew whether it was post-covid or not uh there was the you know are we going to all be remote and work in like you know huts in the Himalayas and we can work anywhere we want whatever and I was completely evangelically about, no, we're all going to be back together because that is the best way to work.

29:30James Greenfield:And now I feel like the rest of the industry has slowly dominoed one by one back to that. And, you know, some people won't do. And that's their fine. That's their personal choice. But I think for the scale of the projects we do and the speed and the flex and, you know, the flux that we exist, it just can't be anything for like being able to all just quickly huddle around something and go like, how are we going to solve this? What's the challenge? What are we looking at? What are the factors, et cetera, et cetera. And I was quite glad I held the line on that because it has proved to be quite a strong thing for us.

30:25To show what's possible, we spoke to Gigi Rice, now a senior creative working across NYC and London, winner of the Gold Can Young Lions Award, and a playwright whose work has appeared at Edinburgh Fringe. We asked, what's the biggest mindset shift you had while at SCA? Discipline. I did not have any before the SCA. I was a person, and I think potentially due to some ADHD things I winged everything in life you know I would just kind of turn up and and do it and as long as I passed I that was enough for me because I wasn't doing things that I really cared about especially not in those kind of formal education settings and I'd never put in enough effort to truly see what I was capable of but obviously that completely changed at the SCA I mean it's so full-on that there is nowhere to escape from the work or not do the work or like swindle your way around the work um and I think for me actually it was Mark that played a huge role in like developing and like getting me to even try out like being disciplined I think when you get accepted to the SCA you're like oh gosh wow Mark believes in me which is you know why he's let me in he's seen something in me and I wanted what he'd seen to be true and I you know I didn't want to let him down and then once you start kind of like putting the wheels in motion it actually became about not letting myself down from where I'd worked so hard to get to but Mark I think was definitely the catalyst for starting that discipline and once you start doing it um it becomes a habit and there's no other way to live your life than the rewards it reaps are wonderful and I remember on the first day of SCA Mark taught me the most important lesson that has ever been taught in my life and that is hard work beats talent and now I try to kind of plug that into every aspect of who I am as a person now and just kind of relentlessly show up so I think I was a bit of a lazy fuck before the SCA and I'd like to think it's very different now.

32:31Huge thanks to Gigi for sharing her story. If you want to follow in her footsteps, visit SEA Online Portfolio at schoolcommunicationarts.com and use Boom 500 to save£500.

32:50So much has changed in a decade. I mean, social media, when you first started, was like a powerhouse. It's sort of changed and shifted. How do you feel about that now? You still on Twitter?

33:01James Greenfield:I looked in the other day for the first time in ages and there was a new business inquiry and my dms i was like oh damn i should have been in here more but uh it's like the first one in a long while of course it was when i wasn't on that i'd misdesigned twitter because it used to give me a good sense of what everyone was saying and where everyone was at and i feel like that's dissipated and i don't think that's a positive thing for us in the industry i think it's good for people to know and stick together a bit more um and however popular linkedin is it's it's just got a very different gloss to it hasn't it so it misses that kind of raw authenticity which I always thought design twitter was good at um you know I think we've ended up in a not so positive world in terms of how we can share work on social media and how we can talk about topics and things that are interesting because there is a certain aspect of stuff which I think should be talked about more and there's just no forum for it and you know some people are on blue sky and some people are on threads but it's not got the same like uh majority kind of culmination in the way that those kind of places did when they were great.

34:07James Greenfield:And yeah, I can't help but mourn them a bit, really. I miss it. Do you not share regular updates on LinkedIn, James, about your morning, your amazing morning routine? What I love to do is share insights on how getting stuck on the M25 is akin to B2B sales. That's my kind of insight that I love to give regularly. You tripped up over something and it opened your eyes to something new. you know yeah linkedin's got its own vibe um and i think i think do you think there's like fatigue digital fatigue from people at the moment are they all just a bit oh god not another social media network and not another thing online is that you sort of recognizing people are wanting to go and run in the sort of green grass again i think the trouble is we ended up in a situation where everybody wants to be the broadcaster and not everyone can be the broadcaster you know that you're a broadcaster right now and I think we've just got too much and so therefore if everyone's on broadcast and no one's on receive then we're missing that kind of dynamic that exists and I think you can see it in events you know I've been to a lot of events recently and I don't think the quality of the talks has necessarily been as good as I would think it should be and especially when people have traveled and spent money and you know in some cases it's because people aren't prepared enough in other cases I think it's because people aren't necessarily suited to being a talker I'm afraid I think yeah and and so you know not everyone should have a podcast um and I think that's not a creative industry problem it's just a problem in the world you know and uh I was in a I was on a really nice beach uh recently beautiful beautiful piece of landscape very quiet And suddenly this moron with a phone started marching down it, like shouting into everything that he could see.