Rory's brain vs ChatGPT, outrageous marketing, work trends and MUCH more w/ Rory Sutherland | E1756

46:18But the idea that the person with the best argument therefore has the best solution is not safe because it discards creative possibilities by the shed load. i mean once you demand that things make sense in advance and that you can only do things the effect of which you can measure down to the last penny large numbers of solutions basically disappear from your solution space they come off the table because a lot of a lot of things only work in time you know fame for example uh i think there's a huge value to a business being famous but it's impossible to predict how that value will manifest itself in advance simply because the point of being famous is that people you've never heard of come to you with demands you never anticipated okay you know so one value of being famous is that um if if you want to perform very highly targeted precision marketing where you only pay to communicate to people who are in the market for your product, okay?

47:23Yeah. You are limited by your own imagination and conception of what your market is and what need states your product may satisfy. Now, if you become famous, you may discover, in fact, that there are whole incremental, unanticipated markets for your product and that your product satisfies need states you never even imagined for a second. This is so true. Okay. And so you have to have enormous faith in the capacity of your own imagination being better than the imagination of 20 million other people to determine what the value is. I think there's something really interesting in that I've made this point about online estate agents.

48:04I think it applies to online dating as well, okay, which is realtor, sorry for Americans, real estate agents. Yes. Okay. Now, what used to happen with an estate agent was when you went to an estate agent, you would have an idea of what kind of house you wanted. Now, an estate agent will tell you that actually, in the majority of cases, people end up buying houses that meet none of their initial criteria. The initial criteria is aspirational? So it's probably just seemingly logical. You know, we want a bit of a garden. We like this. We want that. And then they see an apartment with an amazing river view, and they decide they're not all that keen in gardening after all.

48:41It's kind of a recursive process, okay? Yeah. What happens when you go to a human estate agent is he's also doing – now, this all comes, I think, from the assumption in economics that people know what they want and can stipulate and describe it perfectly in advance, okay, which is a kind of foundational assumption of neoliberal economics. No one, no psychologist on earth believes that to be true. I mean, okay. Now, what the real estate agent is also doing is he's asking a second question, which is actually quite important for the efficient functioning of a market, which is what house could I sell this guy, which I couldn't sell to anybody else?

49:24And so if I went into a real estate agent, they'd probably go, this guy's a bit of a weirdo. I can finally get rid of that bastard windmill I've been trying to sell. You know what I mean? Okay. Or, you know, the Coast Guard tower on the shore. The lighthouse. Finally, I've got rid of that lighthouse. Okay. Yes. I'm sorry. I'll just pause for a second. My phone's. I want to call. Can you call back a little after in about 10 minutes? Everything. Okay.

49:54Fantastic. Oh, brilliant. Okay. Thank you. Right. Bye. Bye. Bye. Come in quietly in case I'm still recording. Okay. Bye. Bye. Was that a flip phone? Yeah. Now, actually that's a very, is that a flip phone? No, no, no, no. It's just, my landline thing oh it's your landline i thought you had a flip phone i'm like whoa is rory going backwards in time there is a flip phone there is a movement there's a movement absolutely there's the old-fashioned feature phone movement you know i love it uh which i think i to be honest if it weren't for about four or five applications like parking apps and uber i think i think i'd consider regressing actually yeah actually if you've got an electric car but you've got a tesla so you only You need one app for that.

50:40I've got the Mustang Mach-E. Oh, nice. Absolutely gorgeous car, by the way. Absolutely. Yeah, wonderful looking car. Yeah. Lovely, lovely job. And Ford did something very, very clever, actually. They were about to produce a separate electric car division and create new brands matching those usual car segments of crossover, utility vehicle, SUV, et cetera. Yeah, sure. And someone very brilliant went to them and said, you're making a complete mistake because you're looking at this problem from the top down, not from the consumer up. You've got five unbelievably strong products, which I think were Explorer, F-150, Bronco, Transit, and Mustang.

51:24Make electric versions of them. Why not? Because anybody, Tesla included, can make an electric car that meets the definition of some sort of car segment or other. They can't make a Mustang. they can't make a mustang or corvette or an iconic car the only thing i thought they should have done was i think there's a market to take the existing iconic looking cars like the corvette from the 60s or 70s mustang from 1970 or 1965 the pony car and that would be a great juxtaposition a 1965 pony mustang with an electric engine it's funny you say that because um i was just i just received a press release today from a british company that has worked out a way of doing drop-in electrification for jaguar e-type oh and it's actually lighter than the original don't ask me how they managed to do that as a v8 engine is a v12 engine is pretty expensive and pretty heavy but you can basically take the shell of a jaguar e-type and by the way it's reversible as well but you can basically drop the electric skateboard into what is probably the most beautiful car ever made yeah it comes with cars i think as with yachts they reach their kind of apotheosis of beauty in the kind of 50s and 60s shouldn't they you know yachts have actually rich people's yachts have become uglier progressively i think since um but what it means is that car manufacturers actually now have a back catalog yes it's a great greatest hits they could remaster the beatles and make everybody buy it again buy it all over again yeah absolutely again and i mean old people have money and are dying and they want to recapture their youth well i've wondered about going around and buying well you could go by the tucker brand if you want to for example tucker's available i don't know it sounds like a burden as much as it is you remember that three the three headlights thing which was sort of yeah uh and i've always wondered about brands like austin healy you know who owns them because saab didn't saab go out at some point which i which i think is delorean absolutely right yeah yeah so there's a couple of these that you could get mini cooper was one right and then i guess that's owned by bmw so bmw now but they had been dormant my wife who just rang just a moment ago has an electric mini cooper ah the range is tiny the range is only about 110 miles it should be the opposite well the battery is pretty small because it has to fit into the standard body so far got it of the mini but actually um range anxiety in the uk i totally accept the us is completely different um but range anxiety in the uk is pretty much irrelevant because of the density of population really so so i mentioned this that you know the u.s needs gas stations to serve a geography whereas we only need them to serve a population and so i did the little maths and it's we've got about 9 000 gas stations in the uk and in the u.s you've got 116 000 because obviously you have a road between sort of taos and farming to new mexico where if you didn't have a gas station on it no one could make the trip we don't really have those roads right you know basically every six months you run into a town even more extreme in say the netherlands or belgium and so the range question is is actually to be honest i think it's a perfectly rational american fare which we've imported to the uk yeah i mean when you have teslas have hit 320 that is and then the model model s has a 400 mile version um i can tell you the 200 mile version of my model x not enough 320 mile model y plenty because there's a certain amount of time that you want to get out of your car and it's about three or four hours that you want to get the hell out of your car i mean it's probably less in the uk because we're driving on more crowded roads i've driven huge distances in the u.s through western pennsylvania and you sit on the interstate and you go at 60 miles an hour it's pretty chill you can do that for you know as you say for three hours without stopping quite easily in the uk you tend to want to stop every couple of hours also as we get older our bladders tend to dictate the there is a uh there is an upper limit you and i are in our 50s now and there is a certainly a bladder issue let me ask you about this um what do people want employees today and what's motivating people you and i are part of the gen xers we wanted to have some amount of autonomy.

56:07We wanted to maybe be we wanted money. What's driving this next generation and then you have work from home, you have this sudden fear that Oh, my. And it's really interesting how five years things have swung because we had people who are white collar thought, I'm going to have five job offers from five different people, and it's always going to go up into the right. And now they're like, Okay, I can't get any job offers. Google and Facebook are not hiring everybody wants to do more with less and now my job's going to be replaced by chat gpt the psyche of the white collar worker has got to be really fragile right now what do they want it's very complicated i mean gen z are both different and not different from other younger generations that have come before them in some ways in that what probably makes them different to a large extent one very significant difference by the way is they drink much less that is which and less sexy yeah absolutely that as well yeah yeah um wow the overton window hey shut people are corny and square they're squares it is it is kind of i mean certainly the level of among the gen z people i work with the level of what you might call dissipation and general um you know bad behavior is shenanigans remarkably shenanigans beautifully put yeah incredibly low um they're very they're very conservative and uh they don't they're not gonna like jump into somebody's pool without being invited no absolutely not no there's there's less of that um which may partly be explained by the lower drinking habits repair enough being and drink being replaced by other drugs by the way um i mean interestingly the first the first thing you've got to do in the US is get rid of this ridiculous two weeks vacation thing.

57:55Yes. That has crushed people's souls. Which I think is monstrous. Now, I'm a Brit. I'm right of center politically. I get the gun thing. It's probably too late to do something and anything about it. It's not an ideal situation, but I can just about get that. Now, I can promise that I've never met anybody in the UK at all. this is the example of status quo bias that is so right-wing that they think we should actually have less vocation in order to grow the economy by a couple of percent i've never come across anybody with that belief And in fact, if you had that belief in the workplace, you'd be just generally regarded as nuts.

58:36and so one of the reasons with flexible work is you almost need a degree of flexibility just to visit your parents if they live 500 miles away or yes okay because you get two weeks vacation if one week is spent visiting friends or parents that leaves you with one week to see what is actually the world's most fascinating country even if you never leave the borders of the United States. Yes. Okay. That's kind of tragic to me. Also, we're taking too much leisure at the beginning of life with higher education and with retirement. And there's too little leisure in the middle. I agree with this as well.

59:13When people have the money and the health to actually enjoy it. That seems to me kind of weird. Why is it if I went to my employer and said, I'd like to take a year off unpaid, they would It's terribly unclear. I don't know about this. But I'd still be back in a year. Whereas if I said, I'm retiring, so I'm taking everything I know, my Rolodex, my contacts, et cetera, and I'm just walking off the stage. That's OK. That's called retirement. That's perfectly OK. Whereas taking a year right as a break is considered heinous. That's silly. It does interest me because previously, labor economics basically said there are two things that were at play here.

59:49There's time, leisure time, and there's money. and the employer pays the employee to compensate them for their lost leisure. Okay. And so pretty much because of the norm of the five-day week, which I think Henry Ford was partly responsible for. Yeah, I think fully responsible for it. He wanted people to be able to take their cars and go somewhere on the weekend. Absolutely right. And actually, by the way, if the U.S. had more vacation, I'm not even sure it wouldn't grow the economy because actually experiences are more labor-intensive than goods. And the money tends to be spent locally rather than on importing materials.

1:00:26Three-day workweek, a four-day workweek is becoming a discussion of this great negotiation that's going on to get people back to offices. And I think where this might wind up is exactly how Europeans look at the United States, which is like two days. It really winds up being four weeks off a month with the holidays, six days, etc. So you wind up talking about 25 days off a year, which is five weeks, four weeks. But we put them into sick days, et cetera. We don't give a full month. One interesting thing about flexible work, by the way, and I was talking to someone at Deutsche Bank. It was a theory of mine, and I wanted to see if it was borne out.

1:01:04And it is borne out. The single sick day or the two days off ill have more or less disappeared because those are kind of illnesses where you're actually well enough to work, typically. You're just not well enough to commute. I mean, the most obvious one without going into huge graphic detail is the stomach upset. Yes. Provided you're at home at a desk within reasonable reach of a toilet. Yes. You've got food poisoning. You're damned if you're going to go into the office. Yeah. No way you're getting on a subway. No, no, no. Not a chance. Interestingly, there's a kind of possibly an uncatalogued gain is that when people have the option of working flexibly, you don't have all those sort of wasted.

1:01:43And actually, of course, a single day taken off can have a large knock-on effect on complex projects, by the way, as well. So that's probably a gain. It's also the interesting thing that people now have, if you like, rather than just time and money, they have a third negotiating counter, which is what I call third and fourth, which is, as well as free time, there's also free where and free when. in other words if i can work at a time that suits me and at a place that suits me for at least some of the time that has a value now it has a value by the way economically uh you know um in that people who have other commitments can still work which they arguably couldn't undoubtedly benefits maternity arrangements because a large part of the disadvantaged women experienced while they were off on maternity leave was just being invisible it wasn't that they weren't working it was just you know you were really interesting the maternity thing you bring up because i came up with a system because i had a particularly hard-working uh woman uh who still works for me and she wanted to do some work even after she had the baby but she didn't want to come back full time no and it was like a light switch on or off you're either back to work or you're not working and i said how about we do this every two weeks you just tell hr if you're working quarter time half time three quarter time or full time and you can vary it just so we have an idea every two weeks set yourself up for quarter time half time whatever and you can round up we'll take a little bit of the you know if you're going to work 20 just round it up to quarter time and we just came up with quarter time half time three quarter time full time so you can pick and it might change you know your kid might get colicky or something and you might want to you know go back down to quarter time after being at three quarter time things can change and so that kind of flexibility i think is the thing that's changing i have the same epiphany because i have a pa who is a single mom um the only downside of it was her ex-husband had run off with a canadian and i couldn't understand why i you know i never seemed to get any business trips to canada which i've seen she had a sort of aversion to canadians but apart from that she was absolutely fantastic fantastic and um uh i suddenly realized okay look the things that make your job difficult to do are actually of no concern to me i'd rather you were above ground and reachable between nine and ten than traveling in on the underground on the um and and out of range you know and so eventually we reach this kind of interesting time shifting arrangement where for example if i had expenses to do or anything administrative, I'd post them to her home, and she'd do them in the evening when her son was asleep.

1:04:34And what I said, the whole part of capitalism, okay, is it's the creative generation of value exchange. Now, if people value flexibility of time more than they value money, for example, even Google now has an arrangement where you have four weeks with a line manager's permission, you can have four weeks of working from anywhere. Perfect. So, you know, that strikes me because I had a friend who's Brit who turned down a job offer from Google precisely because they wouldn't move on the two weeks vacation thing. And she said, look, I'm a Brit. I'll have to go back to the UK for a week every year. I've got parents and I have parents.

1:05:15That leaves me one week to see the US, you know, and she said, I can't do it. And so that was the deal breaker effectively. yeah i think four day becomes the where we're going to wind up on this and it's going to be three days in the office one day from home and we all move to a four-day work week at some point or just because certain people don't want to work and i think we'll have a two-class system people who are working to live and people who live for their work and there's no judgment there and but you'll be able to have both of those things in the same organization should bring with it i think is slight reduction in salary for people in office jobs with a corresponding increase in salary for people who whose presence is required whether it be a postman or 20 or whatever and most of us i think probably feel that the premium paid to knowledge workers is i think excessive in general yes it's it's closing though because if you look in the united states we have two for one jobs and they're all service jobs and now we have plumbers electricians all these positions they they make six figures and we can't get anybody to do those jobs so young people in the united states i think are going to increasingly look at the landscape and say i can work for some i can work for myself as a plumber electrician do drywall whatever it is some service job get plate paid really well set my own schedule and be in demand and control my destiny or i can work for a giant corporation that's not loyal to me that's going to lay me off and zuckerberg's going to be like you know what whatever it's a year of efficiency you're you're not efficient and i think people are going to have to think about that one of the things i love about what's happening with ai is there's a group of people who are embracing these tools and becoming 30 more effective at their jobs and i think those people are going to survive this change or this fork in the road and then the other people are going to realize i don't really like this never-ending efficiency race i'd rather just you know be an electrician or manage a restaurant or whatever it is and we might actually be able to navigate these bad feelings that people have about this there's a wonderful thing in economics called the gvon's paradox which is that um gvon's correctly predicted that an increase in the efficiency of steam engines in Britain would lead to an increase in demand for coal.

1:07:42And I've already said, well, how can that be right? Because if the engines are more efficient, they need less coal. You need less. When the engines are more efficient, we will find more applications for steam engines. Ah, interesting. And therefore, we'll ultimately need. Now, I would argue that probably LED lights in 20 years' time, okay, which are vastly more efficient than incandescent bulbs, will possibly consume more electricity than incandescent bulbs did because they're now so cheap that why wouldn't you just light up your home with phillips hue color changing bulbs for the lols right i see it with landscaping people are now putting leds everywhere outside absolutely yeah and they're like and they don't turn them off they're like they'll leave them on 24 hours a day it's like why would i even program them because they they draw nothing they draw nothing right and they don't need to be changed the that is i think the big revelation here forget about cost but convenience of not having to change a bulb but every five years is life change great annoyances in life completely completely agree gvons probably applies to labor that labor saving equipment that's something that makes a human more effective right in the longer term not immediately immediately you may you may see a reduction will actually lead to effectively you know more worthwhile jobs to be done because if you can be four times more efficient now there is the slight problem which is creating bureaucratic masses of text that nobody reads.

1:09:06It's probably, you know, there's a wonderful guy in Britain called Andrew Orlovsky who makes this part. He writes for The Telegraph and he says, just what we don't need, in other words, generative AI is yet more kind of unremarkable but plausible sounding text to surround every single activity that we undertake. So I'm prepared to believe that quite a lot of, I think quite a lot of text generation in business is probably value destructive. But there probably is a Jeevan aspect to it, which is that if you can make people miraculously, you know, architects, for example, I can imagine, might be a really, really interesting area where you go, you know, show me 10 ways to fill this space.

1:09:47And like you said before, the brainstorming aspect of this, just give me 10 one-liners to describe this project or this product, this new product or service. Give me 10 one-liners. And they all have to be between five and eight words. now you've given it constraint you start seeing a brainstorm then you say okay i'll let you go six to ten words now give me the same ten but say them in eight to ten words and you you kind of get that brainstorming going i think this is where the writer strike in america where the writers of television shows and movies they are trying to ban chat chippy tea as part of their negotiation and now it's gone from like number 20 on the list of like important items to number one so they're modern day luddites effectively who are essentially yes we are not only saying but well rory what they're saying is crazy and well i know you got to go we'll end on this they are not only saying um we want to ban this from the writer's room they're saying you can't use this to generate ideas so they want the studio heads to not be able to say what would be like as popular as spider-man but be for you know this community of uh people this demographic this age group what would be like a modern day spider-man that could work for older people who were part of the boomer generation and it comes up with some new superhero they don't want them to be able to do it because of ip ownership well there is there is the issue of plagiarism because chat gpt is in some some senses a highly plausible plagiarist and the fact that it's plagiarizing from everything rather than one thing doesn't necessarily make that totally excusable.

1:11:24You know, there's also the argument that something that just generates the most expected word to follow the pre-existing words, is it likely to come up with a real breakthrough? Or can you actually recalibrate chat GPT? So as I said, it's artificial inquisitiveness, not artificial intelligence. And rather than being a generalization engine, you set it to look for the most peculiar and unexpected findings yes not the most generalizable like we just did with dr pepper the dorian fruit absolutely right and dr pepper is definitely i'll tell you a lovely story about this there was a creative director of ogleby called neil french who believed that if you took two stupid but successful ideas and combined them okay you might create a third idea you could kind of breed take two two things that people think is stupid but which seems successful and breed them and so his friend said okay what do you think is stupid but popular and he said karaoke okay he said what do you think is stupid 24-hour rolling news and they created in singapore a 24-hour karaoke channel and it's a huge hit it was a big success of course it is of course it is that makes total complete sense and the other thing that writers want to do is they don't want it to be trained on their previous work so this is where it gets really interesting if you took all the marvel films you took all the sopranos films and you made an ai uh based on all of that writing you know you have some giant uh corpuses now which is what these writers do anyway like whoever knows the most star wars folklore has watched the most twilight zone episodes is going to make the best black mirror episodes so they don't want you to be able to use the previous work in amp these are hilarious in their their demands are hilarious in that you can be certain that every writer in a writer's room before they come to work is doing chat gpt to come up with brainstorming ideas just like they watch old films or look at old comic books or they buy old magazines to look for what was in vogue in the 50s 60s and 70s and try to reinterpret it and become inspired so i love it as an inspiration tool i suppose i worry in that there is the, you know, the really defining works of literature and of creation come from a completely unexpected place.

1:13:42So, you know, for example, the murder of Roger Ackroyd, where, you know, made Angus and Christie's reputation was where the narrator was the murderer, which I didn't think had happened before, for example. Spoiler alert, everybody. If you haven't read it, I'm joking, it was written in 1926. If you need a spoiler alert, a century is a pretty good benchmark. One of my favorite crime things was I think it was in the second season of CSI which looked like a murder but was in fact a very peculiar accidental death. I always thought that was very interesting. Yeah, way to go. Yeah, no victim here. No victim.

1:14:19So it was all to do with someone trying to retrieve their bin from a skip after they left university. You ever do Columbo? You ever watch the Columbo? that's untouchable it's wonderful masterpiece well funnily enough i was going online to watch precisely those um only a few weeks ago and every single one is tremendous masterpieces there's one great one where the what i loved about colombo is they use new technology like we're using here as we discuss things this is like the colombo of podcasts rory and i were bumbling idiots who have profound insights once in a while um it would take whatever the new technology is and embedded in episode and they embedded in one episode speeding cameras these were brand new i don't know if you ever saw the speeding camera one i won't tell you the ending but go watch the speeding camera episode because this person basically knows there's a speeding camera and the speeding camera is his alibi i'll just leave it at that perfect there's another one where uh this you know really rich guy who's kind of like a hugh hefner type he buys himself and his wife a beeper a watch beeper because these new beepers have come out and they can beep each other they both have matching watches gold plated beepers and the beepers in this 1980 episode are the key you know linchpin i just love that the writers were watching new technology don't tell me the people were they swapped is that how something it was not a swap but the one of them dies and the beeper plays a role i'm just leaving it at that um it's just clumbo was so great at like it's just one more thing there ma 'am you you said you had uh regatta pasta on a sunday night i talked to the guy at the luigi's and he said no we're going the man had gotten regatta that's that's monday night so i miss my wife says i'm a nudge all right everybody rory you are a treasure detail two two interesting things just to add a bit of more content one of course a speed camera as quite an early example of an artificial intelligence which legislates absolutely.

1:16:26Now, I would argue if the technology exists to film cars which are breaking the limit, it should be possible to demand that a human watches the footage to understand what you're doing in context, okay? Because there are occasions where breaking the speed limit is necessary and right. They're rare, but they exist. The second example is that if you have a speed camera which catches an awful lot of people, okay, there are two possible inferences you can draw. This is a bit like Wittgenstein's ruler, which is, are you using the ruler to measure the table or the table to measure the ruler? It could be that that means that there are a lot of very dangerous drivers on that stretch of road.

1:17:08It could be that your signage is inadequate, or that the speed limit comes unhealthily suddenly after a corner and people don't have time to slow down safely. Right. So this is the point where a human brain and a speed camera are fundamentally different. The human brain has the capability, or at least perhaps the right hemisphere to go, is this huge incidence of speed camera offenses at this particular thing? Is this a product of the drivers or is it a product of the environment? Okay. now i think that this is where i'm very uncomfortable i listen to my sat nav i try and understand what it's telling me to do but i don't always obey it because i sometimes understand contextual factors which like wanting to see nice scenery which lie outside the speed cameras field of consideration yes and sorry not the speed camera the uh the gps gps the gps i have the same thing here we have a 101 freeway in the in the bay area that is dystopian and then we have the 280 which is against the nature preserve which makes you feel like you're driving through jurassic park of course and at under when it's single digit minute difference i am going to take the bucolic view every time i want to have a delightful escape for me to enjoy the ride and google you know google's little thing of saying eight minutes slower does at least provide you with the facility to deviate.

1:18:32Eight minutes more delightful. Yeah, absolutely right. People travel halfway around the world for this. This is quantification bias. We don't have, you know, a numerical measure for idyllic journeys. You know, you can't say this journey is 30 % more idyllic and 10 % slower. Therefore, you should use it. The other thing that does interest me, by the way, about flexible work is as a Georgist, it strikes me that I basically believe in Henry George's objection that the problem with capitalism is that land and you could even argue fossil fuels are not like other markets because they're rivalrously consumed and that arguably they belong to all of us as our kind of heritage.

1:19:17Therefore, in the absence of single, you know, a single land tax, as George proposed, the reason that George's problem is quite simple, which is that whenever you get a form of economic activity which depends on its location for its performance, the gains don't go to the person doing the work or coming up with the inventive idea. The gains go to the person who owns the land on which the activity takes place. And therefore, rent-seeking by landowners basically sucks out rewards to entrepreneurialism or invention or just work. It's a giant tax. It's a giant tax. So, you know, if you own a restaurant with a fantastic view of the Acropolis, this you know uh effectively you're working for the person who owns the land in that sense okay so it strikes me that the second best thing we can do other than the land value tax is to come up with technologies that make location irrelevant and the car was the train was one the canal was another i guess okay um but uh undoubtedly i would say that the car was, I think, spectacular in its importance because you could go and buy, you know, start a restaurant in the middle of nowhere.

1:20:28And if it was good enough, people would drive to you. Okay. You are no longer dependent on footfall. And it does strike me, by the way, that Zoom is very, very important in that it provides what economists call gains to agglomeration without necessarily needing to agglomerate people in tighter and tighter spaces where, as I said, the landowner makes half the money. and so as a piece of george's technology it strikes me that this what we're doing it's absolutely fantastic and you know if the it's just taking a while to calibrate the gains you have people who were living in a city who are getting paid a surplus a benefit yes a higher salary then they fled to a rural area where somebody else was getting paid 60 cents on the dollar but now they've maintained they've been grandfathered in and they still make you know a dollar on a dollar instead of the 60 cents that's somebody who's remote i think this is going to be one of the great gains that we see absolutely right is that over time these salaries are normalizing on a global basis and with chat gpt a person in manila or uruguay or croatia wherever we see this with developers and a tiny uh resource that has massive demand prompt writer if you're a brilliant gpt prompt writer potentially you can make money absolutely anywhere yes with the star link with the star link anywhere with solar panels you know i'm tempted to buy a starling even though my actual broadband jeans just another piece of i have both of them as backups and two or three days a year i have to record this podcast and this podcast says advertising so i justify the 1200 a year to have starling backups as if it happens once a year and saves me one day a year which it has um it pays for itself perfect you only have to pay for the mobile bit if you move it is that right you can you can go from there's one that's movable and there's right yeah and then there's one other ones that aren't i think it's going to all become one thing where like the movability is going to be kind of built into it or there'll be it'll be like a closer gap but it has been a massive change let me ask you a question yeah of course or if i may you're you're a brit you live in the uk i'm a greek we have a bit of an issue that i think you and i should resolve right this is the elgin marbles i was going to bring on the the elgin marbles here now you bought them you paid a pretty penny for them they are uh very beautiful but they're ours and by i say ours i mean the greeks and you brought up the acropolis and the view we have now the acropolis museum it's time for the elgin marbles to come home to greece uh what do you think as a brit maybe you and i can find some common ground here how do we resolve this issue of the stolen marbles that you bought and you paid for and you have ownership of we we did buy them from the turks if i'm right i think lord elgin bought them from the then turkish occupying government of greece but the apropolis is the most important piece of architecture on the planet arguably next to the pyramids.

1:23:29We did actually save them from very likely destruction had they remained where they were. Credit where credit is due. An equitable solution would be to split them, to rotate them every few years. Okay, acceptable. We'll take it. The Greeks will take the roaring proposal. By the way, if you want my personal opinion, I would give them back, were it not for the problem with precedent in God knows how many other situations. Yes. um you know a lot of people get to see them in london i mean it's a hugely visited city um there's some value to it personally if you could confine it to that one particular thing which is after all architectural rather than artistic in a sense not that you can replace put them back on the building but nonetheless yes they belong where the building is if it were purely a matter of taste rather than fear of precedent i'd be pretty happy uh giving them back in perpetuity i think a solution where there's a rotation would be probably pretty good you have it folks rory and i have come to an agreement and now it's but up to the uk and the greek governments to paper it but we've come to consensus rotating it's great and i'll throw something in we'll rotate some stuff uh to i'm not sure which museum you have them in uh where where are the elgin marbles the british museum yeah we'll i'll tell you what we'll get we got some other stuff we'll rotate in a collection from our great greek collections uh you know to replace the elgin marbles during this great rotation that we do and this could make the two countries stronger but we're still going to retire at 56 and you got to pay for the last seven years over there okay whatever the difference is no you guys are out you guys you guys brexited right you don't have to argue about retirement age that isn't it's an interesting question by the way about flexible work which suddenly occurred to me which didn't occur to me before which is that when you demand that someone chooses a single date of retirement okay so you go from five days a week to zero right you're effectively playing a game of chicken with your own mortality go too soon and you run out of money or you have an impoverished retirement go too late and you just replace a life full of business appointments with a life full of medical appointments okay and it's worth noting that the risk falls entirely on you not on your employer about how you make this decision now it would be equitable i think if people were allowed to taper off towards retirement yes so in other words you go to a four-day week to a three-day week right and then you would continue on a three-day week for as long as your health or or pro-rest this would be much better as long as your health allowed you to do it okay my father worked in his 80s he started selling books on amazon something you can very well do remotely and he was much better for it a lot of people who quit work completely they die they lose their cognitive ability and then they get depressed and it all spirals so some sort of tapering option would be much much fairer in fact because you're forced to make this decision and if you mistime it you don't get a second chance yes and how delightful would it be for a young generation to be able to come into ogavi and see an 87 year old rory there on tuesday and wednesdays holding court talking about the arc of history or for me to be 87 and be at my incubator and doing podcasts and interviewing people once a week once every two weeks and meeting with founders and telling them stories of you know startups in the 90s and 2000s to give some context this would be a beautiful future why are we shipping these old people away it would also be good in banking where you'd actually have some people around you can remember the last disaster yeah i'd be like hey yeah we that up too yeah here's how we blew it up exactly by the way what we did was we took all of these high-risk securities and we bundled them together and we called them SPACs we took the inventory we called them uh you know uh what do they call those mortgages mortgage-backed securities there were cdo's where there were there were which collateralized debt obligations yeah what a great fancy word then they started breeding on them so you had things that were squared didn't you yeah i can't i never remember what that was nobody can tell what's in here unless you go to vegas and you knock on the door and you go look at the buildings and realize which is what the the big short is about that's the brilliant thing about the big short which is that you know for example i mean you only had to go to the south of spain and open your eyes in 2007 to realize that the building boom was completely unsustainable that you know even if the entire population of northern europe planned to retire there you know it's there were just too many buildings going on it was it was absurd yeah yeah and you realize that again there's some funny money here yeah have you made it to the uae yet or anywhere in the middle east you've been to dubai yeah i mean i was just there for the first time i'd never seen dubai i've been to qatar cutter uh as they call it um and the uae abu dhabi and dubai and i had this like flashback to shanghai 20 years ago or shangzhen where there's more cranes and more people building buildings than there are in the city yeah and i'm like this and they showed me pictures from 20 30 and 40 years ago and you're like there was nothing here and now if you're a founder in india singapore hong kong australia new zealand the uk whatever there's a pretty compelling case to go to the uae and pay no taxes get tax credits get investment and and just base your company there because all these people are fleeing hong kong or uk or whatever i rent districts to go live in the desert essentially uh interestingly there's a small designated area of dubai which runs on british law anglo-saxon law yes the financial district and then there's a media zone yeah it's kind of like shenzhen in china and i asked them like well why are you doing this and like changing existing laws is very hard creating a zone that has its own operating principles from scratch and just saying these 10 square miles are the media free zone they're creating a casino 45 minutes outside of dubai i understand so they're not saying hey in uae we have to allow gambling and we have to allow free press we're just we have a zone for free press we have a zone for free commerce we have a zone for wagering and gambling and that's it whereas like in the united states the uk we're so many years into this a couple of hundred years into um you know progressiveness let's call it that we're like you know what cannabis 70 of you want it we'll decriminalize it when it hits 50 we'll make it like a medical prescription at 60 and 70 you just can buy it in a store okay gay marriage okay 60 of you want it okay we'll allow it with a certificate oh we'll just give you full blown and you know it's it's very interesting for me to watch now i think i think society's all you know chasing the same goal i think also the um decriminalization of cannabis in the u.s i find it very weird that you're told off for vaping on the pavement but i was driving into the Holland Tunnel in New York.

1:30:42There was a massive smell of dope out of the window down. Okay. And the person smoking, I assumed it was passengers. No, it was the driver of the car next to me. Okay. Was basically toking away happily. Okay. Yeah. Now, my only concern with that is that there are things we ban or we restrict, not because they're bad for most people, but because they're really bad for a few people. Yes. Okay. And I think gambling would be an obvious example of that. Alcohol is a, you know, tobacco actually is quite bad for a lot of people bad for all people yeah but but no actually the in defense of nicotine okay the what you might call the negative externalities i mean if you're an unborn child and you said do you want to be born into a home where the dad is a heavy smoker a heavy drinker or a heavy gambler you'd probably choose the smoker in terms of you know less likely to have violence or bankruptcy or whatever you know it would be more stable you know it's it's very bad.

1:31:39It is very bad. I'm not disputing this for a second, okay? But it's kind of evenly bad, and it generally delivers its badness in your 60s rather than making you incapable of functioning in everyday life, okay? Now, by contrast, I think alcohol, gambling, and possibly cannabis, particularly with very, very strong forms of cannabis, okay, may be entirely beneficial and enjoyable to 85, 90, 95 % of the population. If they induce psychosis in 5 % of the population, then making cannabis consumption universal may not be a brilliant idea. Now, it's a bit the same with salt consumption, okay? So doctors tell people to basically avoid salt.

1:32:23Most people actually salt is pretty harmless, completely harmless if you listen to some people, okay? But there are 5 % of people whose blood pressure can't actually compensate for it. And so they basically force food manufacturers. Now, I would argue if you can identify who the 5 % is, maybe you should tell them to quit salt and leave the rest of us alone. But I'm not sure you'll ever be able to identify the 5 % of people who are going to be compulsive gamblers or the 5 % of people who are going to be driven psychotic by smoking very strong cannabis. This is where I think I've come to in my life.

1:32:55I love personal freedom. i love people owning the consequences and the more you abstract away consequences the more the nanny state you're coddled into thinking that you'll whatever mistake i make why didn't somebody protect me like some dopey kid jumped off a boat i don't know if you saw this go viral over the weekend but it was a graduation ceremony in the bahamas and somebody's like hey dopey kid jump off the boat it'd be funny on our like graduation cruise he jumped off there's apparently a shark seen in the water but he just gets taken out to the tide apparently to be eaten by sharks he's dead he's 18 years old frontal lobe not fully formed uh we can't ban boats we can't you know ban stupidity no we have to have people have ownership of behavior and this is where i think like education and licensing plays such a great role educating people on gambling if you had to go to vegas and in order to gamble you had to sit through a one-hour seminar and it said here are the odds at each table here's how to calculate odds i would be totally fine let people rip they could spend their whole mortgage but just one hour of education you get a driver's license to play the tables in las vegas then the same thing uh for um let's say gun ownership which we have here in the united states some states you have to take a test some you don't but what about for startup investing in the uk you're allowed anybody can invest in a startup right anybody can put 50 bucks in you can throw 50 quid in i don't know if that's 50 bucks if you say quid throw 50 bucks in you know it's uh what do you call it when you make about a toss or something what's uh various things wager flutter um a flood you put a 50 quid flutter in take it lose it people will bet on manchester united they could bet on a startup here in the united states you realize we don't let people bet on startups sec blocks 96 of people non-accredited investors from betting on a startup but you go to vegas you can smoke the strongest cannabis and go to vegas you could take 50 milligrams of an edible and then go put your entire life on a craft stable because in a weird way you're a weirdly unfree country in some ways in that for example you know the number of states in which you need all sorts of qualifications to become a hairdresser or or barber yes okay now in the uk as far as i know a pair of scissors basically qualifies you oh yeah your scissors you're good a pair of scissors and a fancy chair and you're in business okay now obviously if you're incompetent at it people won't come back okay um but uh it's always surprised me that the americans are both quite rightly i think you know um committed to freedom in certain respects yes but for example i mean not being free to drink alcohol out of doors i mean that's one of life's great pleasures it's so weird that we have this patriarchal weird belief that like you have to put it and it's even worse in some places you just put it in a paper bag and you're good yeah so it's the sign that you're drinking it and by the way i don't is dr pepper one of your clients at ogilvy can we coke is but but a fellow of coke and dr pepper are weirdly aligned in the uk i think they're distributed by the same people or something yeah i have the greatest idea ever now i don't know if we'd allow it in the united states but what spirit could be mixed with dr pepper and put into a tall boy can rum probably rum okay i was thinking like i'm trying to think of something spicy or smoky of bourbon or scotch i don't know actually a jack jack jack and coke is of course one of the great combinations okay imaginable um so jack and dr pepper would be a kind of yeah these crossovers would be i think you and i could start an ad agency you could quit i'll quit angel investing you and i start an ad agency to create stupid products that sell out like i think one of the reasons one of the reasons the u.s economy is so successful i think is because there is this breed of people who are effectively entrepreneurial salesmen in that they don't necessarily invent anything no they see something that exists and suddenly go i know how to sell that and i think it's actually a very very valuable part that you you you patently have fairly adventurous consumers who believe that life is capable of continual improvement and so are quite adventurous in terms of their purchasing habits.

1:37:15Not cynical. No. I mean, if you have a really conservative consumer base, it's very, very hard. But you also have this breed of people. UK is kind of mid-Atlantic, I'd say. France is really odd because they're both incredibly innovative and incredibly conservative. It's very strange. So they'll completely invent a new category of car or do something really amazing right but your pain can only come from champagne absolutely you know they haven't they haven't innovated a breakfast ingredient since like you know why would you they've already perfect already eggs benedict what more do you want no they didn't invent eggs benedict that's american i think well what do they make i think it might be american but isn't the sauce uh what's the sauce called it's true that is hollandaise sauce so that hollandaise who created hollandaise i don't know the dutch i guess maybe the dutch yeah yeah i'll go and find out the origins i love the fact that the origins of we were talking about accidental discoveries right at the beginning of the talk and there is actually a guy called nacho who was the inventor of nachos fantastic it was some sort of restaurant okay hollandaise sauce also called dutch sauce mixture of egg yolk butter and lemon juice as we know i'm assuming yeah eggs benedict yeah french for hollandaic sauce the name implies dutch origins but the actual connection is unclear the name dutch ross's document in english as early as 1573 hard to know here there is um what's it say about eggs benedict what's the origin there because sometimes these places are invented in a single hotel or a single place where they actually know um eggs benedict del monaco's in lower manhattan says on spania eggs benedict was the first created in their ovens in 1860 i thought about it in american because it's breakfast with eggs in would either be british sure american yeah i think this food's gotten better oh yeah yeah yeah the food in the uk we've always been good at breakfast and tea in fairness we've always been the two for sure the two optional meals of the day we've always been kind of world yeah i always think breakfast the the only the really great breakfast countries the places i've been amazed turkey is fantastic a full turkish breakfast mexico has cuevos rancheros which are utterly fabulous utterly fabulous then the united states and the uk are probably the i've never got into this chinese stuff like congee you know it's too weird yeah no no i like that i do like the japanese mixed breakfast with a little bit of fish you have the bacon roll how do i know this my favorite musician mark knoffler of die straits fame uh he has a song on his recent album my bacon roll just about a working class guy who likes to fold money and have cash in his pocket and he's just trying to get a bacon roll and it's this song about a guy who's forced you got to hear the song he's forced to go on a corporate retreat to go whitewater rafting and go bowling and he's like they're trying to do team building exercises with a guy who just wants to get his bacon roll and he like and they're like what sauce do you like brown or red and so i'm like i'm looking at the lyrics what's brown sauce what's red sauce and i realized okay i must explain okay this is actually a bit of a divider because there are fair purists in the uk for the full english breakfast or the bacon roll who believe in ketchup brown sauce more typically either hp sauce which stands for houses of parliament which has been around for about 100 years which is brown and it's spicier um or indeed daddy's which is another brand i i would argue that the real purists would tend to have brown sauce with a bacon roll not red not absolutely yeah yes yeah i mean ketchup would be a more as an entrepreneurial an idea if anybody wants to steal it in the uk i've often thought there's a wonderful um effectively it's a behavioral science bias which is sometimes called the jack of all trades heuristic which is you assume that if someone only does some does one thing it's better or it's going to be better okay perfect the japanese heuristic yeah exactly yeah exactly so now interestingly um uh you know i'm going to there's a bar this evening in deal in the kent coast where i'm going which is called bloody mary's and when i go to bloody mary's i always have a bloody mary because if you call your bar bloody mary's you've got to make a pretty good bloody mary that's the rules okay yeah i've always thought if you opened a restaurant which was just called bacon roll and all you served would be strong builders tea and bacon rolls and you could probably choose maybe a couple of things you could get a little adventure you could have a choice of role but like you know you could have several choices of role i think it should be dusty i think it should have dusty flour on the top, or you could have a wholemeal roll, and you could have several types of bacon, crispier or less crispy, but that's it.

1:41:51Now, I think you'd make an absolute fortune. The other thing you'd do, you'd also have a really perverse and slightly annoying rule, which signals your commitment to the cause. Now, the one I love about this is, I don't know if you've ever been to Thresher's, the French fry place in Ocean City, Maryland, I think it is. I have not. now they they are very very they basically only sell fries i think okay in a in a great big uh they're more like british chips actually in a great thrasher's fries yeah you found them excellent now what's brilliant about that is that they now bear in mind they're in america this wouldn't be that controversial in the uk they won't supply ketchup you only allowed to put salt and vinegar on the fries yes but there's constraint and i think that kind of constraint perverse constraint is just a really clever signaling device it is by the way it was thrashers who five guys went to when they wanted to work out how to make perfect fries which makes total sense i'm sorry very quickly take this hello my favorite part very two minutes takes calls this is the best part so great gotta i guess the ask okay super stuff all right bye bye bye bye bye all right everybody rory and i could talk for hours policy you only do one thing they've been in business they've been i think they're founded by a guy called price who i like to think of as welsh um but you only do one thing and also you actually deny people perversely one thing they'd expect you know i think there's some there's some genius there i think it's absolutely fantastic there there is uh i've had times where i've gone for coffee and there's there are one or two coffee places i've been to that do not have milk in the establishment no uh they will have sugar but no fake sugar because they don't want you to ruin your coffee experience you're like well my coffee experience i'm a narcissist i have been made to believe that my design here is important and it's like no the artist who made your coffee will tell you how you will drink your coffee do You know, by the way, interestingly, why an Americano is called an Americano.

1:43:58It's American troops coming up through Italy in World War II couldn't cope with an espresso and ask people to water it down. Makes total sense. And now Americano is, yeah, it's translated. It means we don't have a drip coffee machine. The literal translation is we have one machine for coffee and it's not an American machine. That's a weird thing, by the way, which is that espresso in the U.S. traveling. I went to Western Pennsylvania because I wanted to go to Falling Water. And by the way, Western Pennsylvania is absolutely gorgeous, as is West Virginia. I mean, absolutely wonderful countryside.

1:44:33You're talking about the house, the Frank Lloyd Wright house? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It'd be my life's ambition to go there. I finally got there. Beautiful house. It was tremendous. But it's surprising how many places in the US only have drip coffee still. Because in the UK, basically having some sort of espresso machine, pretty much universal now everywhere. I was surprised in the US that Starbucks actually have a lot of ground still to cover if they want to. Yeah. I almost bought this Franklin Lloyd Wright house when I lived in LA. Ah, which one? Go on. The Ennis. The Ennis house, which is the one featured in Blade Runner with the tiles.

1:45:11The one with the tiles. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Problematically, it's only like a two-bedroom. it's this giant house but it's only a two-bedroom and it's kind of like living in a dystopian aztecian science fiction film which is also my nirvana fantastic i absolutely love it yeah and i almost got my wife to let me buy this the problem was the four million dollar price tag wasn't the problem the fact that you had to have it open for you know people to see also not a problem for a couple weeks a year no the problem was you had to go through a preservation society and i think it costs the billionaire who bought it spent 15 million dollars having the tiles redone and he had to manufacture these tiles that were like aztec inspired but if you ever see the movie blade runner this is the apartment where tyrell corporation has this and also the apartment there's a website called right on the market which you can google which has all the frank Lloyd Wright homes currently for sale.

1:46:10And there is, I don't, I think it's still for sale for about half a million dollars in, if I've got this right, it's in Idaho, but it might be in Nebraska. I think it's in Idaho. There's the world's only Frank Lloyd Wright gas station for sale. Wow. So if you wanted something less ambitious, that's, that's your solution. That is incredible. Look at all these Franklin Lloyd. Oh, wow. I just found it. And these go for a premium. Amazing. I mean this is also like talking about like dropping in the EVs into like the classic cars why somebody doesn't work with the estate of Franklin Allwright to take these homes these incredible ones and then make a modular home style that is a but Mr.

1:46:50Fuller as well yeah sure and and obviously the Ennis house probably not appealing to as many folks as the Falling Waterhouse but everybody copies the Falling Waterhouse anyway so you might as well just sell them the plans to make exact copies of it and then seek out locations for it frank um great welshman as he was he he um uh he he actually did that because he sold the plans to is it the usonian home or the prairie home i can't remember but you pay a certain number of thousand dollars and then you could you could build a house to his own plans i love it yeah so he was he was actually ahead of the game there and actually you know i mean when it comes to zoning if you just had a zone where you can build what you like here but it has to be to a let me ask you a question have you ever been to the spanish city in whitley bay no tell me more have you been to whitley bay like uh seaside town north inside yeah yeah i've been there there's a very very beautiful um promontory there with seals i think on it oh yeah so anyway it's just there's a very famous dire strait song tunnel of love that talks about mark knoffler's you spent here it's kind of like a bruce springsteen asbury park equivalent and so he had heard bruce springsteen talk about asbury park in new jersey and the seaside and all this stuff and he was like yeah you know i should do something like that for england and i'll do it about the spanish city where i used to go play and i used to go try to flirt with girls they took the lyrics from the song and they put it on some steps there so on my bucket list is to go see the spanish city and to meet Mark Knopfler, this is your assignment.

1:48:28Just keep your ear to the ground. Mark Knopfler, Sir Mark Knopfler, must have some cause that he cares about. Of course. That I can make a donation to and just snap a picture with the legend at some point to put on my desk and just to tell him how much his music means to me. Let me see what I can do. I can take a time. Keep your ear to the ground. I'm going up to Newcastle and hence South Shields in a couple of months' time. So I'll also go and take a picture of the steps. Yeah. Well, in Newcastle, I think they play the song from the film Local Hero. Perfect. Theme song. It's called. Yeah. Anyway, the theme song from that is what they play at the Newcastle when they come on the field.

1:49:10Brilliant. Yeah. So anyway. That's been fantastic. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks for coming on again. Let's do it again in six months or something. We shall, of course. Tori and J. Cal just breaking down everything, going down rabbit holes. You got yourself an hour and 45 family. Couldn't ask for more. We're going to keep your two phone calls in there just to show how delightful it is that you push off of these meetings. We'll see you next time in this week's service. Bye bye.