Why uncertainty creates better marketing & what AI will never replace - Dr Margaret Heffernan

18:11Dr Margaret Heffernan:And presumably in that case, it's possible to predict the past.

18:15Dan Salmon:Yeah.

18:15Dr Margaret Heffernan:But you can't predict the future because if you're basing decisions on what people watched historically, it doesn't necessarily tell you what they'll watch tomorrow.

18:21Dan Salmon:Well, this always provokes double takes in people when I say, you can't predict the future because it hasn't happened yet. And because it hasn't happened yet, there is no data from it. And I always get these really strange looks like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, there's no data for the future. So that means we are basing everything on models. And the thing about models is models leave things out. And you don't know until it's too late which things really matter that you left out. And there's this fantastic quote in a New Yorker profile of the economist Paul Krugman, you know very famous for the beauty of his economic models who said very casually once you know i think sometimes the data that i left out of my models might have been more important

19:14Dr Margaret Heffernan:than the stuff i put in which was super honest that's good but a bit explosive yes i like that

19:20Dan Salmon:but what he was saying was you know it's exactly like maps your maps don't have everything on them They are a model of what the world looks like. But they don't have you and me on the map, you know, on Clerkenwell Road, you know, this moment. They can't possibly. They leave out tons and tons and tons of information, which makes them useful, but it cannot make them comprehensive.

19:49Dr Margaret Heffernan:There's a phrase you use in your book, predictability only happens at scale, which kind of touched on this, doesn't it? So if you aggregate the data, you might see patterns, but individually, you see wild variants, don't you?

20:01Dan Salmon:Exactly. And, you know, and that insight I got really through talking to a lot of epidemiologists, which is, yes, you can see that if you give, you know, a massive amount of the population a measles vaccine, that you can pretty much eliminate measles. But you can't say, actually, my 28-year-old daughter won't get measles. You can say she's vaccinated and she's highly, highly, highly, highly, highly, highly unlikely to get measles. But if for some reason she got a Duff vaccine or an expired vaccine, she might not. And during COVID, it really annoyed me when politicians, who clearly demonstrated their ignorance of science, would talk about the science.

20:56Dan Salmon:And I loved it when I encountered Carlo Rovelli gently correcting this, saying, the science is only what we know so far. That doesn't mean it's to be dismissed, but we're constantly learning new things. We're constantly understanding at a tinier level what's going on. And so uncertainty is baked into life. And the sooner we understand that, I think the sooner we can understand our own lives.

21:27Dr Margaret Heffernan:Well, talking about it, it became a meme or it was a joke, didn't it? Like flatten the curve in six weeks. People were doing these. Do you remember those like graphs they were doing of this is where it's going to be done? And then the range of outcomes was sort of like 10x. Yeah, exactly. So basically, we don't know.

21:44Dan Salmon:We don't know. And that's because we have never been through a COVID epidemic before. And should we go through another one, it will not be the same because we are different. And so many other contextual things will have shifted. And, you know, one of the pushbacks I got when I was writing on this topic was people would always say, oh, but history repeats itself. And I'd say, no, it doesn't. It doesn't. It looks like it does, but if you talk to any professional historian, they will say history doesn't repeat itself for a very simple reason, that people making a decision today that looks similar to a decision they made, let's say, 100 years ago, they know that history.

22:30Dan Salmon:They have different information in their heads. So they will make different decisions, so something different will follow. The problem with thinking history repeats itself is it's a kind of aesthetic mistake. It looks similar, so you think it's the same. You know, the Johnson government thought that the Vietnam War was like a Munich moment. As Robert McNamara said many decades afterwards, he knew nothing about the Vietnamese or their absolutely centuries-long hatred of the Chinese. They were never going to turn into Chinese communists, as he had explained to him by the president of Vietnam many years later.

23:20Dan Salmon:But the power of analogy is really slippery. It's like Obama saying that the Arab Spring, which itself is an analogy, was like the Boston Tea Party, you know, full of white people yearning to be free. As we discovered very tragically, it was nothing like the Boston Tea Party.

23:42Dr Margaret Heffernan:I'm sure there's so many examples of that when you start thinking. Oh, it's horrible.

23:45Dan Salmon:I mean, even the Arab Spring, you know, wasn't like the Prague Spring. Yeah, totally. So that's how you get things wrong is by thinking because they look the same, they are the same. Yeah.

23:56Dr Margaret Heffernan:On a slightly different topic, I remember my first lesson in You Can't Predict the Future was I did economics, business, finance, and there's this amazing book called A Random Walk Down Wall Street.

24:05Dan Salmon:Oh, how fabulous. Have you come across that? No, I haven't.

24:07Dr Margaret Heffernan:And they did an experiment and they took the best stock market traders in the world and asked them to predict which stocks are going to grow. And then they blindfolded a monkey and got the monkey to throw darts at the Wall Street Journal. And they said the monkey beat the traders. Right. You know, because, you know, basically what they realized, you know, that it was impossible. Even with the greatest amount of information and the most amount of expertise, no one was able to pick the right stock.

24:33Dan Salmon:Hence the balanced portfolio.

24:35Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah, exactly. The balance of risk. There you go. All the theories, efficient frontier theory comes out of that. You need at least 20 stocks to, you know, aggregate risk. But even there, that's quite funny because what you then do is you minimize your risk. You get the perfectly average return. You don't get superior returns. You just get the perfectly average return, which is fine if that's what you want.

24:55Dan Salmon:Yes.

24:55Dr Margaret Heffernan:You know, but it doesn't give you the superior return.

24:57Dan Salmon:No, but the superior return is going to be luck.

25:00Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah. Yeah. It's like the famous one about if you'd bought rather than buy an Apple iPhone since the day they came out, if you'd spent the same money on Apple stock each year, you'd be sat on$3 million today.

25:10Dan Salmon:Yeah.

25:11Dr Margaret Heffernan:Or something, which is great in hindsight, isn't it?

25:14Dan Salmon:But you would have missed a lot of calls. That's true.

25:18Dr Margaret Heffernan:You'd have no friends. Yeah. Exactly. if you're sat on your own shed somewhere.

25:22Dan Salmon:Exactly.

25:24Dr Margaret Heffernan:And let's move on to talk about where ideas come from as well, which I thought was really interesting in your book. And in fact, talking about random walks down Wall Street is a good analogy for this, actually, don't you? Because you talk about the power of going for a walk. And this stat jumped out at me about going for a walk boosts creativity by 60%, which we know to be true, I think instinctively.

25:44Dan Salmon:But we don't do it, do we? I think we know it from our own experience. If you're walking without headphones on and you're walking not on your phone and not looking on Google Maps, you're going to be noticing stuff. And you may do that consciously or unconsciously, but you are absorbing what's going on around you. So you're alert to where you are, and that will be part of your memory. and when you when your mind is full of observations and memories and ideas amazingly enough ideas start to emerge that weren't there to begin with and so I think of it as sort of it's like replenishing your larder you know replenishing the fridge you can make a lot more dishes now because you have a lot more observations that are not necessarily unique to you, but the combination is certainly unique to you, that nobody else has.

26:39Dan Salmon:And I first started thinking about this. I taught entrepreneurship for a while in Boston. And the first thing I would do is ask my students to just walk down Newbury Street, which is a sort of high fashion street in Boston, and just tell me what was going on. They looked completely blank, you know. But they could come back because it was homework, right and they noticed all sorts of things and then we say okay so what does that mean what could it mean why is everybody decided that this summer lime green is the color what does it mean about how people are feeling what are they thinking you know what I mean the question I asked myself at the moment is why is the cool new car color gray I mean it's such a miserable gray it's not silver it's just a gray and the cars are bigger than ever and they're uglier than ever.

27:30Dan Salmon:So what is that telling us? It's telling us something. It's telling us something. So if you walk around and you notice the world, you have more ingredients in your imaginative larder.

27:43Dr Margaret Heffernan:And it's fun. And it's fun. I mean, also, I'm a kind of inveterate ear wigger.

27:49Dan Salmon:So I love, you know, sitting on the bus and overhearing people's conversations and things like that, because I just, you know, I live in the world, I want to know what's going on. And it's not all in the newspaper and it's definitely not all on my phone.

28:01Dr Margaret Heffernan:Now, if we were to rank a list of people least likely to do this, I would say the guy that runs the Bank of England would be well up there. But apparently he's into this as well, isn't he?

28:12Dan Salmon:Well, when he was chief economist for the Bank of England, I learned that he had a habit of walking around the streets of the City of London quite frequently. And I was very captivated by this because it seemed so anti-stereotypical. And it's really the reason I went to interview him. And he talked about, I think quite humbly, saying we have to make really big decisions that are going to impact millions of people's lives. And of course, we have masses and masses of data and plenty of economists to analyze it. But there's all sorts of data that numbers will never capture. And I just felt an obligation, he said, to try to have a different kind of data in my own head as a check on some of our other ways of thinking.

29:07Dan Salmon:And he would go and talk to faith groups. He'd go and talk to housing associations. He'd go and talk to immigrant groups. And it wasn't to fact check anything. It wasn't to collect hard data. It was just to get a sense of what's going on out there. And later it led him to invite all kinds of people into the Bank of England in a speaker series for the same reason. He thought, you can't have them all going out, you know, lunch, walking around all the time. So he brought in ballet dancers and scientists and astrologers and visual artists and musicians and all kinds of people simply to get different sorts of conversations going in what is a very hierarchical, very traditional institution.

29:53Dan Salmon:And he said quite sweetly, I thought, you know, that for an introvert, none of this was easy for him. So he wasn't doing it because it was easy or fun. He was doing it because he thought it was important. And I can get pretty upset about the degree to which we manage people in ways now in companies with that kind of important work is absolutely managed out of existence. So I will get companies who will phone me up and say, can you come and make our people more creative? And I'll say, well, do they have lots of targets? Yes. Very detailed job descriptions? Yes. Lots of KPIs? Yes. Do they work very long hours?

30:40Dan Salmon:Yes. I'll say, there is nothing I can do for you. I mean there's just there's no point because if you really need these things you are not going to get creative thinking and that's your call I'm not going to judge you I don't understand your business it's up to you but if you if there's no elasticity in terms of them being perceived as a high performer then they're going to do exactly what you tell them to do and that is your single biggest risk.

31:13Dr Margaret Heffernan:I talk with marketers all day. Many of them say the same thing. Traffic is down, leads are down, and they're not sure why, until they realize what has changed. Most of their customers now trust AI to recommend the right brands to them, and the first one that AI recommends, they go with. Visibility in AI search comes down to whether AI trusts your content, but most brands have no idea where they stand. So how do you show up when someone asks AI about the things that you sell with HubSpot AEO. HubSpot AEO shows you exactly where your brand stands in AI search and makes clear recommendations on what to do to improve it without having to guess.

31:51Dr Margaret Heffernan:So when someone asks AI what to buy, you're already the answer. Try it for free at hubspot.com forward slash AEO. It's a real problem this isn't it because as business we don't put a value on creativity anymore do we no and you know we're living through i mean i've been really inspired by a mcgill chris book yes yes yes yes yes where he talks about brain hemisphere and it feels like we're living through an industrial revolution which is just becoming more left brain dominant so yes task and efficiency and you know reproducing the same thing all the time again but the right hemisphere has been neglected in terms of being vigilant about the world around and relationships and connecting things and being in culture.

32:36Dr Margaret Heffernan:And that feels very apt, doesn't it, in terms of what we're struggling with?

32:41Dan Salmon:Well, I remember talking about this at MIT. They run a group for entrepreneurs. And talking about this exact thing. And, you know, they were very dissatisfied with the notion that this kind of very, very left-brained, rigid, numerical, rational brain wasn't just good enough for everything. And I just said in the end, what do you want? Do you want to work with half a brain or a whole brain? I'm not asking you to be both. Everybody's going to have, you know, a different kind of balance. And of course, now we know that it's not just your brain either. It's your whole nervous system. But I just don't see why in your business you wouldn't want to take advantage of the full capacity of human talents.

33:29Dan Salmon:and you're so convinced that you can get by on 50%. If I asked you to get by on 50 % of your workforce, would you feel okay about that? In which case, why are they there?

33:43Dr Margaret Heffernan:That's a wonderful framing. I like that. And you see it everywhere, don't you? Technology is automating so many things. AI is taking over decision-making. So it's just becoming more and more. less, you know, more, sorry, more and more left-brained.

34:01Dan Salmon:Yeah.

34:02Dr Margaret Heffernan:Less right-brained, less room for creativity to...

34:05Dan Salmon:Well, I think there's that, but I think also there are a whole bunch of problems with AI. You know, certainly there's the use it or lose it problem. If you never write anything, you will not know how to write anything. I mean, I first started talking about this, I guess about five years ago when it dawned on me that I'd outsourced to my phone all the phone numbers of people nearest to dearest to me. And I thought, well, that's okay. I can remember my husband's phone number, so I can always call him and get our daughter's phone number. I don't really mind not having all those phone numbers in my head.

34:45Dan Salmon:Outsourcing my capacity to see, to write, to think for myself, I really do not want to outsource that to technology. That's what technology wants me to do. but I don't want to. And the analogy that was always drawn at the time was, oh, this is the same silly scare as around pocket calculators. You know, everybody thought people would lose the ability to do math. Well, actually, if you go back and look, they have lost the ability to do math. I mean, it's a very kind of evolutionary thing. If you don't need something, it doesn't develop. Why would it? So I think one of the things that's really interesting about AI is not only how much people are willing to outsource and how phenomenally uncritical they are about some of the nonsense that they get back, but if they can't think, they can't think their way to a good question, in which case they can't understand the answer.

35:51Dan Salmon:and Jamie Bartlett's very brilliant on this. I saw him the other day asking two people who had volunteered to ask a question to AI and then try to break it down so that the question was understandable to a five-year-old. This is quite a complicated thing because the question was something about, I don't know, what kind of house would be best for a two-person family about to have a child. If you start unpacking it for a five-year-old, where is the house? What kind of house? What is the finance available? In what time does it have to be built? What is the geography of the house? What kind of weather does it have to withstand?

36:43Inside this simple question are hundreds of really important questions.

36:48Dan Salmon:which one do you want the answer to? Because there cannot possibly be only one answer. If it's in Texas, it's a very different house from if it's in Alaska. So to get value out of AI, you really, really have to think well. But if you're using it not to think, then you're going to get super generic answers, which are going to be actually pointless. And let's not forget, it looks free, but it's not. And especially as tech companies start changing the price of tokens, this could become a really expensive way to be stupid.

37:30Dr Margaret Heffernan:I love that. We can now put a price on stupidity then.

37:36Dan Salmon:Well, I mean, if you want to do something on AI, you should talk to Jamie. He is brilliant on this topic. That's fascinating. He is absolutely brilliant and very funny.

37:44Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah. So to what extent do you think AI is like killing our ability to think?

37:48Dan Salmon:Oh, I've already seen it happen. I remember talking to an office admin who said, I just love AI because I'm really crap at writing and it writes everything so well. Well, she's just given up on the notion that she'd ever be good at writing, which is heartbreaking because actually if she could always get better at writing, everybody always can. So she's given up on herself, which I think is a very sad thing. to witness. You know, people get good at thinking by doing it, just like they get good at, you know, tennis or football or singing or whatever it might be by doing it. And I absolutely understand that we can't be good at everything.

38:36Dan Salmon:But being good at asking questions is really fundamental. because it's not only about information. It's also thinking about who am I talking to and what do they need to be able to answer my question, which means I have to think about them. But, of course, with AI, there is no them. There's just it. So, you know, I ran three tech companies. I'm not tech phobic at all, but I'm very cognizant of the fact that propaganda is probably the most sophisticated product coming out of Silly Valley and we should know by now after the horror stories that have emerged around social media to name but one that all of this stuff has unforeseen consequences and we should be alert to them and we should guard against them and I think it's exactly like medicine.

39:35Dan Salmon:You're not allowed to trial any random drug on the population as a whole. First, you have to test it in a pretty scrutinized way to ensure it doesn't harm people. I don't see why tech companies should be working to a lower bar. There's also the issue that tech basically renders everything generic, right? Everybody sees the same stuff, they read the same stuff. I can't remember what year it was where all women were wearing really thick eyebrows. I remember looking at it on the tube. Every woman across from me had the same eyebrows on. Why? Well, because that was clearly a thing in social media.

40:19Dan Salmon:You know, this gravitational pull to the norm, or to a norm, to the mean, this is true of all technology. It is the way it is because of that, because the largest number signifies the right answer. So it's horribly averageizing. And when you do that, everything interesting disappears.

40:48Dr Margaret Heffernan:You've got a dramatic example of this the other day. If you ask AI to pick a number from 1 to 10, what do you think it says? 7. Yeah.

40:55Dan Salmon:And the next number? 5?

40:58Dr Margaret Heffernan:3.

40:58Dan Salmon:All right.

40:58Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah, because it's just replicating the average human response.

41:02Dan Salmon:Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, fascinating. But it will do that about all sorts of things.

41:06Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah.

41:06Dan Salmon:I mean, I think there's a lot that we want to have in common. But my ideal society isn't one in which everyone thinks the same way. I mean, the society where everyone thinks the same way, I think, is what we would call authoritarian and anti-human.

41:27Dan Salmon:but I remember one night working late in my second tech company and there was a QA guy there working late. They quite often like working late because it's really quiet and I just had a chat with him and I said, you know, what is it you love so much about writing code? And he thought about it for a long time. He's a lovely guy and he said, I can make people do things. I can design the architecture of the website flow or the game flow, and they have to do it. I can make people do things. And then later on, when I was writing a book about competition, interviewing a game designer who taught me through the whole thing about, you know, you ratchet up and ratchet up, and then you know exactly when the person's about to quit the game.

42:19Dan Salmon:So this is called a staircase algorithm. So you give them a landing and a little reward and a bit of a breather and then you ratchet it up again. And of course, that's how all these games are designed. They can make us do things.

42:35Dr Margaret Heffernan:So interesting that I've seen that myself. I don't play many games. The ones I play, I still get to the point where I'm going to give up on this one. It's this level's too hard. And then just the point they go, oh, I've just suddenly solved it now. Exactly. Door opens, next level, off you go.

42:48Dan Salmon:Yeah.

42:48Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah.

42:49Dan Salmon:Yeah.

42:49Dr Margaret Heffernan:It's very clever, isn't it? um let's talk about how uh to make good ideas happen there's this steve mcqueen quote which i love which is what i often do is plant seeds and certain things come into fruition other things wither and die you referenced it earlier didn't you like you know you might have a smash hit but you also have a failure so how do you kind of you know creative people have ideas all the time how

43:12Dan Salmon:do you pick the good ideas um lots of people have different methods of my own because certainly when When I was working in tech, I probably had an idea for a company about every week at least. And my test then was always just ignore it. If you can't remember it after a week, it probably wasn't that great an idea. One of the reasons that's a really good test is because what will happen is, if it's a good idea, you'll start seeing evidence everywhere. The same is true when I'm thinking about a book. you know if it's a really good idea I'll start noticing something in the papers I'll start hearing a conversation a different way I'll see something in a TV show I'll pick up something I don't know from something I've overheard on the train you know you're primed to pick up this stuff because the idea is in your head like a magnet and that's you collecting what I think of as sort of iron filings and the idea is the magnet basically.

44:16Dan Salmon:So that's the way a lot of people do it. I think a lot of other people may not have so many ideas, but they'll take them more seriously. So they'll start doing research and things like that. Margaret Atwood tells a wonderful story about how for years she was traveling around Europe and she just kept clipping these newspaper articles about birth control and birth rates and the church and abortion and all that sort of thing, which And years later, she had this big, big file full of cuttings. And it started to arrange itself into a shape, which became The Handmaid's Tale. Mike Lee was really fantastic when I interviewed him because he said how typically when he finishes a movie, everybody's just raring to go on the next one because they all love working together.

45:04Dan Salmon:And he'll always insist on taking about a year out after he's finished cutting it. And it's ostensibly to do nothing. and he'll relax, you know, he'll see friends, he'll go to art galleries, he'll read books, not with an agenda, not with a plan. But he came out with one of my all-time favorite sentences, nothing happening is something happening. And I would say this is true of every single creative person I talk to. There's a lot of what looks like nothing, which is something. and the key is take it seriously notice you're noticing that is such good advice i really relate

45:47Dr Margaret Heffernan:to what you're saying as well because a couple years ago me and a colleague adam did a talk at can called the extraordinary cost of being dull so we tried to actually put a cost on advertising being dull how fabulous we actually worked out a number by looking at how much more would you have to spend on media to compensate for the fact that your communication was so boring so then you suddenly you know the accountants can then go hang on a minute we can't afford to be dull yeah and there was something in the data that i had spotted and was really stuck in my head about surprise being the antidote to dull so if something surprises you yeah you're more likely to have an emotional response you might to remember it exactly and it sticks in your head right and but just as you say we're kind of like i'm old and then i suddenly saw surprise everywhere like magicians, comedians, even military.

46:35Dr Margaret Heffernan:The military use the art of surprise to kind of stun the enemy and kind of take a new position. And like you say, once you see something, you see it absolutely everywhere.

46:45Dan Salmon:And surprise, if you like, is taking advantage of uncertainty. It's creating uncertainty for impact, isn't it?

46:51Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah. In fact, we went on a bit of a rabbit hole with it. So we discovered this thing called reward prediction error, which is actually surprise isn't the experience itself. it's the variance between your anticipation and the reality. So it could be good or bad. So you have a bad experience. You're like, oh, my expectation was high and the experience was low. And that was where the dopamine hit happened or didn't happen. Yeah.

47:13Dan Salmon:But it's just like this thing, you know, when people are traveling these days, they'll do all this research before they leave home about the hotels and the restaurant and the big sites and the da-di-da-di-da-di-da. And when you hear about their holiday on their way back, It's invariably, oh, we found this amazing little restaurant, you know, it wasn't anywhere on TripAdvisor. Or we had this great conversation with the people we were sitting next to in a bar. It's all the unexpected stuff that makes it special because it's special to you. Nobody else had that surprise.

47:47Dr Margaret Heffernan:Exactly. Couldn't have put it better. I love that. Something that jumped out at me actually in this part of the book was the jazz album, Kind of Blues. Oh, yeah. Explain that a little bit, because the improviser's paradox, I thought was very clever. I mean, I think the quote in here was, it requires absolute concentration in the moment to pull off this kind of jazz.

48:06Dan Salmon:Yeah.

48:06Dr Margaret Heffernan:While simultaneously deciding what's going to happen next, effectively you kind of live in the moment and live in the future.

48:13Dan Salmon:Well, so, I mean, also I think one of the things about improv and jazz is about having this well-stocked lotter. Just lots and lots and lots of ideas, you know, sort of sitting there. But, no, the thing that's so fascinating about Kind of Blue is that it was, first of all, it was recorded in two days, which for the greatest jazz album of all time is mind-blowing. And Miles and his band consisted of players who had huge respect for each other's playing, but not so cordially really hated each other. So this wasn't a happy band. and they were trying something that they'd never done before, which is playing modes, where typically at the time jazz was kind of improvising on show tunes.

49:02Dan Salmon:So it's a different way of working nobody's tried before. It's a band that doesn't like each other. They're working with a producer that Miles had never worked with before on an album. They kind of can't wait till it's over. and at the end, at the end of the second day, there's no indication whatsoever that they thought they'd done anything special. And Miles never made an album like that again. Now that is kind of the highest level of creativity you can imagine. The risk-taking is enormous. Nobody's thinking, gee, I wonder if this is the greatest jazz album that anybody will ever make. It doesn't even occur to them.

49:44Dan Salmon:What they're doing is they're trying to be as good as each other, which is why they like playing together. You know, that when Miles played well, they wanted to play that well, which made other people want to play that well and maybe even better than that. And it's really extraordinary to think that there's no track on that album that required more than three takes. and the last one I think was only one take. It's incredible. And at the end they just kind of, you know, laugh a bit and, you know, cool down and go their separate ways and never work together again like that.

50:27Dr Margaret Heffernan:And that became the most successful jazz album.

50:29Dan Salmon:And it's still a work of absolute genius. It's as fresh today as it was the day they made it.

50:36Dr Margaret Heffernan:So in some sense in that situation you want to inject uncertainty, don't you? into the crazy process.

50:42Dan Salmon:But he was cramming it in.

50:43Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah.

50:44Dan Salmon:You know, it's not certain the producer will know how to handle this. It's not certain the band won't kill each other. It's not certain that working with modes is going to produce anything remarkable. It's not certain we'll get it done in the time required. And there's absolutely no guarantee whatsoever that anybody will like it.

51:05Dr Margaret Heffernan:This is partly why I love looking at startups as well, because startups embrace those situations. Whereas a mature company would sit there and go, there's too much risk in this. We're going to walk away. The startup's going, right, let's give this a go.

51:19Dan Salmon:And I think there is a very close correlation between the creative mindset, the artist mindset and the entrepreneur's mindset. Again, when I was teaching entrepreneurship, I was really fascinated by the motivation of entrepreneurs. It's a vast, quite boring, academic literature on this subject. And everybody thinks, so they go into it for the money. That is not the number one reason. The number one reason is I want to find out what I'm made of. Am I up to it? Can I do it? What's it going to be like? Curiosity, right? I just never forgive myself if I didn't give it a try. And I think that's, I think it's a much more inspiring model of entrepreneurship,

52:02Dr Margaret Heffernan:let's be honest, than billionaires and trillionaires.

52:05Dan Salmon:And it speaks to the fact that even, And, you know, I know lots of entrepreneurs who've started companies that have failed.

52:11Dr Margaret Heffernan:Not one of them regrets it because they learned so much.

52:17Dan Salmon:They learned so much about themselves, about business, about leadership, about each other. So it's a great adventure.

52:24Dr Margaret Heffernan:It's so true. Almost every successful founder I've spoken to says if you start out in it for the money, stop immediately. Yeah. Because you won't succeed.

52:32Dan Salmon:Well, it'll be so frustrating. And every day will feel like a failure unless you made a fortune. And since every day is going to feel like failure for a very long time, even in quick startups, it's just a recipe for disappointment. And we also know, my pal Dan Pink has done some wonderful research on this, that the minute money is a motivation, your creativity pretty much dies on the spot. because you're just thinking about that. And so you're trying to curtail and limit your ideas in your search for certainty at exactly the moment that you want to expand it.

53:12Dr Margaret Heffernan:And presumably the irony of that is the money will follow the idea. Yeah, no, no, no.

53:18Dan Salmon:No, the money, the idea will attract the money. Exactly. If it's a great idea. Exactly. And sometimes if it's not.

53:26Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah, well, and then you said the learning you get from the failed idea is often the thing that creates the good idea. Exactly. So what would you say would be the most important, you touched on one or two there actually, what are the most important human skills that we need to survive in the age of uncertainty?

53:41Dan Salmon:I think curiosity. You know, being curious and having the nerve to follow your own curiosity. I think the sense of agency that you can start before anybody asks you to. The capacity to keep going when nothing is obvious. I mean, I was dazzled. One of the big surprises writing this book was to discover that novelists write their novels without a plan. Do they? So I always, I mean, not all novelists, obviously, but I always thought especially kind of thrillers and crime things. You know, they had an intricate plot, all worked out, post-its on the note, you know, sorry, post-its on the wall, all that kind of thing.

54:24Dan Salmon:Lee Child doesn't have any idea what the book's going to be. He starts with a situation. There is no preformed plot. Olga Tkarczuk, who's a Nobel Prize winner, wrote a fantastic murder mystery called Drive Your Plow Over My Bones. And she said it was only two-thirds of the way into the book she realized who'd done it. Right? And she was completely gobsmacked. Right? Right? Murakami, similarly, just starts with some characters in a situation, has no idea what's going to happen. And when you think about it, you realize, of course, that's why these books are exciting to read. Because the writer is experiencing the discovery, just as you are.

55:11Dan Salmon:And so the capacity to deal with that not knowing while remaining creative, I think is just an absolute superpower. power. And it's why the books don't read as formulaic. I think that also requires a certain degree of courage. You know, the American painter, Faith Ringgold, said she used to pray before she started painting. Tracy Emin will often sketch to warm up because she says she's so scared. And because, you know, when all the wandering around and all the idea-making stops, at some point you have to make a choice. I'm going to do this. And that's a gigantic risk. It could be an enormous opportunity cost.

55:54Dan Salmon:If I write this book, I'm not writing that book. And it could turn out to be a dud, and I don't know. So that takes a lot of courage. And I remember, for example, the novelist Sebastian Barry saying, you know, you have to consider that what you're writing is just a pile of malodorous nonsense. And when he finished his phenomenal book, Days Without End, he told me he put it, you know, he sent it to his agent and said to his wife, I don't think the public's going to like this. I think I'm going to have to write another novel next year. Well, it turned out he won the Costa Prize for the second time, the first time anybody done that it's a phenomenal book he completely changed his style yeah so I think that courage to keep going because also that's right he also told me the first nine months of writing that he couldn't figure out what the book was and one moment one day he wakes up he throws away all nine months of work and starts with this very different style and he's off so that endurance that stamina I think really really important and then the capacity to change you know the fact that Miles Davis never did another album like kind of blue or you think of Bob Dylan you know going from acoustic to electric which many of his fans never forgave him for or you think of somebody like well Murakami is now writing music or you think of Gerhard Wichter, you know, sumptuous oils that I love.

57:34Dan Salmon:And he's now working in steel and metal, which is kind of mind-blowing. And they do this, you know, although it often really pisses off their agents and their fans, because they want the adventure to continue. Why would you want to keep repeating yourself, right? So I think that capacity to say, yep, did that, learned a lot from it, I don't want to do that again and I will try something else. I think that bestows a level of flexibility and adaptability that we as humans and society at large really needs in an age when there is so much uncertainty. The ability to embrace change as growth rather than change as, I have to break my routine, I have to walk a different way to work today.

58:25Dr Margaret Heffernan:Completely. One of the best entrepreneurs I've ever met, a guy called Ben Branson, he invented Seedlip.

58:31Dan Salmon:Oh, I've met Ben. Have you met Ben? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We did a thing on Radio 4. Did you? In a series called Decisions That Made Me.

58:39Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yes, yes. I mean.

58:41Dan Salmon:He's a lovely guy.

58:42Dr Margaret Heffernan:Such a nice guy. Wildly successful. I mean, sold to Diageo. And so quiet about it. Totally.

58:47Dan Salmon:Love that.

58:47Dr Margaret Heffernan:The thing I was going to mention was my favorite LinkedIn post of his. he posted the gantt chart that he wrote before he launched seed lip to get the confidence that he was launching it had to plan everything out he's very obsessed with the detail right and then and then he says you know by day two that was entirely out the window yeah and yet he went on and to sell a business in less than three years diageo hugely successful and yet the first thing he'll admit to you is i had a plan yeah but it was redundant on the first day of operating.

59:19Dan Salmon:Yeah and the thing is you know he rewrote the plan and then he rewrote the plan and he rewrote the plan and I remember an aspiring writer asking me how I wrote and I explained about rewriting and I said you know I reckon every book I've written I must have written the equivalent of ten books and this person looked kind of aghast but that's how you find out what it's going to be you know it's much more discovery than invention and the really fun moment is when you discover something you just didn't see coming you know like Olga's discovery of the murderer you know when you see you know that oh this idea connects to that ideas and they talk to each other and they have a lot to say to each other and you would never have known that without writing this is why oops hello should we do that should we do the last question in the dark just for just for drama i think that's a great idea should we good yeah let's do it all right

1:00:26Dr Margaret Heffernan:okay so we have no power um and all the lights are off the gods of uncertainty they are indeed but i wanted to ask you one question which i love to ask everybody which is the same question what's the one piece of advice you've been given which has made the biggest difference to your career? I can't think of one particular piece of advice as such.

1:00:50Dan Salmon:I can think of one really seminal moment, which is when I think I was about 12. And I was due to play the piano at the graduation ceremony of the junior high school I was attending in the Netherlands. and um and i you know we'd chosen a piece i'd rehearsed the piece and then when we did the rehearsal the organizers decided no they didn't want that piece of music they wanted another piece of music and that was fine i could play the other piece of music that wasn't the issue it was just it was really trite tedious boring piece of music was the first piece of music was really lively and upbeat and cool and i remember going home and over the dinner table you know ranting to my parents saying, God, it's a bad choice, and I've practiced this one, and it's stupid, and they should have thought about it before, and it's just going to make the whole event really flat.

1:01:45Dan Salmon:And my father said very quietly, well, you know, Margaret, once you start, they're very unlikely to stop you. And that's all he said, and I remember going in the next day and thinking, oh, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. And then I thought, well, I don't want to play really crappy music. So I started playing the original piece, and he was right. He didn't stop me.

1:02:14Dr Margaret Heffernan:No one stopped me. There you go.

1:02:17Dan Salmon:And if you had to encapsulate that in a piece of advice, it's if you really, really, really care about something, fight for it.

1:02:26Dr Margaret Heffernan:Love that. Amazing. Margaret, thank you so much.

1:02:30Dan Salmon:My pleasure. It's been lovely ending this in the dark. I know.

1:02:34Dr Margaret Heffernan:There we go. So much for enlightenment. This is definitely the first podcast that's ended in the dark. But it's very appropriate.

1:02:41Dan Salmon:You're sure you didn't organise it? I know.

1:02:43Dr Margaret Heffernan:I'd like to say that we did, but we didn't. Just to prove the uncertainty point live on camera. Thank you very much.

1:02:50Dan Salmon:Well, there you see. But that's resilience, having batteries.

1:02:52Dr Margaret Heffernan:It is, yeah. Well, big, big tips to producer James here. We're not reliant on the...

1:02:59Dan Salmon:Everything apart from lighting.

1:03:00Dr Margaret Heffernan:Yeah. exactly

1:03:03Dan Salmon:excellent there you go

1:03:05Dr Margaret Heffernan:thank you very much so I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it now by the way I've got a new newsletter so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week then do subscribe to the one thing newsletter I'd really appreciate it also I have another podcast just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchesotto She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades.

1:03:40Dr Margaret Heffernan:And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.