The Best Rory Sutherland Interview You'll Ever Watch

29:39End up paying 60 Canadian dollars for the CTA. If you go straight to the legitimate Canadian government site, it's 14 Canadian dollars, that's seven quid. Now, sorry, Google, you're a billion-dollar company. You should know that one of the problems you have with an auction system is, one, high-margin players will always be able to outbid lower-margin players, which is not in the consumer's interest. but worst of all these people were not a totally dishonest player i think they're not illegal because i did get my cta i didn't turn up in canada and get put into a canadian jail which i suppose would be a lot better than american jail but i didn't get put in a canadian jail for three months i think it was a legitimate cta they issued but they charged me 60 dollars whereas the the lovely government of canada would only have charged 14.

30:31they're sorry google right You need to be alert to this. Come on, let's have a little bit of consumer interest here. Similarly, when I search for a specific hotel, I want to link to that hotel, not five competing hotels followed by six online travel agents trying to get me to stay somewhere completely different. Now, sorry, I've now started paying for my search because I know I've worked in advertising for 36 years. But I think there's an entirely legitimate use of advertising, which is bringing people's attention to things which they may not otherwise know. And I also think there's a totally illegitimate use of advertising, which is distracting people from what they need to know in order to actually try and plug something else.

31:15So consequently, one of the reasons I like influencer advertising, and I think one of the reasons I think consumers like it, is because intuitively, without necessarily knowing the kind of informational calculus they're going through, they know they can trust this. If I recommend a car, and I'm a car expert, that guy for CarWow, okay? I mean, you know, that's the new Top Gear, right? Okay, that Brummie guy is probably a relative, is he, Anna? The Brummie on CarWow. Obviously, he has instant car credibility because, weirdly, things to do with cars have more credibility if said in a Brummie accent.

31:53I don't know why. It's like, now Coventry, nice, great, you know. I don't know why that is, by the way, but actually it's a benefit, isn't it? But that guy, you know, I mean, okay, I mean, he's trying to sell cars for car wow, and he plugs car wow in the thing. But basically, I take what he has to say at face value. And I think in a world in which more and more information has an ulterior motive, we're going to seek out authenticity. We're going to go to Kagi. We're going to buy our TomTom app. By the way, I'm not suggesting Google Maps is currently trying to root me on a stupid route so that I go and buy a McDonald's.

32:31But it's only a matter of time, isn't it? It's only a matter of time before you go, that's a bit of a dog leg, isn't it? Oh, it suspiciously takes me past the location of a major advertiser. Now, would that be a legitimate form of advertising? I would argue no. David Ogilvie didn't even approve of posters, by the way. Do you want to know this? Why? Right. This is worth knowing because nobody in advertising, because everybody thinks that the purpose of advertising is efficiency, including people who work in advertising, which is they have bought into advertising metrics which have actually been effectively, which are actually a mind virus planted in client companies by tech companies.

33:16Because tech companies have done everything they can to promulgate marketing metrics which favor the expenditure of your marketing budget with tech companies. And they've done that with their running dog lackeys in management consultancy. So a lot of the metrics that are being actively chased by marketers now are not there to serve the interest of the brand, the interest of the consumer, or the interest of the business. They're metrics which are highly convenient if you want to sell tech stacks to gullible marketers. A lot of the metrics which people chase are unbelievably poor proxy metrics. It's nothing to do with long-term brand building.

33:56It's nothing to do with fame because those things are slow feedback, hard to attribute, and therefore they don't suit the application of tech solutions. So what the tech people have done is they pretended that marketing is all about the thing that tech companies happen to be good at at the expense of almost everything else. I see what's going on here as, first of all, the quest for authenticity, and I think that people looking for influencer marketing are looking for authentic information. How often do you buy something and you go to Wikipedia? Let's be honest about this. We do that all the time, right?

34:34Because you go, I can't get any sense out of this marketplace. Everybody's got an ulterior motive. And obviously the person who is doing, you know, the Brummie on CarWow, who's bloody good actually, he is trying to sell something, but nonetheless he's doing it in a way which maintains some sort of authenticity. He's got some sort of reputational skin in the game. We have a lot of entrepreneurs listening to this podcast. Thinking about that coconut tree analogy, if you were consulting a startup up and you're thinking, what is the quickest way to build trust with your audience? How would you approach it?

35:11I do two contradictory things. You probably at the moment need Facebook, Meta and Google to build your business simply because of the reach and frequency they have. However, do not get trapped into a death spiral where your entire marketing activity is all about how can I give money to Google and Meta in a slightly more efficient way? Because I would argue that ultimately those things are a duopolistic extractive business. Okay, I've got to go back one. I'm a Georgist, okay? I believe there should be land value tax, should be a principal form of taxation. I believe there are two forms of capitalistic activity.

35:49There's generative and there's extractive. And I believe that land ownership, not property building, not property development, not land development, not farming, okay? But land ownership is largely extractive. If you buy a buy, I sold a property on principle in London in 1996 because I don't believe in being a buy-to-let landlord. It cost me£700 ,000 in fucking tax-free capital gains, right? But it's not my job to be a landlord. That's not adding value. What I've done is I've bought the right to tax the younger generation, and I don't think that's a right I should have. okay now i would also argue that a large part of meta and alphabet not all of them not all of it is largely extractive it's in other words we can know enough about who's making money that we can basically extract just enough it's a parasite okay enough of their profit so that they still survive but where they can never actually become rich okay i mean there are There are forms of advertising on Amazon where if you give us money as Amazon, we won't put the Amazon Basics product on top of your own.

36:59I don't think that's advertising. So part of what I want people to do is all the while you've got to be working out ways in which you can make money without going repeatedly going through Meta and Google because they are the digital equivalent of the Duke of Westminster. All right. They're the digital. Well, I ought to be harsh on my own. the digital equivalent of the Duke of Sutherland, okay? Right? Okay. They're a big, great extractive landowner who takes the greater part of the gains to the labor of the people working the digital land. And therefore, things like influencer marketing, okay, things like one of the best ways you could do it is by investing in customer service, by saying it is now really expensive to acquire a customer because we have to bribe these two monopolistic entities in order to acquire a new customer.

37:53Therefore, my logic is, now I think there are loads and loads of people, I think 50 % of people in my business are there going, how can we be even more efficient at giving money to? I mean, this is what pissed me off about the back to the office mandate, right? Because what it said, it was your employer saying, we think our landlord's interests are more important than our employees' interests. That's what it was effectively saying. I would be saying, go on and work from home. We'll take our bloody rent bill and we'll give it to you in the form of a salary, right? It was effectively prioritizing the interest of land over labor.

38:32So one of the things I would absolutely obsess about if I were a new age business is the only metric that really matters, if I'm being honest, is repeat business. It's customer retention. Um, that's a really, because it means that people who have complete information all the way down from first discovering your existence to actually experiencing your product. Okay. Those people, uh, knowing everything they know and having experienced everything they've experienced, go back and buy from you again. That's a really, really reliable indicator of how good a business you are. It's an indicator of how good you are at creating intangible value, tangible value, providing customer service.

39:19One of the things I've always said is one of the worst ever framings that's happened in business is the idea of the call center as a cost center. It's not. A really good call center is more important than your advertising budget in many businesses. Well, I'll give you an extreme example of this. I think humans overweight human experience relative to artificial experience. Here's a weird one, right? I think, as of last weekend, I think Southern Water is a brilliant company. They don't know anything about them. Haven't read about them in the Financial Times. But my wife was walking down the street in Deal, and there was a massive fountain coming out of the pavement.

40:09and she rings me and she gives the exact location on what three words of where there's water spraying out of the street and she's, can you ring the water company? And I go online and I ring up the Southern Water Call Centre and ironically, the woman was Northern, really. But Northerners, it makes sense because Northerners are nicer than, you know, they're better call centre employees, aren't they? Like the Welsh, you know, you would, wouldn't you? You wouldn't have Southerners on the bloody call centre, miserable bastards. Anyway, Anyway, the woman on the call said it was just charming. She was just really effective.

40:40She was really grateful. She said they put it out. It's an emergency. Somebody else has reported this. She was absolutely brilliant. And now, I'm not making this up. Okay, I think, I don't know. I think they're fantastic. Now, in the same way, Alex Batchelor, who is the marketing director of Royal Mail, they did loads and loads of research about the brand, you know, Royal Mail's brand attributes. and they can never really make sense of it because people's attitude to royal mail seemed to be like completely random and polarized and then they thought of one bit of research and they did one extra bit of research discovered your attitude to royal mail as a brand was almost entirely predicated not exclusively almost entirely predicated on whether you like your postman and my argument is that in brand terms the personal actually carries much more weight there's much more i think there's an organization which calls something a brand quake in other words i can't remember who coined that phrase it might be the people in category pirates but a brand quake is where you create a moment where it's so remarkable that you actually rethink your entire relationship and perception of the whole business.

41:54I absolutely adore our postman. I think he's absolutely fantastic. And as a result, you know, if anybody criticizes Royal Mail, I'll actually leap to their defense. And actually, let's be honest, I've never had anything go missing. I've lived in the same place for 20 years. I've never had a few things are late. I've never had anything go missing, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. now yeah i mean there are a lot of things by the way where companies are really good but in a way that's invisible because you notice the letter that goes missing but you don't notice the 6 000 that arrive that's one of the reasons you need marketing because the the world the the world is full of informational asymmetries really really important to know that because there are things we notice and there are things we don't notice there are things we talk about there are things we don't talk about.

42:43And the world is absolutely plagued with these informational asymmetries. And one of the reasons you need marketing is to actually redirect people's attention sometimes to the things they're ignoring, because they're not very salient. You know, the fact that your post arrives, nobody ever says, you know, amazing this morning, all my letters arrive. And there are loads of reasons you need marketing. Okay. And the definition of marketing that's sort of prevalent today is really a completely mythical oversimplification created by the tech industry to effectively maximize its own influence and opportunities to sell.

43:18You know, it's simple as that. I spoke to someone just yesterday, actually, at a pub lunch, with someone who runs a marketing director of a big pub co. I won't give the game away. But they spend$6 million a year on leafleting. Wow. and their argument is that's, you know, we've done the measurement of efficacy over the long term, okay? That's what works. Everybody in the finance function goes crazy about it because they say you should be doing this digitally and their argument is this is an effectiveness measure. It's not an efficiency measure, right? So let's stay on that then for a second. I wouldn't rule that out, by the way.

43:57If I'm an entrepreneur, go and do direct mail, go and do physical direct mail because your competitors won't because they're all a bunch of geeks who go, why would I use a 19th century technology? But the point is that a lot of marketing is game theory. It's just what's nobody else doing? I'll do that. Yeah, we've done it loads of times. We got our top 20 dream clients and got their faces printed on$100 bills and sent it to them in the post. And it was all about... Let me guess, you've got about three bits of bill. Do you get three people? It's incredible for... We have an outbound agency, right?

44:30So we're like a sales agency, effectively. that has the best follow-up hit rate out of anything we do and it costs us the least amount of money. So in terms of if I had 10 of those and I was to follow up and say, I sent you something strange in the post, we're probably guaranteed 50 % of those are going to book meetings with us straight away on that phone call. They don't necessarily need like, who are you, where are you calling from? There's not none of that needed. There's also a thing which is reciprocation bias, which is in sales. Sales, OK, I didn't really distinguish between sales and marketing, to be honest, because actually, I don't even distinguish any more between marketing and R &D.

45:08I think they're the two fat tail parts of the business, which when we say they're fat tailed, there are, and this is Nassim Taleb, the world's most greatest proponent of the fat tail distribution in terms of black swans. OK, the main reason you market is not actually to optimize efficiency over time. it's to look for black swans. Sorry, black swans. And actually, marketing is fat-tailed in that 10 % of what you do probably delivers 120 % of the value. And therefore, judging it on a day-by-day, granular level is a totally mistaken approach to marketing. Because like R &D, like venture capital, your 10 % of major hits, okay, pay for all the losses and then some.

45:49That's how you should look at it. And that's how you should look at, I think, you know, the whole process of where a business interacts with the real world has to be fat-tailed because real life is fat-tailed. We are entering a new era of outbound. Four years in, we have a meeting that has levelled up our entire offer. That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us. And we've put meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona Football Club. We've helped close deals up to 950 ,000. We're doing it all. Phone, LinkedIn, email, direct mail. There's a few weird and wonderful possibilities that we're keeping in our back pocket.

46:32So if you're struggling to get in front of the right people at the right time, inquire today.

46:40Right. The mythical bit of the business, which is dominated by procurement and finance, where everything's neat, proportionate, predictable, deterministic. That's just a lie which is created for managerial convenience. A real business, assuming it operates in the real world, is an interface with a world which is chaotic, plagued by anomalies in human perception, plagued by trends, plagued by, you know, competitor behavior, loads and loads of random events. And the phrase I always use, right, is you don't find many entrepreneurs at a chess club. where you find entrepreneurs is bridge clubs poker poker tables casinos blackjack probably the greatest i would argue maybe the greatest entrepreneurial um uh analog might be poker uh which is thinking in bets if you've read annie duke's book by the way thinking in bets it might even be backgammon but entrepreneurs want to play a game which is like real life where it is how you respond to chance events that determine success.

47:45They don't want to play a reductionist game like chess where the rules are all already written and where you know effectively what, you know, in other words, what's a legitimate move at the beginning of a chess game. Also with chess, okay, there's another reason why an entrepreneur is interested in chess. What happens if you play the most brilliant chess game of your life? You get one point, right? Okay, you get one point for a win. okay it's jeff bezos made this point he said in baseball you can only score four in business you can score a hundred a thousand if you're a brilliant if you're an entrepreneur poker's interesting because when you play the best poker hand of your life you get to retire right it's major right chess game you get one point nobody nobody who's interested in entrepreneurialism is going to play a game where it's going to play a game where you get one point for being a total genius right yeah what's the point so then is the that's an interesting one so is is the universal shared factor of being an entrepreneur just that decision making is viewed differently uh the thing i always notice is that um entrepreneurs are effectively interested in actually they're very very happy to get lucky they don't necessarily want to be right they're just happy to get lucky uh i mean you could write a whole book on effectively the essential role that entrepreneurs play in any business ecosystem because it is effectively R &D.

49:16And they're more interested in the outcome than they are in argument. The quality of the outcome is what matters. What I always notice about them is that if you go to someone in a large corporation and you point out an anomaly, it annoys them or they try and ignore it. If you go to an entrepreneur and you point out an anomaly, they get excited by it because they see it as an arbitrage opportunity or an opportunity to game the system or whatever. Property developers are like that. They're always looking at what's everybody else missed. They're not interested. You see, if you're in a corporate environment, you want to know what everybody else knows so that you can demonstrate your rightness.

49:54If you're an entrepreneur, you want to know what nobody else knows so you can actually outplay the fuckers. I think it was J. Paul Getty. There's a wonderful thing in that documentary. it's a drama-mentary about the Getty kidnapping where I think the Getty family originally got rich because they noticed a train struggling to cross a patch of desert. And they thought, that's strange, what's going on? Clearly the fact that the train is struggling means there's a dome in the land which suggests there might be oil. Now, in the same way entrepreneurs are totally happy to take on board utterly trivial anecdotal information because they're not in the world of proof which is argumentation, they're in the world of discovery.

50:37And, I mean, there is a criticism of the scientific movement, that the scientific movement has all been about doing things you prove rather than discovering things you wouldn't expect. And therefore it involves a massive misdirection of effort in terms of endless incremental refinement rather than penicillin, Viagra. I mean, how did they not know that COVID was airborne? for 10... That's crazy. Okay, right? I thought it was airborne, right? For various reasons, okay? It was obviously getting... Okay, this is my totally shambolic, totally shit, unscientific approach. I've got a friend who's a nephrologist in Canada.

51:18She was getting all her Amazon deliveries, getting the postman to put them in the garage and leaving them for four days. And then she'd bring them in and unwrap them because she thought it's a coronavirus. It's therefore spread by fomites and physical contact. and i listened to that and then after about three weeks i said so that we're right postman are we getting really ill right we haven't seen any data that says that you know postman's turning up every day you know he's not saying oh sorry i'm rushed off my feet because everybody else is sick with covid maybe it's not okay so i went and bought a phillips air purifier and that got completely rubbish when i said i bought the phillips air purifier because i thought it might reduce the chance of transmission within the home.

52:00It's not airborne. It's not airborne. In any case, they said the HEPA filter isn't fine enough to remove the virus from the air. I said, hold on a second. Does the virus travel around in the air on its own or does it float in the air on bits of sputum? Because if it travels in the air in bits of sputum, they say, oh, no, no. If it's that big, it can't be airborne. Right? I don't know where they got this from. And I said, have you ever smoked a cigarette? if you smoke a cigarette there are massive particles in cigarette smoke I mean they're huge you don't need a microscope to see them they're huge and what do they do they float around all over the fucking place because at a small level the properties of air it's almost like a bit of have you ever seen those spiders that actually they throw out a huge bit of spider web and they basically surf on it they catch a breeze and they can travel like huge distances by just riding on the wind by throwing out So spiders knew this.

53:00And all I'm saying is I think everybody was so frightened of putting their neck out and going, what if? Evidence-based is bollocks, right? This is Roger L. Martin, my personal guru and Svelingali in the business world, so don't listen to me. It's a fucking waste of time. Go and read the books written by Roger L. Martin. He was the dean of the Rotman Business School in Toronto, okay? Go and read his Medium posts. He's, I think, the best strategy thinker. is the air to Peter Drucker, basically. And he says this whole evidence-based thing is a ridiculous barrier because there's no evidence about the future.

53:33What was complicated about the bloody coronavirus was novel. It was novel. It wasn't the same as other coronaviruses. Therefore, the evidence you had about past coronaviruses may or may not have had any bearing on the behavior and transmission of this one. But I think it's time. I think it's time we occasionally have the right to say. I think science is a bit shit. Okay, because we fetishize science completely. Oh, it's scientific. Oh, it looks scientific. There are fields in which that is entirely legitimate. I'm sure in cosmology, okay, the science is pretty legit. I'm absolutely sure that in elements of engineering, okay, it's totally legitimate to be scientific.

54:14This is what Roger Martin said in his Nudge Doctor talk. Aristotle specifically said you can only use the scientific method in fields where things cannot be different from the way they are. So tomorrow, gravity is going to be the same as it was yesterday, or else we've got far bigger problems to worry about. There are certain aspects where the rules don't change. There are enormous parts of life, and Aristotle would say, the greater part of life involves decision-making in fields where things are different. And therefore, demanding that everything you do in a fat-tailed, chaotic world necessarily meets the rules you have laid down for operating in a totally deterministic and predictable world is a complete misapplication of the scientific method.

55:04I think, OK, cops would have done a better job of solving the COVID problem than scientists would have done. Two things about, a few things about cops. One, they know that they don't have all the information they need. Secondly, they accept the fact that some of the information they get is misinformation because people are lying to them. It wasn't me, officer. Didn't notice a thing, right? So cops are used to operating, detectives are used to operating in a world of imperfect, asymmetric information with a high degree of uncertainty and where every situation is slightly different from the last one.

55:37Now, there are good checklists cop goes through, door-to-door inquiries, collect DNA, look for fingerprints, right? but cops effectively follow a two-phase process, which is there's the investigative phase, and then eventually you have to arrive at an evidential phase. You have to find out who did it, and then you have to prove they did it. Now, in the investigative phase, they will make use of anecdotal information. They'll make use of information that has no evidential value. You know, did you notice anything unusual? Well, there was a bloke in a white van who drove past six times. Sometimes you don't rely on the evidence you already have.

56:14You do things to generate more. So in the pure scientific method, you can only do something based on evidence. In police world, you do something to generate evidence, like you stake out a house, right? Or you stage a, you know, honey trap or whatever you do. Sometimes you do to know rather than know to do. And cops are totally happy and I think do a pretty good job here, actually, eventually, you know, not so happy about the Lucy Letby conviction, but I think we'll part that, right? I don't think that's safe. I'm not saying it's wrong. You know, I think there is enough dissenting expert opinion here that we have to actually rethink that one.

57:00Or at least, you know, At the very least, she deserves a retrial because I could have mounted a better defense case. Now, I would have gone on a bit. But actually, I think they mostly do a pretty good job. And they're happy operating in what a friend of mine, J.P. Castlin, calls dynamic uncertainty. So, you know, what is uncertain is constantly changing. What you know is constantly changing. the context in which you are making the decision is constantly changing. And that's the world in which entrepreneurs operate, cops operate. I would argue that's the world in which marketers should operate.

57:42That's the world in which good scientific research should operate. Because actually, the bit of the science that appears in the scientific paper is actually a reverse-engineered narrative of what actually happened in the route to making the discovery. Our book is out now. So sales is therapy is available everywhere for people who are looking to get better at communicating, asking better questions, closing more deals and bringing in more clients. Beware it is not for the faint of heart or for closed minded people. You can buy it in all good shops. Links below. So let's take that thinking then. We we don't live in London.

58:27But when we come back, there's a new artisan coffee shop or burger place or something. Some of them really stick and they just become institutions and some disappear immediately. What's the difference between the ones that stick and the ones that don't? Some of it's luck. Some of it's timing. Some of it's the competitive environment. It's always worth remembering, okay, any business, there are elements beyond your control. That's why finance people retreat into a world of artificial certainty. Let's optimize for internal operational efficiency because once we actually factor the real world into our equations, It all becomes too messy and my brain hurts and it doesn't fit on a spreadsheet.

59:06Right. Let's be absolutely honest about this. Right. If we're being brutally honest in any business startup, timing over which you don't generally have control plays a remarkable part in whether you succeed or fail. You know, if you happen to be the first burger, the gourmet burger chain versus the second one, you know, the consequences are going to be very different. The brilliant documentary, I think it's a BBC documentary, on the history of the British sandwich, which is really, really interesting because, in other words, it went from the joke of the British rail sandwich to kind of Pret-a-Manger and gourmet sandwiches.

59:44But it's an extraordinarily complicated and path-dependent process. There was someone at Marks & Spencer who was decisive because he worked with Allied bakeries to work out bread that would survive overnight. site, therefore you can produce sandwiches centrally rather than having to make them on site. And so, you know, the person who really understands all this is Matt Ridley and actually my late colleague Sam Tatum with his book Evolutionary Ideas. There's a path dependency to things. You can launch something too soon and nobody can get their head around it, you know, literally. So there's a path dependency that a lot of things, a lot of ducks have to either accidentally or intentionally be lined up before you can succeed in something, you don't necessarily fully control those variables or control them at all.

1:00:33Some of it will be luck. Some of it will be probably, you know, psychological branding. Some of it may be unbelievably trivial, by the way. And there's a guy I recommend here called Mark McCulloch, who's like a quick service restaurant hospitality marketing guru. And one of the things he points out is that a lot of cafes and restaurants fail to do the obvious because they know that they sell salads or they sell premium burgers. But the person walking by, unless they're an avid reader of Time Out, doesn't know that. So we had this interesting discussion in the office. We were talking about Oaxaca and nobody knows what's a chimichanga, what's a burrito.

1:01:17People get muddled. And I suddenly said, actually, how many random punters in a London location, particularly if they're not even native, okay, will know that Oaxaca is a Mexican restaurant in the first place? And Mark McCullough told me the story of a woman who walked for nine years every day, walked 200 yards past a branch of chopped to buy salad for lunch. Now, she just assumed, she saw chopped, she assumed chopsticks. She thought, I don't like spicy food. I'm going to ignore that. Right? So literally nine years of her life, that was like the person who worked at Ogilvy when they were at Lancaster Bridge, who asked somebody, what's the closest tube to the office?

1:02:03And they said embankment. and for the first two years at work, she travelled down to Charing Cross and literally, after two years of this, she was walking back to Embankment and someone says, you go and live in, you know, you live in Finsbury Park or wherever it was. Why the hell, why didn't you just walk to Charing Cross? She goes, well, I change to Charing Cross every morning. And she was literally changing trains. She did that 400 times before she realised that effectively they're more or less, I think, you know, it's an extra two yards walk to get to Charing Cross versus the other one. quite often it might be something it might be a bottleneck a mental bottleneck where loads of people are walking past and they don't know what you do now i'm talking to mark mcculloch on a on a zoom call with the guys who run chai wallah and they said we we realized this and we're going to put indian street food cafe on the outside of all the restaurants and mark mcculloch this is where i go okay this is one of my you i am not worthy moments okay because i don't think i would have thought of this in 100 years.

1:03:04Martin Carlton, without pausing, just says, put Indian street food and cafe. Because then people who don't like Indian street food can still use it as a cafe. Interesting. And you now are solving two jobs to be done rather than just one. Now, sometimes I suspect major businesses fall or succeed on the basis of things they've never even noticed. This is why I think Marketer as Detective, there's a very brilliant planner at PBH who wrote this fantastic piece called The Planner as Detective, effectively saying that, you know, one of the things, you know, have you read all the Sherlock Holmes short stories?

1:03:48If you read nothing else, seriously, the other person who was hugely influenced by them, I discovered as a kid, was Rick Rubin. He had an aunt who introduced him to all the Sherlock Holmes stories, and he just fell in love with them. Just seriously, they're brilliantly written in the 19th century. They're written in perfect English prose. They're unbelievably readable and enjoyable, and they're everything. Interestingly, of course, Conan Doyle was a doc. He trained as a doctor. So I think what he's doing is kind of applying the skills of a diagnostician to detective work. But it all comes under this category of detective work.

1:04:22sometimes you know in the Sherlock Holmes stories what Holmes often does is he noticed something that nobody else thinks is important the dog that didn't bark in the night and that that's why by the way I mean one of the things I think that's that's really valuable in a entrepreneur's curiosity and no sense of proportion because if you're in a big business and you start talking one of the things I noticed you start talking about like the design of the website in a board meeting. We're here to be talking about, you know, whether we buy 747s or, you know, airbuses. I've been out of date there, aren't they?

1:04:59787s or airbuses. But what are you talking about this trivial thing? But you can change the design of an airline website and it'll make you 20 million a year. And so quite often it's a bottleneck that means successful. It may be some random psychological fact. It could be a comparison. Read a book. Everybody read a book. Okay. You can buy it for four quid it was written in 1916 by a guy called robert up de graf it's called obvious adams it was one of david ogilvy's favorite books and if you read nothing else as a business book it's literally 60 pages you will start reading the first two or three pages and you'll think why has rory recommended this hokey shit by page eight you'll go this is better than the harvard business review it's just a it's just a book funnily enough featuring an advertising guy but it doesn't have to be an advertising guy.

1:05:50He's really a marketing problem solver who achieves his amazing success is by noticing things that are too obvious for other people to talk about. And I think that book is an absolute prize. Amusingly, which really delights me, is every now and then I plug it on a podcast and I go onto Amazon and Obvious Adams is number three in advertising or marketing on Amazon. And it fills me with joy to think that this book written in 1916 has achieved this, you know, is still being bought. And it deserves to be bought because, you know, like Ogilvy on advertising, like Claude Hopkins, all of those old advertising books are still worth reading.

1:06:35James Webb Young, all of those books are still worth reading because those people were going, basically, they were going far enough up to uncover truths that are really universal human truths about how we react to communication, not fanciful tech models of how humans should decide and act. A few more copies sold this afternoon. Yeah, definitely. So we think about the... You can read it in a single shit. I mean, it is literally 60 pages. There we go. That's this afternoon plan. So we think about the traditional current-day marketeer, We're thinking about this kind of unpredictable world. There'll be young marketeers now.

1:07:16There's probably a few different poster boys. We've got Rory Sutherland. You can be pinned up on my wall. I'm just a fucking mouth. Seriously, there's a lot of people know this stuff. What I don't understand is what the advertising and marketing world failed to notice. Is that they're much more interesting to people who aren't in marketing and advertising than the people inside those worlds actually notice. and all I'm trying to do really is if some of this information just enters, I'm not claiming to be right about anything. This is why I'm dissing the scientific method because it's all about being inarguably right rather than solving a problem.

1:07:57And I'm dissing the misapplication of the science. My brother's an astrophysicist. I'm perfectly happy for him to get on with whatever he does. but the misapplication of what is pseudoscience in other words something that has the appearance of being scientific and logical which actually is a gross misdirection of effort or at least is only works over the shorter term before it starts being gamed or creating distortion and i think you know one of the things entrepreneurs do actually is they wait for big companies to get trapped by their own metrics the pursuit of those same metrics then effectively drives them into a corner, which leaves a market space available for somebody else, fundamentally.

1:08:42So all I want people to do really is to go, every time I've got a problem, there may be a psychological solution to it. Maybe the problem is perceptual. It's to do with psychological perception. it's to do with people's own epistemology. Maybe the solution is a creative thing, maybe the problem is a trivial thing because psychology doesn't have a sense of proportion. You know, in the sense that it's a bit like poker in that in poker you have a thing called a tell, which is usually a very small thing that the signaller is unaware of but which the other poker player spots. What I'm saying is that if we demand this ludicrous burden of proof that you can only actually try something if you can already prove it works, we're basically turning our back on any business has now decided that whatever I want to be in the future is I'd rather be certain than get lucky.

1:09:43Now, I'll give you an example of this. One really valuable but almost impossible to predict and to evaluate quality of a business is just being really fucking famous. Right? Because people can't buy something if they don't know it exists. And they're less likely to buy something if they've never heard of it before. But also, if you're indiscriminately famous, you discover who your target audience really is, rather than being focused on those people who your algorithm tells you it is. Now, if you get more and more focused on marketing efficiency, you get trapped in a local maxima. You never discover new markets.

1:10:20I would argue that the market for lots of things, there's a lot of actually consumer plurality. I talked to a guy who sells very high-end organic food. And he looked at his existing customers and said, what's interesting about it is you'd think you'd be able to stereotype the kind of houses my customers would look at. He had a deco at Google Street View. No. No. actually, one great thing about being famous is that people come to you with opportunities you never even envisaged. If you're not famous, you have to make all the opportunities for yourself. It's a one-way street. And one of the things I noticed about accidentally being famous is people invite me to speak at conferences that, how would I have targeted?

1:11:05I didn't even know they existed, right? And actually, sometimes these conferences are really massive, but they're in a different field that I'm just not aware of. And if you're so there, you know, one of the things is if you demand that everything is quantifiable, you can't do valuable things that aren't precisely quantifiable. But those might be the most valuable things you can do. When you think of the traditional marketer, obviously, I'm sure you're getting peppered with questions about AI. How do you think that is going to change? It all depends on what we, we should remember we still have some degree of agency, and it all depends on what we ask the AI to optimize for.

1:11:45And my concern is that AI will fall into the hands of people in procurement, in finance, right? And they will ask it to optimize for short-term profitability. Now, I would argue that AI, when used speculatively in the world of... Right, okay, this all comes down to a philosophical distinction about what a business is for. And since about 1970, 80... No, since 1980-something, actually since 1990-something, the overwhelming dominant assumption about what is the purpose of a business is shareholder value creation. And therefore, the short-term pursuit, never mind the fact that it's incoherent, because it doesn't ask which shareholder over what time horizon, because everybody's taken that to mean the next financial quarter, okay?

1:12:45Generally, the way you will achieve those things will weight you disproportionately towards cost-cutting to a point which works at first, by the way, and then proves catastrophic. Because it actually... Okay, Octopus Energy is now bigger than Centrica, than British Gas, right? As an energy provider, I think that's true. What are they focused on? Customer service. All their ads talk about their customer service. What are they doing? They're doing radio ads. Brilliant, because radio is totally underexploited as a medium, okay? You know, what they will do is they will overestimate, over-optimise for efficiency and under-optimise for discovery.

1:13:22It's all to do with the explore-exploit trade-off. It's an algorithmic thing. And if you go back a bit earlier, before Milton Friedman came up with this idea of shareholder value, generally what that means is that the senior management of an organisation are create incentives that align them with the shareholder's own interests. Those incentives do not trickle down to anybody much below the C-suite. So you end up with a fundamental misalignment in a corporation where there's a group of people at the front, at the top, who are a kind of managerial Ponzi scheme, who have massive share options and things aligned with the shareholder interest.

1:14:03Meanwhile, the people who are trying to do a good job for the customers or look after the workforce are entirely at odds with the management. because nobody normal gets up in the morning and wants to enrich shareholders. You might want to serve customers or make sales or add value, but nobody's motivated by that. Nobody normal. So you create this autistocracy at the top. If you go back a bit earlier to a guy who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, actually, called Herbert Simon. Herbert Simon had a completely different view of what a business was for. and his view was that profit was not an objective of a business.

1:14:43It was a necessary constraint that in order for a business to do its business, it had to make a profit to maintain its own existence and to justify its existence and to attract a reasonable degree of future investment. But the purpose of a business was the discovery of new sources of value. New sources of value mostly to the consumer, but you could equally argue new sources of value to the workforce because you would argue that if you can find a way of rewarding your employees which doesn't involve money, flexibility of work, you've discovered a new source of value creation. You've discovered a new value exchange.

1:15:22So the purpose of an organization was to look at its resources and ask how its present and future resources could be deployed towards the creation of new forms of valuable exchange. If you look at Peter Drucker, he said the only two valuable activities in a business are marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost. That chimes completely with the Drucker. And without getting personal, you know, Milton Friedman was weird, right? He literally, I mean, you know, I mean, very, very great writer, very, very interesting man, very persuasive man. Interestingly, he couldn't, fascinatingly, he had a very rare condition.

1:16:08He couldn't tell the difference between music and random noise. Never heard of that before. There's somebody else famous. It might have been Che Guevara or somebody else or Simon Bolivar somewhere. But apparently it's incredibly rare. Which always strikes me as a bit interesting. But anyway, I digress. But that strikes me. Okay, the quest for new forms of creative value exchange strikes me as something that everybody in business can get interested in and motivated by. The employees can find it motivating. You know, R &D people, you know, it fundamentally focuses you towards the future and also towards the customer.

1:16:50The shareholder value movement fundamentally will always focus you towards short-term operational efficiency improvements, which are fine as far as it goes, but that's not a five-year ambition, is it? The shareholder value movement has also been a gift to tech because tech comes in on the back of basically we can get rid of your staff and replace them with some form of automated alternative. Now, I would argue that in the Drucker-Austrian Herbert Simon model of the world, your call center should be seen as a major source of interesting customer information and competitive advantage and a source of customer loyalty.

1:17:36In the modern vision of the world, it's something to be replaced with AI. Now, by the way, I think customer service can be massively amplified by AI, but that requires an opportunistic mindset, not an efficiency driven mindset. What we've done, and the Labour Party has hardly helped in this by basically spreading a narrative of doom over the entire economy, is that if the AI is in the hands of people who have an efficiency mindset, it will actually be catastrophically bad and awful. and those people by dint of the power they have by alignment with the dominant shareholder value paradigm have most of the decision making power so actually ai will just make shit decisions faster i was going to say so if you've got short term it all depends where you start right i mean if you take this is totally gross and over-sumplication but if you take large language models as a very sophisticated form of predictive text the thing we all know about predictive text right is if you start with the wrong letter, you'll never get the word you want.

1:18:39I literally searched on Google Maps for Abergavenny, but I typed the A as a Q. Now, to any normal human, it was pretty obvious. I was looking. No, no, it was coming up with places in fucking Iran. Right? Okay. Right? Because if you get the first letter wrong in that model, okay, you'll never get what you want. if your foundational assumptions are wrong and you use AI you'll just get to a stupid place faster and the worst thing about it is everybody will think it makes perfect sense yeah yeah I think that's the danger that we I mean there was a study done recently about critical thinking is on the decline the skill of critical thinking because you're outsourcing more people are doing computer science degrees I heard in the US than are doing all humanities degrees put together actually in the future world we actually want philosophy graduates I'm not a classics graduate I'm self interested there but it worries me I mean it really really worries me because you have this really weird world where lots and lots of people are being trained in a deterministic mindset you know it's like it's like the school's been taken over by the chess club you know that's a valuable form of intelligence don't get me wrong but it's it's not particularly well suited to the majority, I think, of problems we face in the world.

1:20:07Let me give you an example. This might be bullshit. I have no evidence why it will work, right? No evidence at all. I don't think anybody will try it. I think you could reduce unnecessary GP visits by 50%. Very simple. At the moment, if you want to see your GP, you ring up at 8 o 'clock in the morning and it's a shit show. you simply make it publicly known that pharmacists are allowed to book GP's appointments for tomorrow. Only pharmacists. So if you want a GP's appointment for tomorrow, you go to the pharmacist. Now, the pharmacist will go, well, before you go to the GP, let me have a look at that.

1:20:44Ooh, look, here's some ointment. Why didn't you buy a hairbrush and some toothpaste? Right? Pharmacists can now prescribe antibiotics. Pharmacists could also prescribe a brilliant thing, which is delayed antibiotics, a delayed prescription, which is, look, here's a prescription post-dated till next Tuesday. If you're still feeling shit on Tuesday, come along and cash it in. Now, 95 % of those people will get better in the intervening period. They won't want to spend the eight quid, okay, on cashing in the prescription, but they've gone away with a bit of paper so they feel reassured. No need to go to the GP.

1:21:20Now, I don't know if that works, right? It's just a hunch. I think it's worth testing. But if you have literally a bunch of tragic nerds in procurement and compliance and everything else, through whose hurdles we have to pass before you can even try something like that, the McDonald's breakfast and the McDonald's drive-thru window both were massively punished by McDonald's when they first appeared because it was a deviation from their standard model. nearly all innovation in large companies emerges as an act of corporate disobedience we actually had some people come in at ogilvy and they looked at the research and said has it not occurred to you that nearly every time you do something remarkable something in the fat tail right uh it's because somebody basically deviated from the normal process if you look at nespresso they only survived because they lied to nestle about their profit figures.

1:22:18They went rogue. Okay. We don't know because we only know. I'm sorry about this. Oh, bugger. I don't know who that is even. That'd be a cold call. If you look at the really successful things that emerge out of large companies, it's nearly always because someone goes rogue. Now, we need to look at this, you know, just as 80 % of scientific discoveries are not made through the conventional approach to science. We need to ask the question, okay, well, if that's true, science doesn't need just to be more scientific. It needs to be better at getting lucky. How do we increase the surface area exposure of scientific discovery to lucky accidents?

1:22:59And in the same way in business, if we literally find out that the only way in which large corporates produce something significantly different and innovative, what you might call a category-defining innovation, not just a better version of some shit we're doing already, but I mean something that creates a new category. If you're a company... We need to say, well, okay, what part of our business activity needs to actually not be subject to the usual constraints and rules because some part of all this bullshit is actually fucking us up. If you're a leader or a company using psychology, How do you start to drive innovation within a company?

1:23:40You accept, first and foremost, that you cannot use what you might call this. This is my complaint about marketing, right? So the nerds have come in, the tech people with their lackeys in consulting. Because these management consultant firms aren't making any fucking money out of strategy, right? They're a total fucking lie. They make all their money. They claim to be strategy consulting firms. They make all their money from basically selling the implementation of tech projects. So it's effectively a kind of Baptists and bootleggers conspiracy between tech firms and consulting firms, which is we sell the tech, you get the completely unnecessary hours where 200 Oxbridge graduates swarm all over the place producing a load of bullshit decks for no readily apparent reason.

1:24:23It's all bullshit. It's just plausible bullshit. it. So everybody buys into it because they've got a plausible story around operational efficiency and cost reduction. And they're mostly dedicated towards efficiency, not opportunity. Now, one of the things the tech people have sold is the idea that marketing should wash its face. But the most valuable things I've done in 35 years in marketing, I've done about 10 things. David, 10 is probably, I've done three or four big things, and maybe three or four slightly smaller things that have been valuable in perpetuity. Some guy at Ogilvy in 1968 suggested to American Express that they put member since on the card.

1:25:06OK. I would argue that member since date on an American Express card has been worth well in excess of a billion dollars to American Express. Ogilvy for that idea probably got paid 500 bucks. All right. there's an idea that Ogilvy Australia came up with for a large multinational consumer brand, which has undoubtedly made them billions of dollars. I won't say what it is. It is still making them millions and millions of dollars 10 years after they had the idea. Out of that idea, what do they make? 350 ,000 Australian dollars. So you have a billion dollar idea for a corporation in marketing, right?

1:25:43And you get to buy a flat in a shit part of Sydney. It's not really. So the risk reward thing is not really appropriately calibrated for marketers. And let me explain why, okay? Because you are held responsible now in this nerdy world of like procurement and thing for every penny of cost you incur, but you can only claim the value of what you do for a limited time horizon after you do it. So if you have a break, now I started off whining about this, saying it's a waste of time working in advertising because it's like being J.K. Rowling where they tell you you can only get the royalties, right?

1:26:22It's like being J.K. Rowling where they say you can only get royalties on the first edition. After that, all the movie rights, all the other stuff we do, that's ours to keep. But J.K., don't worry, we'll pay you royalties on the first edition. So if you have a marketing idea which is literally transformational, right? So you're held responsible for all the costs and, by the way, all the times where you fail to generate one of those breakthrough ideas or they don't work. All of that is on the negative side of the balance sheet. If you create a massive, disproportionate, unbelievable positive, this also applies not just to agencies, it applies to people working in marketing.

1:26:58And this never occurred to me because I've been in an agency for 36 years. It's exactly the same bullshit for people in marketing. So I'm not saying we deserve, we had an idea for a business which changed four lines of a call center script. It made them two million pounds a year, right? Not just that year, but every year. Now, at no point can they claim, can they offset a penny of marketing cost in 2025 for the value that was delivered for something they did in 2020. 2019, actually. They made$20 million through marketing over time by doing better marketing. And yet, okay, as far as the finance function is concerned, yeah, we're not interested in that.

1:27:50You did that in 2020. But it's still making money. Yeah, yeah, but that came into quarter three 2020. You can't. Imagine having a pharmaceutical company where you just wander into the laboratory and you go, did you invent a blockbuster drug today? No. We did five years ago. Yeah, I'm not interested in that. Did you invent a blockbuster drug today? No. Well, you're all fired. That's basically what it's like being a marketer. It's bullshit. Because these people effectively are operating on a tech-injected timescale of every single unit of cost has to be matched to a unit of revenue. Now, the way you do marketing well, Now, David Ogilvie said in his entire life, he only had five really big ideas.

1:28:37I think he's doing himself down because I think he had a sixth idea, which was the creation of the kind of culture within Ogilvie. And that was, you know, as big an idea. But he said, I only had five really big ideas in my entire working life. It's probably true. Let's face it, we accept this with musicians. You know, the one hit wonders. I think he died recently, but I think he lived in Croydon, didn't he? Peter Sarsted, who wrote, Where Do You Go To, My Lovely? one of the greatest songs ever written. I don't know if he ever wrote anything else, to be honest. But he was allowed to make a perfectly decent living out of that.

1:29:10And I think his kids probably inherit some of the royalties. If you have the equivalent idea in marketing, which is the ideas we should be really aspiring to, platform ideas, ideas that grow on which you can build value over time, there's no incentive to do that. Whereas if you say, oh, we've got a 3 % increase in click-through rate on the so-and-so, so-and-so performance thing, Everybody goes, well done, get to keep your job. A load of fucking bollocks. So these finance people are there throwing out these stupid fucking metrics all over the place, right? They have extraordinary, it's like the Soviet Union, it's Soviet-style capitalism.

1:29:49You're not working for any sensible end for how do we, now the exception to this is family-owned businesses or privately-owned businesses. Four out of the five winners of the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Gold Awards in the last year. The fifth one was Guinness. And by the way, Diageo is shit-hot marketers who play the long game. This strategy to make Guinness really – there's a great podcast with John Evans on this. This strategy to make Guinness really, really popular and the number one beer in the UK, they started work on that 15 years ago. They're serious. They know what they're doing. You know, if you're going to invest in any large company, those guys are pretty good.

1:30:32However, the other four were Specsavers, McCain, Yorkshire Tea, and the fourth one is also a privately owned business, family owned business. Now, somebody should be saying, OK, in terms of long term value creation over time, the great advantage of a family owned business is one, you're not so obsessed about shareholders because they're you, so you focus on the customer, right? 90 % of the intellectual effort in business is basically involved in, you know, fellating the investor community in some shape or form. Secondly, the great thing about a family-owned business is it's free to operate and consider different time horizons simultaneously.

1:31:12What do we do next month? What do we do next year? What do we do in two years' time? What do we do in three years' time? Ford is still, by the way, sort of a family-owned business. Mars is a family-owned business. I went to Texas and I kept bumping into these really interesting businesses. Buc-ee's. Have you ever been? No. Massive gas station. Oh, the Disneyland of gas stations, if such a thing were possible. It's gloriously bad, OK? It's got a huge logo of a beaver, right? By which I mean the animal, obviously. OK. OK. Where else did I go? There's an extraordinary thing called HEB, a Texan retailer, grocery retailer, which is so good that Sam Walton basically said, I'm not going to compete with them because they're too good.

1:31:56So Walmart, you know, it's basically the closest the U.S. gets to actually a Sainsbury's, if you like, and it's just fantastic. Family-owned business, H.E. Butt, still run by the Butt family, et cetera. And I'm going, is nobody in PLC world actually looking at the success of these companies? Because they're all comparing themselves with other PLCs, right? Because they've all got the, they publish all their accounts and they've got all, it's great for the fucking nerds who want to actually, you know, in financial organizations, because what they want is ease of comparison. If you're doing a really healthy job of looking at businesses, you go, hold on a second.

1:32:36What are they, we don't have metrics on these businesses, but all of them seem to be reliably, you know, McCain. Look at the innovation. They were a Canadian potato farmer who were suppliers to McDonald's in Canada. and mcdonald's wanted to expand internationally into i think the uk might have been their first market back in the 70s and they went to their american potato supplier and said would you be willing to supply us with potatoes overseas and they went nah so they go to their canadian potato supplier okay what about you and they go but canadians are they're really polite

1:33:11and on the back of that they've turned themselves into this fantastic but look at the innovation than they do. The most significant thing, by the way, do you know the greatest beneficiary of McCain? The insurance industry. The biggest thing to happen in home contents insurance in 30 years was the invention of the oven chip. Because the biggest bane of any insurance company was the chip fat fire in the UK. Because it didn't always burn the house down, but in a way, it was almost worse than that because it coated all your furniture, all your carpets, all your possessions with a layer of burnt fat, which meant that everything in your home had to be replaced.

1:33:51And chip fat fires, we had one when I was a kid. They were unbelievably the worst thing that could happen for an insurance company. And McCain came along, and I suppose we have to also give some credit to the air fryer here, but McCain came along basically with the oven chip, and it was absolute glorious moment of happy day for Britain's home insurers. Wow. So sometimes, this is what I'm saying, events beyond your control. Rory, thank you so, so much. You are incredible and so articulate. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been brilliant to have you again. Any time. I'm always happy, yeah.

1:34:31Beautiful. But, I mean, actually, family-owned companies, let's have a look at them. What do they do that we can't do? Okay, so let's line this up. Guinness, Laithwaite, Specsavers, McCain, and Yorkshire Tea. Yorkshire Tea is owned by the same people who run Betty's Tea Rooms. Mmm. And they also own Jackson's of Piccadilly, am I right? No, maybe it's somebody else. No, so it's another coffee brand, I think. But they're family-owned. And they actually run businesses the way consumers want businesses to be run, which is multiple time horizons and the search for incremental sources of value. whereas every time you know you go to a business that's been taken over by like venture you know by the wrong kind of venture capital you know or has become a plc basically you know also all those organizations because they're obsessed with with efficiency are basically assuming their customers are much meaner than they are they're optimizing the business for a kind of mean-spirited shithead who just wants to get something quite bad at as low a price possible.

1:35:32Now, those customers do exist. The customers you're optimizing for when you optimize for efficiency do exist. They're like homo economicus. Now, people have always said in behavioral science, homo economicus doesn't exist. No. In any category, there are people who are like homo economicus. They just want the lowest price possible. There's a name for those people, but I can't say it on a family show. the other thing about those people they are the worst customers you can possibly have if there's any customer you don't want it's a fucking sting bag who's just trying to pay as little as possible all right i used to talk to coach drivers who did holiday coaches and they said the passengers you get in peak season on a coach trip are absolutely lovely there's this group of passengers who would book at the very end of the season the cheapest possible coach holiday they could possibly have And they said, the coach driver said, the last week of the holiday season as a coach driver is the worst week of your entire year because the people are total assholes.

1:36:31He said, you actually would go. You've been driving them around all week and you'd put a cap around for tips, right? He said, the tips would literally come to£5.47 and three people had put in a pound. The other 45. Now, those people, the people that all the optimization obsessives, the finance people, the procurement people, the people they are optimizing the organization for are the very people you do not want as a customer. Homo economicus is a cunt. Right? It's not that they don't exist. It's that they're horrible customers. Right? And therefore, when you pursue efficiency, what you're – and I notice this all the time, which is – So, you know, I've got a car, I've got a lease car at the moment.

1:37:19And I go in and I go, OK, I need the tyres replaced. I've got to have the car serviced. The car's being serviced by a Ford garage, right? A Mustang Mach-E. And then they say, actually, we need the rear tyres need to be replaced, but it's an amber, not a red. And I go, that's great. Can you replace the tyres then, please? And they said, no, because the lease company will only allow you to replace the tyres if it's an amber. through quick fit now i've got nothing against quick fit but i've always been very happy with them they're very good i'm not having a go at quick fit okay look that'll mean another afternoon out of my working life couldn't you couldn't i just pay you 20 quid for whatever the difference is and you do the tires and they pay what they would have paid quick fit and then i pay you 20 quid no we can't do that so as a result i i then had to spend a whole afternoon effectively doing a video call sitting on a wall outside QuickFit to get my tires replaced.

1:38:16Because the whole thing was optimized on the assumption, this is where homo economicus is problematic, homo economicus contains the assumption that everybody is a shit. Okay, and that nobody's willing to pay extra for any improvement in quality. All they want is the predefined good that they decided for. Most people in most categories are actually quite nice. They go, look, we all need to make a bit of money out of this, right? You know, I get it. I go to Unilever. I buy the toothpaste. I don't go and go, what's the, I go, look, I don't want to start my own toothpaste factory. You've got a toothpaste factory.

1:38:52You can make toothpaste for me really cheaply. It saves me the bother of making my own toothpaste. We're all happy here. Let's not worry about whether it costs£2.27 or£2.05. Most people are kind of like that. You know, it's a value exchange. They're happy for both parties to gain. It's not a zero-sum game. The last people you want to do business with are people who think it's a zero-sum game. Yeah. Sting asses. Absolute assholes. Yeah.