Modern Wisdom - #049 - Rory Sutherland - Psychology In The World Of Advertising

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising, an author & a writer for The Spectator. Causing some form of behavioural change is the goal of all advertising and whoever holds the keys to understanding consumer psychology has an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal. Rory is one of the world's most influential advertising professionals and this episode is nothing short of gold for anyone who is a consumer, or advertises to them. More Stuff: Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland Buy Rory's New Book Alchemy - https://amzn.to/2HdiUPL Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, my guest this week is Rory Sutherland, the vice chairman of Ogre, the advertising. Now before most podcasts start, there's a little bit of four play back with them forwards between myself and the guest, catching up and talking about what we're going to talk about and stuff like that. With Rory, it was more analogous to me trying to step onto a train going high speed. And he just began. So I started recording straight away. Also, Rory had a British gas technician come round to sort out his boiler part way through. So you will go through the adventure that is Rory's boiler, plus all of the amazing things that we spoke about today. He is an absolute master of behavioral economics

and the psychology of advertising, anyone who has ever bought anything in a shop should listen to this podcast. I'm not gonna pontificate anymore because it's just fantastic, enjoy. because it's just fantastic. Enjoy. I was looking out to consume a capitalism as trained of the Galapagos islands of understanding human motivation because just as evolution throws up things that duck build platypus, the kangaroo, etc. that don't really make much sense. In the same way, consumer capitalism is interesting,

both the things which shouldn't be successful but are. And the classic example of that is Red Bull. But I mean, you could actually, if you think about some of the greatest business successes of the last 10, 20, 30 years, I mean, going back further, denim, for example, doesn't really make sense as a fabric. The popularity of denim doesn't make any sense. It kind of fades, it looks a bit shit. It was manufactured as a wagon cover and then worn as overalls by indigent laborers.

You would have expected silk to have become big. And the trousers are front, but it's not silk, it's jeans. Then you've got things, again, if you've made a business case for Wikipedia and your last slide and said, and the best thing is that everybody's going to write this for free. Basically, you would have been shown out of the room. It's completely insane. Red Bull, again, doesn't taste very nice, cost of fortune, comes in a tiny can. No one making a case for that really would get anywhere.

No one knows. In a Soviet control economy, no one would have sat down with a, you know, the supreme Soviet and said, well, for our next seven-year plan, what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really needs is no-for-priced, disgusting, tasty drink. But at the same time, I think it's interesting, because I think what capitalism and evolution does is it throws up,kers successes, but there are also things that fail that logically shouldn't. I mean, in the case of say evolution, why is pathogenesis or why is in other words asexual reproduction, so very rare. Yeah. Because if you want to replicate 100% of your genes,

simply splitting into two, you would think is a pretty cool system. Well, this sex stuff is... Well, you only need one, have you, right? Yeah, exactly. And off you go. What seems to happen is that when a disease hits, you all die.

No, no, no. Sex is all die. Sex is the diversity trade off that means that some of your genes will survive. It's hedging your bets essentially. It's covering your bases because you'd rather have your genes survive split between a variety of different carriers than put all your eggs in one basket. And I think what tends to happen is you do get these asexual reproduction things happening and they're very very successful right up to the point where they are. And then when they fail, they fail spectacularly. Now is this might be unfortunately?

Is this your man from British gas? How long? I'm so sorry. This is going to take this. I suppose it's very authentic podcast. Absolutely authentic podcast. be unfortunately. Is this your man from British gas? How long? I'm so sorry. I suppose it's very authentic podcast. Absolutely authentic podcast. I'm going to go down. No worries. We can pause if you like. Yeah, we've paused. Right. We're back. That was probably more about washbasins than you needed to hear, but there we go. Totally. Totally. Totally. There are finic at the end and very fine tunes, subtle device. So I wanted to talk about news article, which I got sent yesterday.

I can't believe that I've never heard of this before, but you may have done. Have you heard of the hit to kill phenomenon in China? No. So, oh, is this this thing where it's more expensive? If you hit someone and they survive, it's more expensive because you get sued. It's essentially? Yeah, so if you hit a person in China, in the car,

you have to pay the medical bills for a lifetime, but if you kill them, you only pay once, like a burial fee. So the fee for killing is about 30 to 50 thousand dollars, but a lifetime of medical expenses is in the excess of millions sometimes. So there's these bizarre videos where drivers will hit someone and then reverse backwards and forwards over the body because it's more economical to kill than it is to injure. So you know, I don't know if you know that film, T H X 1138, but that's a very early George

Lucas film, but that's the kind of world in which, oh, sorry, perfect no problem at all, in which the whole of the world is kind of controlled by our countenance. But enough, of course, that's true in the UK, in that in the UK about five years ago, the insurance industry was hit by a young male driver who effectively plowed into a bus queue, leaving a large number of people essentially critically injured and disabled for life, but not dead. And I think the total cost of the claim came to something like £70 million from one accident. Wow. Now, someone in the insurance industry admitted to me,

they said that we would have been considering better off if he'd actually killed them all, because patent lives industry. Now, you've simply got to trust the insurance industry at this case, not to send people around to hospitals disconnecting life supports systems, not this way. And one would, disconnecting life supports systems. Yes. And one would hope that that doesn't happen.

But of course that fairly simple economic truth is true all over the world. That it's only in China where presumably the people are uninsured, is that right? I'm not sure about that. I think I don't understand why their insurance doesn't cover the expenses of incident, which is associated with their insurance. I'd have presumed that's what the insurance would have been there for. And we have to be careful about this,

because of course, the reason we have to be careful about this is there's an element of prejudice, which is probably a bias, which is we tend to be careful about this. There's an element of prejudice which is probably a bias which is we tend to see the Chinese as slightly more calculating or an emotional and there's a whole bunch of sort of stereotype in going on there. We've also got to remember that of course the proliferation of, I mean, I think the Russians probably are pretty shit drivers, but my impression of Russian driving skills isn't helped by the fact that dash cams are much more common in the Soviet Union or were historically

or the early Russia rather than they are in the West. And therefore, a disproportionate number of those videos on YouTube showing people driving in a bonkers fashion or trashing supercars or driving out in front of trains. A disproportionate number of those are going to be Russian simply because in Russia it seems to be that having a dash cam standard fitting. It's just a standard fitting. Whereas I don't have one.

I've always asked that question in another way. What happens if you've got a dash cam and you make a terrible mistake yourself? Just throw it out the window. You throw it out the window or trash it or drive over it. Oh yeah, unfortunately the dash cam, which logged the footage of me crashing into someone was destroyed in the crashes I crashed into someone.

Ah, right, okay, so you have to construct that story. It didn't occur to me that I looked at buying a dash cam and thought this is a bit of a double-edged sword, isn't it? It's going to capture my road range. If I'm swearing at the guy in front, it's going to capture all that shit, which isn't necessarily going to help me in a quarter of law. And so it did occur to me that a dash cam, well, you know, maybe I'm better off without one. It depends. It's hedging your bets there about whether or not you think that you're going to be the victim or the perpetrator of accident more or less of the time, I suppose. I mean, it's a worrying thing in a sense because it is there's something about that that's

indicative of a low, a low trust culture, isn't there? Yeah. I'd like to think I'm the kind of person who, regardless of the evidence, if it were my fault, I would, you know, I know we're always told in a road accident you must never apologize, never admit blame because of the legal implications. But I'd like to think if I ran into the back of someone, I'd basically say, look fair and square, this is what happened. Yeah. And I'd take the hit. I'd like to think I'm that kind of person.

And so the idea that we're not in a society where, you know, the assumption is that other people are lying. Strikes me as a bit alarming. Yeah, I think you're trying to, we're trying to protect for a few odd situations where there's a little bit, the system goes awry, so to speak with that. Well, there are the fake wit flash claims on there they which of course are so in other words someone will break I mean occasionally someone will drive in front of you and then break stupidly in order for you to go into the back of them. There was families of people that were doing that wasn't there driving across into slip lanes and river and stopping in front of lorries and stuff like that. I'll tell you a very wonderful story which you you'll love, which is very podcast worthy, which I hate to do at a friend of a friend of a friend, but I think it is actually true,

which is... Did it touch yourself as far as you want to be? Exactly. He was driving home extremely drunk and drove onto a large roundabout in his way home and realised that he'd overshot and missed the turn. Now you'd think the beauty of a roundabout to a sober person is that if you miss your turning you can simply go round again. To the pissed mind, Harold, this isn't immediately apparent. And he immediately slammed on the brakes and started reversing back to the correct term. While

reversing back round the roundabout he slammed into a car behind. And he was just about to basically leg it, where a police car turns up, just at the moment you don't want it to turn up, you see. And the police car just goes, hold on a second, so you might have just got to speak to the driver behind you. He sees the policeman go and breathalyze the band into whom he's reversed, you see. Which till the cop is not irrational, if someone's hit a car in front, you assume the car behind his to play. And the breathalyzer of the car behind comes up positive. And the policeman then simpede walks up to his window and says, well, you really better go say, he said, I'm terribly sorry, that guy behind completely out with the fairies. He told me that you came round the roundabout backwards. He was a bastard, didn't he?

I said this job, simply throw it. Some guardian angel, that is to get him to help him get away with it. So much serendipity there, oh my days. Well, yeah, that is thanking your lucky stars situation, isn't it? It is really us, do you? I want to move on to the most pressing topic at hand, which is the debate between wet and dry toilet paper and whether or not you should have a B-Day or the Arabic shut-offer in your house. Yes, well I'm a big fan of the shut-offer, I'm a big fan of the Japanese toilet, I'm a big fan of moist toilet paper. I mean, it seemed to me my father, who's 88, said the same thing, that the whole business

between getting up in the morning and leaving the house. If you consider the extraordinary improvement in terms of time saving that's brought to us at other times of the day, by things like the dishwasher or indeed online shopping if you choose to use it or the washing machine or the extraordinary entertainment made possible by television. That part of the day has been transformed since my father was born in 1930, okay, since his own father was born in about 1895, it's unrecognizable. And yet the first part of the day, nothing, you know, shit, shave, shower, basically nothing's happened. We still have a Victorian first half hour of the day. Yeah, we're primitive.

We aren't totally primitive and it strikes me that this is an area where there's huge potential for innovation. But you know, the reason my toilet paper also fascinates me because it's one of those things and the immediate parallel as what we're doing now, which is video conferencing. It's one of those technologies which should be big, but isn't. And it seems very strange to convey a moist lavatory paper with video.

What we're doing right now, yeah. But both of them, you can make a fantastic logical case for, okay, so I make the case for moist lavatory paper. How come our aim is the only part of the body, which we think is adequate to clean with dry paper? I'm entirely with the Islamic world on this one. I'm with the Japanese on it, because you wouldn't go out into your garden

with some fairly harmless earth, potting some plants. And you'd come in and go, oh, look, I've got mud on my hands. Let me rub them very vigorously with some A4 printer paper to remove the mud. You'd kind of use water, wouldn't you? Okay? And the fact that we in the West, who consider ourselves so advanced, clean our rectums with dry paper is ridiculous.

Okay. You can just do our excuse, people who I suppose you do it first thing in the morning, and then have a shower or a bath. You can say, okay, that's something. But I mean, at least that Arabic tube thing is at least a nod in the right direction. I found it a bit weird that you occasionally get them. I was in a prison in Qatar, a long story, but they have the tube, but they don't have any toilet paper, which is a bit weird. I'd have both.

Well, the problem that I've found, so Yusuf, who is one of the co-hosts of the show, he recently purchased his first property and one of the co-hosts of the show, he recently purchased his first property and one of the mandatory things that he had to have ahead of a washer-dryer combo was a shot-offer in his... I agree with him. In his bathroom, but the problem is that it's right next to the boiler so the water pressure that comes out, if you're not able to hold sufficient anal tone and ring tension, you end up accidentally giving yourself an enema with your...

Oh, with your own shit. Oh, God, God, there's a conodic irrigation through... Reverse. Reverse. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Okay, I'm, because course, oh my god. Okay, I'm having my bathroom done at home later on this, yeah, so I think I will consider one of those because I agree with you. I think it's barbaric that we don't have them. And actually very strange actually two things.

One of the things I often talk to my dad about this, my dad's 88. So you have this very interesting contrast. I also buy gadgets from my dad to see whether he uses them or not as a kind of experiment because I'm the kind of idiot, okay, who buy any old shit, you know, I bought yogurt makers, bread makers, I bought any bloody gadget that I can simply because I enjoy it's intrinsic gadgetiness. And so I always find it interesting buying my dad things because what he likes and what he doesn't is revealing as to what's genuinely useful. I think of the age of 88, you've got a fairly sensible take on what's life improving and

what is, I bought one of the Google HomePod minis, which is like Alexa, it's like the Echo Dot, but the Google equivalent. And I wrote it about this in the spectator and a few people said, what the hell are you doing? Plugging, you know, Amazon and Google's products? So it's those if they need any help. My argument for this was that mostly those products being sold as ways to turn on your lights remotely, control your thermostat. Now I do all that shit because I'm weird, okay? My argument was that for your spectator reader or your spectator readers mum and dad in their 70s or 80s, it's a technology none of those people will buy off their own back. There's not a chance in hell that anybody aged 80 is going to wander into Curry's PC world

and go get me an Amazon Echo Dot or a HomePod mini. Actually, if you think about it in pension in terms, it's the world's best radio for 30 quid. It'll play any music you want, you just asked for it. It'll play any radio station you want. It'll tell you the time, it'll tell you the weather, it'll tell you how to cook a turkey. So, 30 quid for the ability to speak to a circumcute, and interestingly, my dad only installed it on about 27th of December but he uses it about you know six or seven times a day. Brilliantly.

After I wrote that article a friend of mine told me that his mum is in a nursing home where they bought an echo dot and they put it in the lounge of the nursing home. Now I think this is a brilliant idea. Now no one's ever thinking and no one's going to position a tech product as it's perfect for oldies, okay? Because it's kind of the kiss of death in marketing terms. It's rather like, I bought from a company which only sells products to the elderly and disabled. I bought a lot. I bought a long handle, dust pan and brush. So it's a dust pan with a really long handle and a brush with a really long handle, which pan and brush. Right. So it's a dust pan with a really long handle, and a brush with a really long handle,

which means you don't have to grovel on the floor when you've tipped some cornflakes, okay? Now, it's a brilliant product for the disabled, but it's also a pretty brilliant product for anybody who isn't disabled. Yeah, it's the fact that it's not sexy, isn't it? I don't know. I know. Actually, this is one of the most interesting questions in tech,

which is, how can we put a man on the moon No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, It was literally long after we'd had a bad long after we'd had you know tranquility base etc someone thought well this luggage stuff Actually most of the weight could actually be born by the floor and using a wheel which is not an unfamiliar invention You know, that okay. I'm sure that what's happened partly is that sideline tech like skateboard in line wheels happened partners that sideline tech like skateboard inline wheels became more and more affordable as a byproduct perhaps of skateboarding or something of that kind. The technology somehow improved. Nevertheless, you could have had a basic wheel. You could have been something before, hand. Are you saying

weirdly that giving products to pensioners is kind of like the litmus test, Occam's razor, canary in the coal mine for whether or not a product. First of all, pensioners don't generally, they're not doing things to show off, or they're low on signaling and they're high on pragmatism and practicality. The other thing I bought my dad, which was an extraordinary success, the Philips Air Fryer, it's actually technically, it's not a fryer, And the other thing I bought my dad, which was an extraordinary success, the Phillips air fryer. It's actually technically, it's not a fryer, it's a small desktop fan oven, with glass super heated air, and you can cook chips or cook any food. Think of it as halfway between an oven and a microwave and you've got about the right thing. Now I bought one myself and I thought it was an absolute game changer.

And I thought, well, absolute game changer and I thought well maybe this is just because of my inherent tech and filial, sort of near filial. I bought one for my dad who's become a weird air fryer evangelist going around various other old people. Actually, it's a frying shit pointing this out. And actually to the other people's credit, they do actually occasionally people come up to him in the pub and go that air fryer, that was a good tip. Nice. Yeah, I think designing for the disabled or designing for the elderly is inherently interesting because I've written about this in the spectator because in a sense,

if you take, for example, wheelchair ramps, wheelchair ramps are also useful for people with wheel luggage, okay? The legislation that replaces doorknobts with doorkandals is designed to One chair ramps are also useful for people with wheeled luggage. The legislation that replaces doorknobbs with door handles is designed for people who don't have use of their hands, who can open a door with an elbow rather than needing a hand. Now what you're going to remember, and likewise the reason that the shampoo opens at the top and the conditioner at the bottom, I think was designed for partially sighted people. I've always wondered why I noticed the case. But it's a good principle because in the shower you're partially sighted. I mean if you wear spectacles you're not wearing them in the shower.

If you are you can't see a fucking thing. I don't wear spectacles. I still can't see a fucking thing in the shower. That's a nice story. Then you have the fact that someone really mean comes in and turns the shampoo inside down in the Then you take the fact of say the door knob well if you're carrying two monks a tea you effectively have not used your hands so actually most humans are partially disabled inside this came from BT brought out this huge buttoned phone

which was designed for people who are significantly visually impaired. And weirdly to their surprise, it became their best-selling, what would you say, wired telephone. And of course, they ran into the bedside phone. You've got people who haven't got their specs on. They're probably reaching over and lying on one side, so they want to be able to dial by touch rather than by sight.

And designing for the extremes is always interesting. And I think, you know, don't give me right, I don't blame them for marketing Alexa as a kind of leading edge tech thing. But the reason I wrote the article in the Spectator is the application for anybody over the age of 60. And Barry might know and over the age of 60 is going to buy that thing. So what I wanted people to do is buy it for older people as age of 60. And bear in mind, no one over the age of 60 is gonna buy that thing. So what I wanted people to do is buy it for older people as a Christmas present. Now, the wonderful thing is my friend's mother

who's in the nursing home, she's a big Ray Charles fan and she gets to the lounge first and she says, Alexa, play Ray Charles and off the Ray Charles goes. She won't use the Alexa when there's anybody else in the room because she doesn't want the other old people to know how it works because then she'll have to put up with their shit music. So she actually uses Alexa in a fantastic, fertive way where she'll never actually change the volume or change the music while there's anybody else present. She's just leading ignorance the same as everybody else.

She's leading, I don't know, it just plays Ray Charles. It's the Ray Charles machine. It's Ray Charles on the Haley of Jackson. It's a special radio that plays nothing else. Yeah, you're totally right. It seems like designing for the extremes with this kind of super utilitarian approach where you've got the absolute no frills and everything. So as a perfect example, we are shoehorn evangelists

on this show. Anyone who doesn't have a shoehorn is losing thumb skin at a rate that is completely destructive. Or find your shoes by scuffing them as you put them in. Absolutely. No, I totally agree with you on that. The shoehorn is again, and actually the long handle dust pan and brush, which I bought from a disabled supply's place. That again is obviously every dust pan and brush should be like that.

And so there's an interesting question, which is, I mean, there's a wider question here, which is, are things which are easy, sort of stigmatized or devalued? are things which are easy, sort of stigmatized or devalued. And so, video conferencing fascinates me because our business is reluctant to adopt it simply because it is comfortable, pleasant, and you can do it from home. So is there this sort of macho singling, which is none of those, it's a serious business meeting,

you get up at six o'clock in the morning and you fly to Frankfurt. And what we're doing is we're signaling commitment through effort. Now that wouldn't matter if the effort were actually beneficial. I mean an example of a technology that just as okay evolution leads to brilliant things which work fantastically which none of us will ever have thought of but it also leads to dumb runaway what's called fishery and runaway, of the Peacock's tale, okay, where you get effectively runaway arms races between different males, say,

to attract female attention. And it was occurred to me that the typewriter as a technology was emblematic of that, in that it meant that for a period, the word process had different matter, because you can take shit, edit it, you know, change the address, you know, you don't have to type the same thing 47 times. Word process is a different thing. But the typewriter essentially meant

that for a period of about a hundred years, everything produced by a serious business had to be written twice. And then if it needed editing, I'm just about old enough to remember when you'd get shit type for your work. It was only really the first two or three years of work where you'd handwrite a memo

and your PAPE type it up and distribute it. But I can just about remember this. And it was really stupid because there'd always be a mistake or you'd change your mind about something. We'd actually meant that what you had to be written ended up being written four times. Older Ogle V people have told me that you have to, basically, if you're a young person at Ogle V in the 1960s and 70s, you have to spend about two or three hours a week as a kind of Terry Thomas in the typing pool. So you have to agree to everyone. You have to go in again. Hello, gorgeous creature.

And then go in in the available smoking jacket. Hello. And the reason for that is if you didn't have a bank of favours and affection of the typing pool, you couldn't get anything written. And so you were more or less ineffectual at your job. You had to, everything you did was a favour trade. Now senior people could just go, I need these seven things, type that. But if you were junior, you'll put at the bottom of the pile. So your only chance of escaping obscurity

was by essentially doing the Leslie Phillips Act. It's bringing in the dots and the sentence candles and all that sort of stuff. And it must have been to extraordinary extent. And the advantage of that, of course, I'll over email was that the only shit that got out was important, because you actually had to burn some favors to get it produced,

whereas under email, any idiot can basically generate huge amounts of work for somebody else without any cost to themselves. Now, everyone who's listening will know that, right? The amount of disillusion that we hear. The email would be an example of one of those. So where tech goes wrong, I think, is really interesting, because it's similar to where evolution goes right,

inventiveness, extraordinary kind of, extraordinary inventiveness, an unbelievable way to solve problems, laterally, and through unexpected sources. But the downside is that we can essentially become embroiled in utterly senseless competition. I think email is the case where it feels like work and therefore we assume it's productive. But okay, we're doing this as a video conference. Now, if this podcast were recorded with us speaking at the speed

we could type with, you know, pauses of a couple of hours in between responses. So my next sentence would be, imagine if you... Now, you wouldn't have any listeners. It would be painfully slow. But when we're typing, we're not conscious of the contrast between the speed of typing and the speed of speech. So we think, well, I'm typing quite fast here, you know, I'm really being productive. Now, despite the fact that that email exchange that takes place, oh, sorry, have you finished? I'm just going to do some paperwork fantastic. I won't be long. Yeah. Okay, so an email exchange that takes place over three days and takes an hour of your time, possibly could have been settled in a four-minute phone call.

Yeah. Do you want to do that? I wouldn't do that now. Okay. Well, you're out. But that, but weirdly, when we're engaged in that three-day long hours, hour and a half time crafting the emails back and forth. We're not conscious of the relative inefficiency. In the same way that we're not conscious of the fact that the

Victoria lines match faster than the other tube lines. I don't know if you know this, but the central line of the Victoria line are pretty fast, the Jubilee lines fast, Northern lines, pretty circle lines, fucking, you know, that's continental drift basically. But nobody notices how fast the Victoria line is because the time between stations is about the same. What you don't realize is the distance between stations is much, much further apart. So actually you're really welling it on the Victoria line for significant periods of time. But our consciousness doesn't tell us that. And I'd weirdly spent, oh God, any go there, I'd spent 30 years of getting to Houston station, not realizing

that if you go to Victoria and get on the Victoria line, you get to Houston in about eight minutes. I mean, it's teleportation compared to the other routes. And so I always find this really interesting, I mean, where human perception lets us down, be where what we invest our time and attention on in terms of innovation can be extraordinary counterproductive. And as I said, I mean, I would say what we should have done is we should have announced the Alexa as, you know, for all elderly people living alone, this is one of the best things to happen in 10 years. Yeah. And nobody's mentioned that, okay? They all going, we can turn your lights on.

Well, yeah, you can do that as a switch. But with great story about light switches. And this is not a fascinating about how technology works. The first electric lights, mimic the first gas lights in the switch was beside the light. You may remember that American standard lamps often have that thing you turn at the top, and it seems a bit weird to us, but that's actually a skewer-morphic mimic of how you turn a gas light on or off by twisting a little flange. Okay, that's stick turn. Flange. Right. Christ. And so the first electric lights in America, you'd wander into the center of the room, reach up towards the bulb, turn a knob and the light would come on. People would want brilliant electric. And then someone said, well, you can actually put the switch right next to the door, so when

you come into the room, you just turn the light on. Now, you'd think people would go, fuck, why didn't we think of that? Okay? But they didn't, they went, one, completely unnecessary luxury. So they went on for 10 or 20 years, basically bumping into furniture in the dark, trying to find the light. Because this seemed them at the time a completely unnecessary indulgence.

Is this odd artifact of what already existed? What already exists? I've already solved that problem. So therefore, in my mind, it isn't a problem because, you know, and it's really fascinating. You can actually find, and I was looking at this the other day, I looked on Google images for ads for electricity. Now, you're going to be saying, well, you know, if you ever move to a house, you can actually find, and I was looking at this the other day, I looked on Google images for ads for electricity. Now, you're going to see, you know, if you ever moved to a house, okay, which wasn't on the electrical grid, right? Basically day one, you go, okay, the first thing we're going to do is we've got to get this wide for

electricity. I'm not even, you know, the idea that you'd have a salesman come out and explain to you why it was good idea, okay. I did this guy would have come around and go, well, the great advantage of having electricity is you go, what the fuck are you talking about? Exactly. Can you just please put the wires in? Can you just please put the wires in? Yeah. But of course, in the early days, you actually needed to do this. And it's fascinating,

because you can see these ads and as a copyrighter myself. I can imagine myself writing exactly the same shit. So it's now, I think, by the Dublin Corporation, encouraging people to get electricity in their homes. And one of the great things it does is it says, well, Maureen, with my new electric kettle, okay. Now, you know, I can simply flick it on. I don't need to light the stove and it produces hot water. Now, the copyrighter then goes on to imagine two possible consumer benefits from this, that none of us have ever adopted. He says, so first of all, when I'm having tea with you, I don't leave the kettle on the stove, I have it on the table between us, so if we need to top up the pot, I don't even need to get up from the table. Okay?

Yeah. And every night I take my kettle upstairs to bed so I can have a cup of tea in the bedroom. Okay. Now the fast-editing thing there is they make both of them a true. Two benefits of having an electric kettle is one you can make tea in any room in the house. Two, you can actually have the kettle anyway you want it to be, not necessarily on the stove. The strange thing is that nobody, as far as I know,

ever does either of those two. It stays in the kettle. It stays in the same place. It stays in the same place. I've never moved it anywhere else. Okay, some people had a tea's made, but it's never occurred to me, you know, to take a kettle into my bedroom.

Yep, thankfully. But I mean, all for the part of I've done it. No, don't think so. We put it in the cup downstairs and the other thing as well as if if you did do that. Oh, one second. I've got, I've got, I've got, it's okay. Yeah. It's all done. Is it? Yeah.

It's got actually three leaks on there. Wow. Oh, that explains why I'm so weird. Yeah, you had a pinhole on your heart and then your hull was leaking from the top end to the tap and the bullet fit so I'll replace the hole in the middle. That's awesome. That's really useful. I'll just replace the hole a lot. I'll pair it with him back. Oh, that's fantastic. Thanks very much, Lee. That's great. Oh, thank you very much. There's pressure. Thanks. If you just slam the door.

Yeah. Once you're down, that will be absolutely great. Oh, there we go. Oh, good. You're wearing a smocker. Perfect. Right. Thank you very much indeed.

Have a good, have a good day. There's no one days it now. It's Friday. Have a good weekend. Thank you. It's all the best. Bye-bye. Are you wearing a smartwatch there, Rory?

So here we are. So I suppose if you look at electricity, I mean one thing that interests me about that is it actually suggests that marketing and consumer innovation are a significant factor in determining economic growth. We never look at this. We always assume that supply creates its own demand, that once you invent electricity people just go, well, fucking hell, well, where have you been all my life? But actually for the most part, they don't, they actually need to be persuaded. I mean, there were farmers in Wales, my father can remember, who had electricity to power their milking machines in the cow shed, but didn't want it in the house. That's so bizarre, isn't it? Yeah, well, as far as might you say, I mean, it's done.

Yeah, it might not be straight down the middle of the representative demographic. But yeah, what do you think this says about the value of advertisers then? Because I know you've got a very interesting analogy you use about alchemy, which I absolutely love. Well, I think that marketing and advertising in terms of both behavior change and also creating the context for things that enables us to see why they're desirable might be much, much more important in terms of economic growth, productivity and just the wealth of nations than economists have given it credit for. Now one thing I'd say is that the United States enjoys a huge advantage as an economy,

not only in its productive capacity, its scale, its you know size, but also in the nature and character of its inhabitants, which is for good and ill, and it's not always for good, okay. But Americans are, if we're being cynical in European and a bit snooty, they're a bit credulous and some, you know, oh wow, look at that, you know, Greg Proop used to do a fantastic comedy routine about this, which is, you know, the American at Disneyland versus the Brit, you know, And you see a giant eight-foot mouse, the American's going, hey, gee, kids, do you see that? Like, he really does live here. And that is the British dad who sort of looked for out that there's a six-foot mouse. Oh,

for fuck's sake. Yeah, exactly. You know, you're nothing better to be doing. We've got nothing better to be doing. And so the American belief that life is capable of continuous improvement, which I have to say, I mean, most of the nice things that have happened in cynical Europe have probably happened on the back of that American night, you know, just as actually most of the really worthwhile shit was invented by people in sheds in the Midwest. You know, let's give them credit for this because I mean, Brits haven't been bad. Scandinavians mean, you know, the French do, French may win.

They're either very conservative or very inventive. Yeah. I can't get my head around that at all. That's the most inventive creative people in the world, or like the most weirdly conservative. Yeah. And both I guess. But actually, you know, what is it?

I mean, you know, 50% of the innovations that actually make life pleasant and livable and easy, you know, have probably come from the US in some shape or form. And they've been adopted because of that American belief that there's always a better way of doing something. Is that because it's such a young country, do you think? I always think this one,

when I think about the difference, especially between the UK and America, I always draw this analogy that the way that Americans talk, this kind of top down love for the country. Like I've never once heard an English person say, it's a really just love England, I wanna do it for my country. It's the sort of thing that you associate

with like far right activists and people with skinheads. Yeah, which is a terrible shame actually, because I mean, we got quite a lot to be pretty. I mean, you know, to be honest, I mean, the place is living here. It's pretty great, actually. Apart from January, February, March. Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah. I mean, clear out January.

If you can ever find a life, my father, funnily enough, said one of his regrets was he said, by the time you kids had left home, what I should have done in my late 60s is bugged off to Spain for January, February, March. Or bugged off. You know, because he wouldn't have cost very much to turn the heating off at home, you know. And, you know, those are the three worst bits. I mean, mind you, hell of a lot of the world hasn't that I mean Chicago's beautiful in spring and autumn New York actually New York as a convinced they have a great climate But actually it's too fucking cold in the winter and it's too fucking hot in the summer I went as a heatwave in you or a cold snap in New York. It's unlivable. Where's London rarely does that, you know? Yeah

And you know that I mean Where so I mean there are places which have a pretty perfect climate, I guess, in the Canary Islands, and there are, LA is pretty good, isn't it? Chilli apparently, has a fantastic climate. But yeah, there's this kind of propensity towards accusing things of being a shit, which is so, it's almost like British people take pride in it to a degree. They're more patriotic about the fact that they think everything is shit than they are about their own country.

Well, I seriously worry about this, and it's a weird one, because if you look at all these statistics, which everybody believes, which is essentially all the gains have gone to the richest X percent, okay? And essentially the middle class have become completely trapped in a kind of income trap where they're earning no more than their parents were. Now, the interesting thing about this narrative is that according at least to Robert Frank, sorry, not Robert Frank, Russ Roberts, sorry.

So it's actually not true. Now let me just explain this in a second. One, it's perfectly possible to have a society where everybody is getting richer, but where every desial of the population is getting poorer, provided people are moving from poorer desials to richer desials. Now, part of the reason they're more poorer people is they're more students who are poor, and there are more immigrants who tend to be poorer when they start, not necessarily when they end, and there are more retired people. Then household composition is smaller as well,

divorce has affected things, smaller numbers of people for household changes, the whole balance of things. But actually, if you look at what's called panel data, which is the same people research over time, actually the poorest, the people who start off poorest, are very likely to become quite a bit richer, and the people who start off richer over a period of 10, 20 years, are quite likely to drop out of that top desir.

Really? So there are no social mobility, if you look, now the only perspective that we care about, because I'm not an aggregate desal of the population, okay, I don't let you know. The only thing we really care about is is my life getting better, and for most people, except actually the richest, who tend to get a bit poorer, for most people who start off poor, so students, for example, are notionally poor, but they don't think of themselves as poor in the same way that maybe retired people don't, because they see themselves as investing in their future.

To buy a product of that particular area of their life, that particular period of their life, right? Yeah, and it's something you do in order to become richer later off. That's the logic line. Whether it's overblown, that's separately, separately, whether, actually, further educations become a bit of a peacock's tail, kind of credentialist arms race, I think is probably true, I'm too angry. But I'll park that for now, because it's a whole separate discussion.

I mean, I think it's become a bit, I think you know that you now get people to go, well, if I want to get a really good job, it's not enough to have a degree. I've got to have an end of PhD. You're a fucking PhD. I'm kind of going off a fuck saying, you know, I mean, actually you'll learn more in a job.

I mean, part of the thing that annoys me is the implicit insult that when you're at an institution of higher education, you're learning loans. And the second you go into a job, you become some sort of slap-jawed, mouth breathing more on, who never learns anything. I mean, you know, I went to Cambridge for three years, I then spent three years in Ogleby working with people like Drayton, Birdon, Steve Harrison, extraordinary kind of creative people and advertising people. I learned just as much in those three years in Ogleby as I did in, you know, at university.

I learned just as much of those three years as I was in the UK. It's a bit of a... The idea that somehow you need to be spending all your time acquiring these credentials. Strikes me as a pretty dubious... I couldn't agree more. When I went to university, I sat next to my business partner in my first ever seminar. Sat down next to him, complained about the fact that I was skinned and from then We started working together and 12 years later. I've still not been able to get rid of him but

He'll be listening I'll receive a pay cut for that because he's one that controls the accounts as well So what what you do by the way is I've just read about this in this group detained in Dubai You move to Dubai and then you get him to sign checks, right? And then you can still the sign checks. Right. And then you cancel the checks so he gets sent to jail. Fantastic. Yes. So that's great. But you're moved to Dubai. Yeah. So you get him to sign a few checks, which then you refuse to honor as the partner. And then he gets banged up in jail and you take over the company. It's apparently it

works every time. Well, yeah. Cool. I love to make sure that he doesn't listen to this one. So he's not expecting it. But that'll be fine. So yeah, we sat down. We sat down next to each other in our first ever seminar. And very quickly we started operating a business from HR advertising, marketing, dealing with suppliers, dealing with consumers, everything, front and backward facing is vertically and horizontally integrated. As you can imagine. And at the same time, I was doing a business degree

at Newcastle and I was dealt fatal dose of contrast between what the real world was showing me and what my academics were showing me. And very quickly, I became so disenchanted, disenfranchised with what I was learning. I think had I been doing philosophy or psychology or something, it might have fed my passion a little bit more, but as I was learning. I think how they've been doing philosophy or psychology or something, it might have fed my passion a little bit more.

But as I was learning about Henry Ford scientific methods of operations and chisene logistics and stuff like that, I just thought like, what am I doing? Like this does not reflect the business world that I am being exposed to. And then sure enough, I came out and I thought, well, the piece of paper for me, I'm the absolute avatar for, got a piece of paper that I didn't need, spent. And I spent, this was before the 9,000 pounds a year thing. I was like three

grand a year. And I've still come out with like 27 grand, 27 grand of debt for a degree that essentially facilitated me running a business. If you offered people that £27,000 loan and said you have to spend a third of an education, but the other 18 grand you can spend on anything you like starting a business, moving house, getting whatever. Everybody would do a one year degree wouldn't they? Absolutely. Maybe two. Nobody would do three. You'd want wouldn't they? Or maybe two. I said, nobody would do three. You'd want nine or 18 grand for the other shit. 18 grand?

For the 2006 was a deposit on a house. That was a deposit on your property, right? Yeah. So that's not a market in education. Saying here's money which will lend for you just as the housing market isn't a market because the mortgage is money they'll lend to you on the sole condition that you spend it on property.

So unsurprisingly, houses are really fucking expensive. And a student loan is 27 grand they'll lend you on the sole proviso that you spend it all on education. Now, you know, I mean, to be honest, I would have spent two years of Cambridge and bought a fucking Mustang. Or something. But I mean, actually, I mean, this is one of the most interesting questions, which is I would argue that it's one of the interesting ideas, which in all the interest people on the right

and left, and as a result, makes no progress because nobody gets angry about it, but actually giving people money in lumps, and there's a whole load of experiments in the effect of a altruism movement. The problem with welfare is partly, you know, it's partly right-wing people are too reluctant to give it, which is one interesting question, but left-wing people tend to have this view that if you give people a large sum of money, they'll immediately get pissed. Now what's interesting in all the experiments where you give people not regular smalls, now if you give me 100 quid a month, what really improves my life when I've got 100 quid a month, let's say I've got 40 pounds of discretionary income a month, what improves

my life most? Answer, beer and cigarettes, right? Because if I've only got 40 pounds a month of discretionary income, the best way of improving my life is to get pissed with my friends and to have a tap. On the highest immediate return. Yeah. Immediate return, it's fantastic. Now, if you give people three grand, they start asking different questions. You know, five minutes, should I move? Do I really need to bar car?

Do I really need to get educated? And if you look at these experiments in Africa where you go around and they find genuinely deserving people, typically if you've got a house which is entirely made of natural materials, it doesn't mean you're a hipster in Africa, it means you're genuinely poor, okay? If you haven't got any concrete,

you haven't got any corrugated iron, you're really poor. So they identify those people and basically send them through their mobile phone, like a year's salary, buff, like that. And the number of people who actually spend it on booze and cigarettes is unbelievably tiny, but what's fascinating is they don't spend it in the way the charity assumes is important. They all spend it on totally different things, educating their kids might be their priority, actually getting a proper roof on the house,

might be their priority. One person actually did by recording equipment, which looked a bit of an indulgence, but he then started a band and made quite a lot of money out of it. And so there's some really interesting questions about welfare, which is the right tend to disapprove of it, the left tend to do it in a really patronizing way. And actually, if you say, look,

and some extent, right wing people in favor of this, because they go, well, the bastard's want to get pissed. They're all fucking wrong, right? So right wing people, maybe a bit actually, although for the worst of reasons, they may actually be right here, but you're saying, actually, if everybody at the beginning of their life,

I hadn't inheritance from an aunt of a thousand quid when I was bloody, I was twenty something, okay. That sounds a bit ridiculous now. It was at the time, it was life changing, knowing you had a thousand quid in the bank, which if you needed it, you could spend it. And then later on, another aunt died and I had about twenty, okay. And that basically enabled me to get a deposit of our flat, and they have been a furnished, the flat and it would have been a dinner lunch. Now, you know, a huge amount of my property wealth is probably predicated on that

20,000 quid which made me get started a bit earlier. So I'm starting to wonder, should the student loan be available for anything? And you say, okay, you've got to spend one year of inferred education. If you spend 18, OK, you've got to spend one year of income further education. If you spend 18,000 pounds and you want to start a cafe, or you want to start a business. And by the way, one thing about small businesses, I think we ought to mention more, is that, OK, there are areas where

the business needs to be big. I don't want my broadband to be provided by a bloke down the pub. OK, I get that. But small business activity adds an enormous amount to the wellbeing of communities. Why do you think? Every time a shop opens, a cafe opens, you know, it more or less defines what's a successful thriving community. Actually, one of the things, are you in Newcastle now? Are you in Manchester? Newcastle still. Now, interestingly, what I find interesting

when you travel to other British cities is that cities that did really well in the kind of early part of the century. And Newcastle's probably one of them, isn't it, actually? I mean, you go that Sheffield's another one. You come out of the station. I went to Sheffield in 1987, and we missed the last train, and we sent

to our host where's the best place to stay overnight. Sheffield, he replied, leads. The fact that people open, whether it's hotels, plumbing firms, cafes, all that sort of activity actually has an importance in human day-to-day human life, which we can't really, you know, we shouldn't really understate. And so I would argue that you should change the student loan and just say, it's a young person's loan, everybody gets it. Spend it as you wish. And you spend as you wish. With a provider that maybe I think a year should be spent on education. Then, you know, if you want to go and do three years and

do that stuff, well, okay, but you should pay the cost that that's 18,000, you can't spend on something else. Yeah, I totally get that. I wanted to talk about the recent UK advertising watchdog release that spoke about how it would be cracking down on what it turned sexist stereotypes in ads. Do you think this is a significant change or is it natural progression? What's what do you view on this? To some extent the sexist stereotype, in a sense, there's been a reverse sexist stereotype for quite a long time, which is, which a lot of men find very irritating, which is you have to portray the man as a bit of an idiot and the woman as the sage, fontoable Wisdom, oracle, because if you do it the other way around, you get massive complaints. That can get a bit

tedious. There is a problem, of course, with stereotyping in advertising in TV, which is simply that, I mean, okay, if you only have 30 seconds, there is an element where when you've got 30 seconds or 60 seconds to tell a story, to some extent you have to rely on tropes, because things which are odd, okay, throw the viewer completely. You need the archetype, right? You need them to be able to infer so much more of the cut in the story. By the way, changing ethnic stereotype entirely in favour of that. I mean, it's worth remembering that you get some weird stuff going on, in that there was that much applauded Nike ad about London, which is very,

very ethnically diverse, except for a complete absence of Indians. Anybody of subcontinental origins seems to be completely missing. Now maybe because people of the subcontinent only really interested in one sport, which is cricket. Yes, at that point. At that point, and I can't be a big incorrect it. So, yeah. Yeah, and so there may be an element of that, but I mean, I don't know, I mean, good advertising, first of all, you can, you can, you can push it stereotypes, but you can only push so fast and so far, because, you know, if you think about it, if you'd shown, for example, it would have been very good in 1970 to show a gay couple in one sense as an archetypal, you know, creating a norm. But the ad would have become entirely about the, all discussion of the ad would have become entirely about that.

So you didn't, you had the oxo family because then you just said default family, this is what family is alike. Okay. And then the centrality of oxo was communicated in the way that would have been much more difficult if you'd set out to be an absolute. I mean, okay, you could have made good fellows, not using, for example, Italian, Americans or Sicilians. But using other Latvians, right? And it would have been less hysteria time, but it also would have been a bit of a weird feel. But you wouldn't have communicated across the subtlety. I talk about this a lot when people mention love Island to me. They talk about

the TV show, and they say that there's a lack of diversity in terms of character depth and complexity in that. And I'm like, look, you've got 45 minutes of 14 people's 24 hour periods. It's like 350 hours of lived life every day that you need to try to fit in. And you're like, you do not have the time to convey the subtlety and the nuance of someone's very specific views about exactly what they want from a girl or a guy. It needs to be that's the hero, that's the villain, that's the maid and that's the redeemed, that's the nerd,

that's the, because it allows us to expedite the root from character introduction to character maturity. No, I think that's, you're absolutely right. In terms of short storytelling under constraints, there's, there's the, first of all, you want attention to be attached to something where, you know, in one place. And so anything to weird, David Ogleby always said, look, if you just want your ads to gain attention to show a gorilla in a jok strap, the point is you can gain attention, right? But the danger is if you do anything to now, Ford got into huge trouble because when they

reproduced an ad showing factory workers in Essex, in Poland, right? They replaced some of the black faces with white faces for the Polish market. Now, I didn't go on TV to defend this because the whole thing had become a kind of PR nightmare. But you've got to remember that the population of Poland is probably 99.5% white, that if there's a car factory in Poland, the car workers are overwhelmingly Polish of ancestry. Now, if you had had a car factory with the correct ethnic mix, which was perfectly used in the British brochure, by the way, I'm not to... Now, you could say, okay, this is because Poles are racist, which is not an implausible hypothesis. Okay, but equally, to have, let's say, 30% Afro-Caribbean employees in what is supposed to be a

Polish car factory would be like having a British car factory where there were seven Navajo Indians. The point is that you wouldn't, you'd be going, what the fuck's going on? They're not representative, right? It's simply not representative. And they got in a huge grief about that. And I, you know, it was an insensitive thing to have done. But at the same time, I understand why they did it. Because simply, you know, if you're in Poland, the ethnic composition of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic or whatever, is not the ethnic composition of London.

Are you going to amend your approach as you move forward at Ogilvy? Is this something that you're genuinely concerned about or is it something that you've been ahead of the curve on already? Well, Ogilvy as an agency was definitely ahead of the curve in terms of female employment and female promotion. So I occasionally get a bit baffled by the kind of discussions the ad industry has beating up because every single division of Ogle V I've worked with and for Has probably in the last 20 years if you split it up It's been run equally by men and women The ad agency has has had female management for a significant time

women. The ad agency has had female management for a significant time. The design component, the direct marketing component, all of them have had significant female management input. It's also worth remembering that to some extent the composition of an ad agency's board depends on the gender balance of who ad agencies recruited in 1988. Yeah, there's an upper ceiling. So there's a, there's a, so looking, my contention is that the advertising industry and the communication industry will be majority female at all levels and in most departments, not necessarily the creative department, but that will grow closer and closer to 50-50 in about 20 years. Can management planning, most of these disciplines will become majority female in a certain

length of time. Creative departments slightly odd because what some creatives are sent to me is if you recruited from art colleges, it tended to be guys who went to the advertising course and women went to find art and design, or fashion. So you might have had a fashion department in the art college which was disproportionately female and you might have had an and department which was disproportionately male. And it's not entirely fair to say that's prejudiced rather than preference. Having said that, I don't think creative departments will be

overwhelmingly male, normal creative directors be overwhelmingly male in the other 20 years. What I do believe is a conservative is there's a natural, a small-seater conservative, is there is a natural pace of change. And one thing that sometimes annoys me about these movements is that I support the aim of the movement. I think the movement is completely right. And I want to see, I share its aspirations. But if I ever step in and say, no, I'm telling you what you're trying to do, but the way you're trying to do it is wrong, or the way you're diagnosing the problem is wrong. The assumption is not this guy is trying to help by suggesting there may be other explanations, instead you're treated as basically one of the enemy.

Well, the implication is that you're trying to deny, not trying to... You're trying to deny? Yeah. Now, to some extent, you know, when I first recruited by Ogle V, we were about 12 of us, maybe 14 graduate trainees, and I think the ratio was something like two to one male's female. Don't know why that was. It's worth remembering, by the way, that HR, which is responsible for recruiting, is in most companies a bit of a matriarchy. So you could raise a little bit of a

question, which is, well, on HR has been a fairly well gender balanced, if anything. Or female dominated. Female dominated discipline. For quite a long time, what were you fucking doing for the first, you know, 10 years or less? Well, yeah, is it that women are oppressing women here or I don't really know. It's not impossible. I mean if you look at it from a very Darwinian point of view, of course, this was a slight bias among certain men to recruit women. Yeah. Okay. Now, which is also looked down upon, that's also not allowed. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,. There's, okay, the senior people are a product of who was hired in 1988. It's also a product of maternity leave, except the fact that actually my career wouldn't

have, I wouldn't be vice chairman of Ogle V if I had been at home looking after kids between, I don't know, 1999 and 2008, okay? Right, if I got home and looked out to kids, effectively, I would have had to reboot my career. I totally accept that by the way, as a partial explanation. What I'm not keen on is just this thing, which is anywhere where it's not 50, 50,

there is therefore evidence of prejudice. That's too simplistic. Not saying that prejudice doesn't exist, of course it exists, and that exists in both directions and from both genders, by the way. That, personally, there is prejudice, but, and this is the big, but, it's not fair to say there is prejudice, there is inequality or imbalance, ergo, the only source of the imbalance is the prejudice, because there are loads of, one of them is preference, okay?

Simply speaking, if you look at countries, very liberal countries like Sweden on Norway, you will find that a countancy and perhaps being an actuary is disproportionately male, and nursing is disproportionately female. Well, you can't skate a lot of the jobs that females tend towards in these more egalitarian countries like Sweden and such like they scale more, like a lot more poorly than STEM

fields. Like if you're a nurse, how many patients can you look after at once? Like maybe 10, 20 I guess? I don't know. But if you are someone who's creating a software guy, yeah, there you go. You've got seven billion people at your behest. So yeah, I totally agree. By the way, none of these findings has any bearing on the judgment of an individual, because what often is not understood in this debate is the difference between aggregate

and individual. So, you know, where you get considerable overlap, okay, what you will see is the very extreme tales, the kind of person who wants to become an actuary, okay, is, well, I mean, okay, if you wanna get, no, I mean, they're gonna be slightly cheesy a bit on the spectrum maybe, which is by the way, trends mail as well. Yep. It's a very extreme take now. teensy bit on the spectrum maybe, which is by the way, trends male as well.

It's a very extreme take now. That it nobody's saying for a second that there can't be female actories. I'm simply saying that if you expect actories and scaffolders and nurses to be 50, 50 male female, you're going to have a long wait. In less, you impose social engineering of a level that most of us wouldn't find acceptable. And that's going to lead to more dissatisfaction longer term, right, as well. I mean, there's an interesting theory, by the way, which is born out by my own anecdotal experience, which is the main reason women, there are two problems with STEM, and getting women in, well, they're loads of problems about women in STEM. One of them is if you do STEM, you're more or less encouraged for a levels to do maths physics chemistry. What that means is you haven't got run to do a nice

humanity subject. Now I think someone's got to change. I did maths Latin and Greek, which was I'm really glad I did that in now as an adult. It was a total pain in the ass of the time, because I'm doing maths and physics. Effectively, it was the same shit with different diagrams, right? Whereas I had to go from reading Homer to then, I don't know, students' tea distribution or whatever it was, okay, my memory is hazy on that one. And it was a bit of a mind-fuck. So there's that problem which is, and more women than men are going to be reluctant to say those subjects are really enjoying them, Jim. One of the theories is that by the way what tends to

happen is that the reason more men go into STEM is simply that there are more men who are shit at history, English, and languages. Now modern languages was always a female dominated field at university, I don and languages. Now, modern languages was always a female dominated field at university, I don't know if you noticed that. But it tended to be the modern languages faculty was the playboy mansion of the cavery. So that was the thinking man's degree. Yeah. And so what, what tends to happen is that if you're if you're the men who do stem tend not only to be men who are good at stem, they tend to be men who are not very good at history English geography French. There are fewer women who are shit at history English geography French.

Therefore fewer women do stem because men who are good at both tend to do art subjects as well. Because it's less competitive. Well, and more fun. So, interestingly, my brother, okay, my brother's okay at history English and stuff, didn't like it that much. He's an astrophysicist. He went and did a totally STEM career.

His contemporary who was equally good at both. In other words, he acted in the theatre and, you know, he was, you know, really key actor. He actually went off and did history. Even though he was equally good, really, at maths. Well, maybe not quite as good as my brother, but he was very good at maths. He was very good at history. He did history. My brother was very good at maths.

He was quite good at history. He did maths. Now, what you'll tend to find is that if women are more naturally strong in humanities fields and therefore there's less need for them to find a subject of study where their weakness doesn't apply. And STEM is a fantastic escape for someone who basically goes, I hate writing essays, but I love solving quadratic equations. Fine, that's me all over, yeah, exactly. So I wanted to ask what your thoughts are

on the future of the attention economy. And whether or not people are going to continue to give away their attention and their data so readily. It's very interesting. On data, I'm completely messed up, because it's with my attitude to data. It's a bit like the attitude I have towards whether what my children do on the internet. And that was always the problem which is look, I can either police them to within an inch of their lives or I can just trust them. There doesn't seem to be a very easy middle ground that doesn't involve a huge amount of work. So either I basically go and say to my kids, look, if you say anything in the internet that disturbs you, if there's a bloke being a bit pervian weird, let me know.

And I'm going to trust you. Otherwise go and look at what you like. Which is what I moralist did. All you do this thing, which I often think backfires, by the way, which is you police every minute of their use. You put every single safe guard on their bloody internet access, which simply means they go around to their friends house and look at porn harbors for a long time. It tends, those people whose parents and the children I noticed whose parents and most

protective are also the most devious. Yeah, yeah, it just drives it underground. It just drives it. How does it drive it? Yeah, it was a recent New York Times article saying that Silicon Valley tech workers make sure that their children's nannies keep them away from all technology and that some of these nannies get sacked if they come home and find that their child says, oh, I played on an iPad today or I did this that and the other, which says an awful lot like the

same as Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids on iPads. Well, yeah, I think. It's the same theory as drug dealers don't use their own supply, right? Which I think is super interesting. So what do you think about the attention economy then as we move forward? How's that going to work? So the data question I think is sometimes overblown, actually, in that the idea that this is the new oil, the data question is assumed to be absolutely vital when it's actually sometimes useful, sometimes useless. I think that a large number of people in tech and indeed a large number of people in advertising and marketing have misunderstood how marketing

works and they've tried to turn it into an efficiency game. And I think a large reason why marketing works is precisely because it's inefficient, that costly signalling, in other words, the fact that you're talking to a large group of people simultaneously through media which are perceived to be expensive, using celebrities or creative talent or filmmaking skills or storytelling skills which are in short supply and therefore seen as scarce and valuable, is what actually gives advertising its meaning. Now how do you send a wedding invitation? Now you could send it by email,

but that we really shit wouldn't it? Naturally, no one would come because they'd assume there was going to be a pay, a cash bar, you know. Okay. In order to send a wedding invitation that says, I'm committed to this partnership, you can throw money at it, you know, which is, you know, full-page ad in Vogue, okay? It's guilt edge wedding invitation printed on hard card with engraved curly type. I've got one on my fridge, which is common with a fridge magnet that's got a heart and it's made on wood and it's engraved. Really?

Yeah, that's from print. Yeah, okay. Now, you throw a stack of money on that, and you do it conventionally, and everybody goes, this is a serious wedding. No one's not turning up to that wedding, are they? No, it's not the very dragon that you're exactly. You can use craft and effort, which you can make something by hand.

You can use humor, which is another scarce commodity. You can produce an email newsletter that was really, really funny. But what you couldn't do is just email the parents of Flurinda, so-and-so, request the pleasure of your company, at the measure of their daughter, so-and-so, to Mr. Dave, whatever it is. You can't just send that as an email. The meaning actually resides not in the textual informational component. This isn't really information theory, this is signalling theory,

and they're different things. The obsession with data is all about how can we make this message really efficient. But in a way, there can be really clever efficient messages, and I don't dispute that that's part of what advertising is about. But the real way you build trust in a brand is to make it famous in an expensive way. Yeah. Do you think that this is people doing the avoiding doing a hard thing, which is the very, very creative copywriting, which is the subtle and nuanced approach to delivering

a message to the market and stuff like that and focusing instead on this slightly more kind of spectrum side use of the data where it's frequency, what open rate, what particular kind of etc etc. I think Silicon Valley sees everything as an efficiency game. It sees everything as a time and money optimization problem and it's now straining into fields where that doesn't apply. Don't go me wrong, in things like manufacturing, in certain areas, the correlation between efficiency and effectiveness is pretty high. Economists aren't totally insane about this, but in various things, marketing military strategy would be another one.

There are quite a few areas of life where actually the asymmetry between the sender and the receiver or the attacker and the defender, the information lay symmetry requires you to do things which are irrational. And it's very interesting that there was a case where a man basically tried to murder his wife by tampering with her parachute. I don't know if you saw this. No. He was next military guy and weirdly he nearly got away with it because she wouldn't testify against him. And what the hell? He wasn't allowed to approach her. He was obviously under a kind of order. How unearthed did he get to her and persuade her not to testify. And they found that he'd written songs, love songs,

patently addressed to her and placed them on YouTube. And somehow got her to watch them. Right. Now why that strikes me as fascinating, okay? As if he'd simply emailed her and said, I'm innocent, I'm innocent, I'm innocent, it wouldn't have worked. Okay. Right. If you'd tried to use reason, if you, let's say you you had no money but you had a lot of musical talent, you wanted to send out a great wedding invitation, you could record a fantastic song about your wedding or your love for your future bride and you could post it on YouTube and you could email the guests an invitation to watch it. Obviously you'd have to make it a kind of a private YouTube channel. Otherwise you get thousands of gate crashes. Yep. But that would be that would be equivalent because it's costly in terms of money,

cost in terms of effort in terms of talent. You know, poetry is in a sense more costly prose. Yeah. Poetry means more than prose because it's harder to write. And in the same way, this effort to make everything efficient is a bit like trying to take you know, keats and rewrite it in prose. And I think it's a fundamental mistake. And of course, if you believe this to be true, data becomes absolutely everything because, you know, all the human talents of persuasion and seduction are external to your model. So all you have to do is get the right information to the right person at

the right time. And that's purely a data game. Now, of course, that suits Google and Facebook and everybody else to pretend it's a data game because that's where they have a monopoly. They have a monopoly on that kind of data. They can't claim a monopoly on creative talent. They can't claim a monopoly over celebrity. They can't claim a monopoly over persuasive about ability or psychology, but they can claim a monopoly over what they know. So they pretend advertising is the kind of game in which they are unavoidable. Now you can't blame them for doing it. We all do the same kind of thing. We all pretend that the areas where we're strong are more important than they really are. And at the same time, the data question is unbelievably flaming complicated

because we've been naive in the West because we've always had relatively nice governments. You look at what's happening in China with the business where everybody has a kind of citizens eBay rating. Yes. And this is being developed in China. Now it may be a terrible mistake because suddenly everybody below a three is identified as a group and they may rebel or revolt. You're just increasing tribalism a bit. You're creating kind of Gilles Zon for the people who are sub three rated, aren't you? Well, it's like there's an actual episode of Black Mirror, which is about this and then it's somehow it's occurring in real life and no

one's actually taking, well. Now, so it's affecting by who you talk to, who your friends are, who your friends are on social media, who your parents were, all those things affect your rating, and your rating affects whether you can travel, whether you can travel overseas, whether you can do this, whether you can do that. And of course with eBay, if eBay gives me a shit rating, I can just create a new identity or move on to Etsy or something. But with the government, that's everything. Where you can live, where you can move, how freely you can travel, where you can work, whether you're going to job or not, is all affected by a kind of credit rating on steroids.

Now that's a terrifying, terrifying thing. I mean, particularly when you automate it, so there's no... I'm not even comfortable. There's the great thing about this, data which is information, and there's data which does things. I'm not very comfortable with the speed camera. I don't think we should have accepted it, because I think in order to be find, it is not enough to say, I drove at 40 and a 30 limit. Therefore, I should have three points and a hundred pound fine. I think a human should watch the

footage and the human should have discretion over whether or not I'm fined. Were you overtaking someone, were you swerving to avoid an animal, were you doing? Well, in one case, I don't think I'm wrong. I've had about four of these in my lifetime. And three of them were totally deserved. And I'd either been to speed awareness course, or I took the points. One of them was where there was a driver who was either drunk or having a massive ride with his wife, who was swirving all over the road. So I just waited for them to move into the left hand lane of a dual carriageway and basically well-ed it for 300 yards, as the only safe way of getting past.

Yeah. Now, any cop would have arrested them, not me. Anybody watching the film footage in the wider context would have said, I can see why this guy did that. Should have had a dash cam. Yeah, well, interestingly, I never thought of that. I thought they weren't really available then, I guess. No, this was, this was about eight to ten years ago. So I didn't suppose you could have got them. But that is a fair point, actually, which is you

could actually say, look, this is either the circumstances. I wanted you to take this into consideration. I wonder whether or not they consider that. I recently got my first three points. I didn't know that a long wheelbase van, one up from a transit van, is classed as a commercial vehicle and means that it's got a national speed limit on a single carriage way of 50 miles an hour, not six. I didn't know that. Well, there you go. At some point in the future, you're driving.

So I didn't know. So I remember I was going to go and pick up a couch with my dad, my dad's in the car, and I'm driving along, and the van didn't have one of these classic enterprise things like the most basic of Equipment that you can no air conditioning and no cruise control and etc. So I'm driving to Leeds from Newcastle and I'm on this single carriageway and I remember seeing the Mobile speed unit on the left and look down and I was like 61 single carriageway piece of piss. Absolutely fine. I'll be laughing. What I didn't realise was that I was 11 miles an hour over the 50 limit for the vehicle. I'm like, well, like, and I've got the thing through and I've got, you've got to send off your license. I didn't even know how to send my license

off. It didn't come back with a hole in it. I don't know why they need my license to like, everything's done electronically anyway. But yeah, and that was a bizarre one. I think, well, there's more subtlety and new ones to that particular situation. Like, yeah, maybe before I drove the van should I have looked at whether or not there was a different national speed limit. Yeah, but it's not that, like, I don't know. No, no, I wouldn't have, I never knew that. I know clue. And then the other interesting one is, it's not quite acceptable to impose a speed limit on dual carriageways or multi-lane motorways, because the very strong rule there is you've got to go a bit faster than the cars to your left.

Yeah. Because if all the cars are traveling at the same speed and a high density of traffic, it's impossible to change lane, and people can't actually get off the motorway. So you have to have some degree of flow to prevent the whole thing becoming kind of gridlocked. Yeah. And so, you know, you have to accept that if the people in the left hand lane are going 50, the people in the lane are going to be going 54, and the people in the fast lane are going to be going 58,

because that's just how we drive. And it's an instinctive thing. You Americans aren't like that. They have different way of driving. They'll sit on an interstate side by side for half an hour at the same speed. And then they'll also weave in and out of each other as well. They'll even out. They'll undertake a bit. And also, of course, it's worth remembering in American, in parts of the American West, it's 15 miles between intersections. It's a totally in America, in parts of the American West, it's 15 miles between intersections. It's a totally different mode of driving anyway.

Yeah. And so that's an interesting question, which is, in the Chinese case, there's the question of context. You could end up being marked down for talking to these suspicious foreign spies when all they were doing is asking directions to some tourist sites. I want a sight. I want a coffee, where's good for a coffee around here? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so the ability to actually get yourself out by saying, okay,

I can explain this, suddenly becomes totally impossible. And in a way, a really bad bureaucracy, an automation will naturally lean to bureaucracy is worse than a tyranny in a way, a really bad bureaucracy, an automation will naturally lead to bureaucracy, is worse than a tyranny in a way. Yeah, because it's automated. It's totally automated, and your ability to actually get anything expunged is more or less impossible. Well, even in a tyranny, at least the tyrannical notion is deployed by a human. There's an element, at least a small element of margin on either side.

So final question that I wanted to ask was your vision of advertising moving forward. I've got George, who is one of the guys that works on the Modern Wisdom Project, asked what you think the ROI and advertising will look like as we move forward? The skills required won't go away and I don't think they're nearly as different as the digital people are trying to pretend they are. Now, bear in mind young people and digital people have a vested interest in pretending that everything's changed and everything is dead because it effectively means they can occupy the top jobs because the experience of people older

than them has suddenly become worthless. And there's a no, no, I can't blame young people for going with that gig in a way. Because I mean, you know, it's a very good story to tell, it's kind of plausible. However, I think that there are some really interesting questions to be asked about advertising, which is how do you do costly signalling in a digital medium? Which is a really interesting question. In other words, we've got the digital equivalent of yellow pages. We've done that very well. And Google is, to some extent, the, you know, Google plus Amazon, whatever, is, you know, we've done digital yellow pages, Facebook is arguably

the digital sort of AT&T. But we haven't got the digital equivalent really of the back page of Vogue. Now, maybe there are things like you actually create a Netflix series. there are things like, you know, you actually create a Netflix series. You know, with, you know, what's the digital coins of sponsoring the Olympics taking the back page of vote? Now, for small businesses, by the way, I would have made an important caveat here. There's a difference. When consumers ask how costly your wedding invitation is, right, they're

also subconsciously factoring in how rich they think you are or know you are. Now, if you're worth, okay, 10 million quint, you send the invitation out on photocopier paper, that's much, much weirder than if you're getting married as a student and you send the invitation out on photocopier paper. Now, it's worth remembering that my local, follow just went to the opening of the Deal Peer kitchen,

which is the new cafe at the end of Deal Peer, and it's two young people in their 20s who have opened it, and they post on Facebook and they post their menu and they ask for suggestions for what other breakfast dishes might be attractive, kinshury, I think, a big one anyway. might be attractive, kinshury, I think would be good one anyway. But, but doing that, bear in mind, you don't have to do it, it involves a certain amount of effort, I get it, you're busy running a restaurant, the fact that a pub or a cafe or restaurant posts on Facebook regularly and is keen to promote itself on social media or Instagram or whatever is to some extent a form of effortful costly singling. That isn't really true if you're Nestle or Coca-Cola. Okay? Because the difference is if a student buys

his fiancé a 500-killing engagement ring, it's costly singling. If Rupert Murdock does, it isn't. And so we've got to remember that the cost is also proportionate to the perceived cost in terms of discretionary effort, what you might call discretionary effort or expense. And as I said, I think Facebook is a very, very good local advertising vehicle. I follow every single pub, cafe, whatever, and I'm impressed by the ones who make an effort to do this really well. But that isn't the same if you're, you know, Georgia or Marnie or if you're Nestle or if you're Coca-Cola,

you need a different canvas in order to display discretionary cost. I get that. I think what's particularly interesting for me looking at the internet marketing world and what I get exposed to a lot of the time is that the this moving slightly back to the discussion about data. There's this Obsession with getting the data right as opposed to necessarily making the message resonate with the audience. Yeah, it's that the very specific with the audience. It's the very specific kind of Russell Brunson click funnel. If you use this kind of copy with a countdown timer, then you've retargeted them with an upsell in three days via email. Then if they don't click through on that, then you follow this particular thing down.

To me, the art and the subtlety and the actual connection that is made between consumer and brand, and the actual connection that is made between consumer and brand, that is being replaced with an algorithmic, um, logic puzzle. And at the end of that, there is particular formula, forget about the message, don't bother yourself with the creative, and then what you get out of the other side of that is successful business. Now interestingly, I haven't got it because I've got British gas smart metering. I haven't got it on my current app. But there are ways in which I think a really impressive thing you can do is just show you understand consumer psychology very well. So there's the effort which often is partly data driven. But one of the things I love is the British gas app has a little thing where you submit a meter reading. Now most gas meters in the UK are kind of under the stairs or they're in a weird cupboard or a shed or some other weird thing.

And the person who designed that app all credit to them just added a little switch which turned the torch on. Actually, I've got one of my eon-mon. Yeah, unbelievable. Eon did the same thing, okay? Now that sort of thing is just really smart and lovely because it shows we didn't have to do this. No one would ever go fucking thing, didn't even add a torch, well, that is shit, right?

No one in research would have said it would help if you had a torch. But someone thought, now that's an example of discretionary effort or discretionary, you know, that someone made the budget available and bothered to put enough attention into this to think, actually, they're going to be loads of cobwebs, it's going to be dark and musty and they can't see. And we're back to designing for the disabled again, I suppose, in a funny kind of way. But it's just kind of way. But it's just that there is this weird thing which is the other thing I think that I noticed as a criticism of digital is there's not enough attention to what happens

when things go wrong. So they optimize a fantasy version of the customer journey. And they don't think of what happens when that journey doesn't happen to plan. they don't think of what happens when that journey doesn't happen to plan. So I hate criticizing John Lewis because generally I love them and I get the stuff to live into my local weight troves and it's fabulous and you know and they do wonderful advertising, it's a great brand, it's a partnership, I love it. But I wanted to dice from John Lewis and it was supposed to be to live the next day at weight troves and I never got a text saying it had turned up but after about two days it said it'll be dispatched to arrive tomorrow so I assumed it must have been there so I went in there and said no it seemed to be well the one of the drive for me but the Dyson despit, okay. Now, they must have known that it hadn't,

or they must have had the data to know that it hadn't arrived, okay. So, a bit of me, I rang them up and I said, why do I have to, they said, what you have to do is reorder, we'll refund you and you reorder, and I'll send you another one. I said, why is this my problem, okay?

Because you should have noticed that it didn't arrive. You should have texted me to say there's been a delay. You should have canceled that first order, sent out the second one and said, don't worry, it'll be that tomorrow. I wouldn't need you've noticed because I want to, I want that desperate to have the thing. Okay. You know, right? I wouldn't have cared. Instead, I'm suddenly the second, this is where bureaucracies, I think, is so telling. The second something goes wrong, you find yourself in a spiraling nightmare of calf gask, you know, total chaos, where there's nothing you can bloody do about it. I did feel about that. Well, hold on, there should be a fucking algorithm that says, has it arrived if no forward to person.

Yeah. Decide what to do. And it humanizes that the company side, right? If they'd said, if they'd run me up and said, look, we fucked up a bit. Yeah. Sorry about this, but it'll be with you tomorrow. I would say, what a great company. Yeah.

You know, because you've actually taken an initiative and you're actually looking out for me. And so I mean, I worry about all this stuff because I think there's this optimization thing, which is all based around the kind of fantasy of how the world's supposed to work. And in so many ways, A, the world doesn't work like that because shit happens and things go wrong. And I wonder that when tech people are designing, they're looking for this naive navana situation, which you can demonstrate in which when it works to plan looks really cool. But in many cases, they may be optimizing completely the wrong thing. So they may be obsessed with getting the thing there in one day rather than two. Whereas

what I really want is just, you know, is actually really regular tracking to tell you the way to the point. We want to know when it's there. Yeah, maybe what they're trying to do is actually optimizing what seems to be the, what might be the sort of operations element of optimization, not the psychological element of optimization. And then you get back to all my shit about train, saying the point that actually making trains faster is relatively of secondary importance for many train journeys in the UK.

Because you can now work on the train. Actually the most important train technology in the last 20 years is Wi-Fi plus a table. Because if you got Wi-Fi on a table, I mean, genuinely, if you ever invite me to speak in Newcastle, I always say to my PA, if you're in Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, basically say yes. She goes, well, it's natural confidence. What the hell are you going there for? You know, I'm, you know, and I go, yeah, but I get four hours on a train, which is the most productive.

I'm going to be all week. Yeah, you're insulated in this him at the time. You see the environment. No one's bothering you. You've got no one bothering you. No one bothering you. They might bring me a minute of tea and coffee and laughing. And so what's so interesting is that to some extent every time you attach these kind of rational metrics

to what you're trying to do, you pay a very large creative opportunity cost because maybe the thing you'll really need to optimize isn't actually numerically expressable, It's not a metric. It's a feeling. How do you scale that then? I think what you do need is you do need just behavioral science to go in and say we have quite a lot of evidence to show that a people don't know what they want. They don't they can't say what they want, but we have quite a lot of evidence about people's emotional state that they care actually much more than they think about X and much less than they think about Y. And therefore if you optimize either what consumers say they want or what economic logic seems to dictate, you might be missing where the real money shot

is in this activity. I totally get it. Rory, today's been absolutely fantastic. I'm right in saying that within the next couple of months you're going to have a book coming out, is that correct? Three or four, it's called Alchemy, the surprising power of ideas that don't make sense. And it's basically a plea for the world to abandon this need that everything needs a rational justification before we try it. In the real world, bonkers, shit works, and very logical things fail. Fantastic.

And we've just got to face up to that. Well, I think we've got a good list of them that we've gone through today So hopefully if I can get a hold of you around about when the book comes out I'd love to have you back on again I'm sure that lots of the listeners will have absolutely enjoyed today's episode. I really appreciate your time It's been a pleasure speaking to you and next time you're in London or next time I may be a new castle on one of these train trips. I'd love to catch up. Absolutely fantastic.. Rory, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much indeed. you