This Week in Startups - E1077: “Alchemy” Author Rory Sutherland on the Darwinian approach to business, analyzing outliers, why eccentric CEOs have a psychological advantage with customers & more!

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

1:00 Jason intros "Alchemy" author Rory Sutherland 3:45 Architecture is the cheapest way to buy art 6:01 How Rory is dealing with quarantine, why he prefers working from home, and will businesses be more efficient post-COVID? 14:12 What is Rory's job, why you should strive to create your own job title, treating the free market as Galapagos Island, using the Darwinian approach to business & analyzing outliers 19:47 Why some business successes are due to psychological discoveries: Red Bull, Dyson & Nespresso 27:25 Jason's theory on why Dyson succeeded, Kano theory on product development, why eccentric CEOs have a psychological advantage with customers, how Uber's arrival map was the key feature of the product 33:48 Why the actual value of products are typically not the proposed value of products 39:40 How new products hold value as a conversation starter, how context, setting & framing is essential to innovation 43:21 Two ways to create economic value: find something people want and figure out how to make it OR figure out what you can make and make people want it & examples: Lionfish, Fish That Ate The Whale, Royal Potatoes 50:13 Why are Americans resistant to behavioral economics? Is there still a hangover from McCarthyism? How this relates to COVID and wearing masks 1:02:08 Daily news is 95% noise, why political news coverage doesn't reflect political reality 1:11:40 Why modern politics is dumb since far left and far right are much closer than they've ever been, issues with referrals & nepotism 1:21:06 How Rory got his first job in advertising "as a weirdo" and the wildcard since he was hired as part of a group, individual hiring vs. group hiring 1:23:20 TWiST Book Club Questions - Casey: Favorite behavioral study experiment or one that he found the results to be surprising? (ie. Milgram experiment or Stanford Prison Study) 1:32:12 Catherine: What’s Rory’s favorite alchemist moment of his own from work? Has he had to advocate for an illogical idea, and how did he persuade others? 1:41:01 What will we lose by being remote? 1:51:19 Reading their own audiobooks, how cheaper and easier consumption does NOT cannibalize original mediums 2:01:26 How Rory would reinvent the theatre experience, why modern corporations are slow to innovate & experiment 2:11:18 Greatness of re-readable books and rewatchable movies/television

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And NetSuite by Oracle, the business management software that handles every aspect of your business in an easy-to-use cloud platform. Schedule a free product tour and receive your free guide seven actions businesses need to take now at NetSuite.com. com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to this week in startups. It's June in 2020. And we might be coming out of the pandemic or we might be going into the second wave of it. We're dealing with a ton of social unrest and protest here in the United States, as many of you are, even around the world.

And boy, has it been a very interesting, unique couple of months here in America? In fact, it's been like basically nothing in our world. lifetime, with the exception of perhaps 9-11, the Great Recession, 1987, we had a huge stock market crash, but that was kind of localized. In other words, this is one of the most unique, perplexing, confusing, and perhaps even transformative moments of our life, time. And I thought 9-11 would be the most. And this feels like it's much more impactful than even 9-11, which at the time of 9-11, couldn't even conceive. And I'm really excited to have our next guest on the program

because he's an interesting thinker. And he came to me because we have a book club based on this podcast, This Week in Starburst. We just started on a whim. You know, we have a Slack channel where a couple of thousand of us hang out each week. There's tens of thousands of members. Hundreds of people posting interesting things about startups and entrepreneurship every day. You can join This Week in Startups.com slash Slack.

It's free like everything we do. We make money off investing in companies, not off charging founders for stuff. And so you can join us there and join the Books group. We did Bob Eiger's Ride of a Lifetime. We just did The Fish That Eat the Whale, the Story of the Banana King. And then in between those two, somebody said, hey, there's a really interesting book called Alchemy. And I said, Alchemy, oh, it's my favorite word, or one of my favorite words. As many of you know, I'm a dire straits fan.

and the greatest rock and roll album ever recorded live is Alchemy. And this book, Alchemy, the dark art and curious science of creating magic in brands, business, and life really hit a lot of entrepreneurs. And I think they weren't expecting it. And it's a really great read. It's a great listen, in fact. And we have the author, Rory Sutherland with us today on This Week in Startup. Hey, Rory, thanks for coming on the pod.

A huge pleasure. Really an honor to be here. Thank you very much indeed. Yeah, now I'm assuming you're in the UK somewhere? Yeah, just outside London, between Seven Oaks and Westeroom, so it's about 20 miles from the center of London. Fantastic, and you're living in your architecturally unique apartment, I take it, as opposed to a fancy new apartment. This is your architecturally significant apartment. It's one of the chapters in your book. One of the chapter says that architecture is the cheapest way of buying art, because the way people buy architecture and buildings

starts with location, then size, and essentially down your choice architecture, aesthetics and design pretty much fall out at the bottom. And as a result, you pay a very trivial premium to live in an architecturally significant building. That is fascinating. I was looking at a bunch of these type of buildings and I almost bought a building called the Innis House here and it was the house from Blade Runner, which was Decker's apartment in Blade Runner, Ennis House, Ennis House, E-N-N-N-I-S. And they wanted like $4 million for it. And I was like, oh, my God, that's amazing. I'll get it was when I lived in Los Angeles.

The problem was it's a Frank Lloyd Wright house and it was going to cost like $15 million to renovate because he made it out of these crazy Aztec tiles. The blocks. I think I know it. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It's a gorgeous house.

In fact, he made like another little mini version of it. But anyway, the thing that's amazing is you're absolutely right. You can buy one of these houses, but you can't change it, right? Because it's architecturally significant. No. I mean, that's the downside. Although, to be honest, if you have a kind of compulsion for remodeling homes, the fact that you can't change it is a bit of a plus. because it forces you to be happy with what you've already got.

And also you can't change the interior with Frank Lloyd Wright either because generally they're all of a piece. There's a great website for your listeners, by the way, which I occasionally use as kind of fantasy browsing, which is right on the market. Yes. Which is the complete list of Frank Lloyd Wright properties for sale at any one time. And I think there's a gas station in Idaho,

which has been for sale for ages for about half a million dollars, which is the world's only Frank Lloyd Wright gas station. I mean, how is that not for sale? I mean, what a great office space. I mean, a cafe. Think about the possibilities. But I was literally on that website three months ago looking because there's another Ennis house that was like a little version of it.

And he seemed to work on a lot of themes. How are you doing with the pandemic in the UK and have you been quarantined in place? And what has that been like for you? Because I think it's an interesting jumping off point because the world has changed so dramatically. And we'll get to the book and a lot of the interesting concepts in it, but I'm curious your take on it. How is this affecting life? How is it affecting your life? What do you think the carry forward will be? This is a terrible thing to say, and I really don't like saying it, because I'm conscious of the fact that it's affected people incredibly

unequally. At a purely selfish personal level, I like it. I mean, I like working remotely. I prefer Zoom meetings to physical meetings. It's brought home to me what an extraordinary amount of what is stressful in working life is nothing to do with the economically productive part of what we do. It's the extraneous crap that comes bundled with it. And so, you know, my actual work,

by which I mean the part of my work, which is presumably economically valuable, although you can always debate that with someone working in the advertising industry, whether there's any economic value at all. The actual work is more or less enjoyable. It's like solving a crossword or something. The things that contribute the stress

are generally things like not being able to find someone's office at 9 o'clock in the morning, going to the wrong meeting room. And it's nothing to do with the real work. And so the part of my work that's useful, when I'm allowed simply to do that, I lead the life of a kind of not very diligent

Victorian clergyman. You know, it really is quite civilised and pleasant. Now, I don't like saying this because I'm also conscious of the fact that if you're in a flat share with a lunatic or you're in a place with no garden or outdoor space, if you have, for example, anxiety problems, this has hit you very, very badly. But it's worth simply making the point that I think, I think that the remote working bug is here to stay. Yeah, it is definitely addictive. I don't think that will revert. Yeah. And so if everybody is working remote, what does that mean for business?

How will business change? Which businesses will benefit from this? Will businesses be more efficient, less efficient? Will people be working more or less? What does the world look like if we're 10 years from now and people don't go to offices? Let's say 50% of people who are going to offices now don't go anymore? I'm terrified of predicting this because it's something that's been predicted for so long. And I had a friend, funny enough, in your line of business, who was in Silicon Valley.

And more or less, as soon as the internet came along, he bought property, I think, overlooking Lake Tahoe on the grounds that he thought that city property would plummet in value. This was 1995. And the most valuable thing you could own would be a fantastic view. And that was his logic in 95. Now, so far, he's yet to be proved right. The opposite has happened. And strangely, in fact, the internet made the world more centripetal, not centrifugal.

Because it concentrated activity more, I think, in about five or six megacity hubs. And so I'm very, very loath to make confident predictions about teleworking and remote working. On the other hand, we all have had an enforced glimpse of this. the possibilities. It's possible that teleworking and remote working is something which, I suppose, in complexity theory, you might call a threshold problem in that until about 30% of people adopt it 30% of the time, its benefits don't really become apparent. Right. And so, I mean, what it would mean would be it would undoubtedly change property values, but ideally what I'd like to see happen is that the relationship between labor and capital,

to use kind of Marxist terminology briefly, becomes a bit more nuanced. And so one of the things I've been talking to a guy at the Adam Smith Institute in London, and we said, look, the standard model of work is you pay people, and they grudgingly come and work for you for the minimum hours necessary in exchange for money that they prefer to leisure up to the point of the margin. Now, that's patently not a very good representation. People derive identity from their work, some parts of their work, they find enjoyable or purposeful or valuable. But one thing I did say is the exchange between work and

leisure can be more nuanced. So if you think about it as you have free time, which is leisure, but you also value free where and free when, by which I mean the opportunity to work at a place of your choosing, which may not be home, by the way, but it may not be the office, and the opportunity to perform work at a time of day of your choosing, has a value to it, which is independent of work leisure, which is, I think, a false dichotomy. I learned a bit of this, for two reasons.

I was a very early Zoom advocate in the sense that, to me, this was like in behavioural science, the conundrum with moist toilet paper and video conferencing were two things that made obvious logical sense, but which nobody really adopted. Okay. And so I regarded those as the kind of Fermat's last theorem of behavioral science.

And so I did lots of experiments, even two years ago, before the pandemic, with my own team, trying to get them to work remotely more. Thank God. Thank God that's where you went with it, because I was about to say, if you worked with your team to work on wet toilet paper, we might have to put a label on this, podcast. Yeah.

No, I left that to their own discretion, although I patently made it very clear that I thought that Monty's toilet paper was better. Yes. And when we get back from this, just quick break, I want to know what actually is your day job?

What do you do at your when you work in advertising and then why you wrote the book when we get back on this week and start? Hey, it's a little weird right now. We all know that. And we also know that, no matter how crazy it gets out there, we need to focus on delighting our customers. And it's super important to maintain those customer relationships. And Zendesk is here to help you with the Zendesk for

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All right, everybody. My guest today is Rory Sutherland. I want you to stop, pause the podcast. Go over to Audible. Audible.com slash twist. Actually, can get a free book, I think. It's still up the link. Or go to Amazon or whatever bookseller.

you prefer and go by Alchemy, the dark art and curious science of creating magic and brands, business and life. We were just talking about remote work, but just to tee it up, what is your day job? What do you actually do for work? I know you were in advertising, but what exactly do you do? Vice Chairman's a great job because it's one of very few remaining jobs where you can more or less define it yourself. I had a very good friend J.P. Rangaswami, who was chief technology officer of BT for a time. And he always said, never do a job which is pre-existing. Because he said, if you take on someone else's job, you end up being defined by comparison

with your predecessor. Whereas if you have a job title which didn't exist before, you have some degree of freedom of invention, which I think is quite clever. Very clever. So when these people invent bizarre job titles, maybe they aren't being entirely pretentious. They know what they're doing. and that enables you to write a job around your own strengths. And a part of it, quite a large part, is what I call behavioral science impresario,

which is continually making the case that, well, as I put it once, the next revolution is psychological, not technological. Explain what that means. And so quite a lot of that is suggesting that better understanding of what people really care about and what matters to people, because we, don't know ourselves. One of the reasons you need free market capitalism is it's a massively well-funded social science experiment in discovering what people really want to do. And we can only second guess at this, I think. And so one of the things I believe is that I think you can take,

and I think advertising people, but not only advertising people, I think marketing people, psychologists, academics in that space can kind of do a dive. on capitalism, which is treat free markets as a kind of Galapagos Island environment. And instead of doing what mostly happens in business, which is people come along with a pre-existing preconception about how capitalism works and what its virtues are, and instead, look at the anomalies, the duck-billed platypuses, the weird beaked finches, and ask yourself, what does this really tell us. And I told the story at our Nudstock festival, which was last Friday, very simple point. Okay. If I went into a board of directors, and particularly if they were wearing

suits or they got an MBA or finance background, and I said, why are most fish restaurants by the sea, or why are there so many fish restaurants by the sea? The, what you might call the Harvard Business School answer is, you know, low cost of distribution, ready access. to sources of fresh fish, you know, supply chain, logistics, all that sort of stuff. And actually, if you look at it in any depth, that isn't really a very good explanation. Because if you look at what really happens, if that were true, you get lots of fish restaurants five miles in land. Also, the best place to buy fresh fish reliably is probably at a fish market in a large city, not by the sea, where you may be over-dependent on three fishermen or whatever.

I think what it is is it's mostly psychological that when you're by the sea, fish taste better. Correct. And there's some evidence of this. I mean, rose wine, apparently, I can't stand the stuff, but apparently it tastes better by the sea. And they've done experiments of this. There are various drinks and substances where the psychophysics or the psychogeography is very strong. I don't know if you've ever had pastis or perno, those French anise. Oh, the Ricard, pastis.

Amazing when you have it on the two or the three with a little ice and a little water. Mix it yourself. Fantastic at a French bistro. Horrible at home. Disgusting when you bring it home. You bring a bottle home because you've had this French bistro experience. It's undrinkable. Right. But in a French bistro, oh, so nice, especially when a waiter brings it with an apron around their waist, yeah. And so I describe myself as a kind of Darwinian business analyst in a way in that I learned this, and I huge debt of gratitude to any of your listeners, Robert H. Frank at Cornell, who's written various books, for example, the Darwin economy. And the economic naturalist, I think, is one of his as well. That's a fantastic, the whole Darwinian approach to business, which is look at the anomalies and the

peculiarities and ask why, rather than coming along with your kind of creationist assumptions and imposing that model on everything you see, I think is extraordinarily useful in understanding what business really tells us, because it's an enormously well-funded. social science experiment. And what can entrepreneurs learn from looking at business problems, looking at their own business, and trying to think about the behavioral aspects of it, i.e. eating fish by the sea or rosé, you know, when you're in the desert or by the beach, how should we change how we think? What is the exercise we do in terms of opening our minds up to different possibilities,

as opposed to what we learned in a business book or when we're getting our MBAs. If you're prepared to abandon this kind of very dry narrative that economies work because they're efficient and instead consider that perhaps they work because they're adaptive or perhaps business successes are much less down to sort of price and efficiency and much more down to psychological discoveries made either deliberately or accidentally.

And then look at the evidence. And here are a few, I think, billion-dollar ideas. I don't think it's an exaggeration to describe them as such. Nespresso, Amazon Prime, Apple, specifically, I suppose, the iPod and iPhone, Red Bull. I can name a few more. I think I mentioned Dyson, okay? Yeah, Dyson's a great one.

Dyson's an extra. I think they're all. really, their value lies in either deliberately or accidentally stumbling on some psychological truth, which is counterintuitive or strange, and therefore had never been uncovered by anybody else. So let's do it for Dyson. Like the Dyson is this fancy, like, $500 vacuum that just looks weird. Right.

What, what is... It looks weird. Yeah. I, to be honest, I'm slightly upset you chose Dyson, because unlike, say, Red Bull, Nespresso, Google to a small degree, by the way, which I'll mention later, all of them are successes which are much more to do with fish tastes better by the sea than they are to do with fish supply chains. And in the case of Dyson, this is the thing that I find fascinating. Okay, if you'd come to me, and bear in mind, I've got a disproportionately high appetite

for counterintuitive ideas. But if James Dyson had come to me, 15 years ago and said, I think there's a market for an $800 vacuum cleaner. I would have basically said, Jim, mate, don't give up the day job, okay? Because your idea is insane. You could have looked at all vacuum cleaners sold to date to the domestic market. And you would have said, you know, it's a distress purchase. It's a grudge purchase. You only buy a vacuum cleaner when your existing vacuum cleaner breaks down or when you're

forced to move out of rental accommodation. Okay. That's the first point. there's no luxury ends to the vacuum cleaner market. Secondly, you would have said, if we look at the kind of bell curve of price, we see that about $3,400 is the feasible maximum. And in any case, Jim, you've missed the absolute clincher, which is anybody who can afford $800 to spend on a vacuum cleaner

probably employs domestic cleaners so they don't even use their own vacuum cleaner in the first place. 100%. And I would have smugly sat back and thought, right, that's got rid of his insane delusions, hasn't it? Only to face the embarrassing recognition that he's a billionaire and I'm not. Right. So what is the psychological device at work there that made that idea particularly work, do you think?

I have to be honest. I can explain Nespresso, which is a framing thing. Right. That because you pay by the pod, that previously before Nospresso, the market for a 60 cent coffee that you made yourself at home didn't really exist. There would have been a few lunatics who bought unroasted Jamaican Blue Mountain and roasted it themselves in a shed. Yeah. Who kind of paid that amount. But it was a tiny niche.

Now, the interesting thing is because you don't buy an espresso in a jar or packet you pay by the pod, your frame of reference isn't Maxwell House. It's Starbucks. Right. You're comparing it to, it's a third of a Starbucks. You're comparing it to a much more expensive alternative. Right. Okay. Now, the case of Dyson, I genuinely don't quite know.

And I have a theory, and that's all it is, is a completely untested theory, which is that if you need a vacuum cleaner, if you go in and replace your old one, you're $300 down, and all you've got is the same vacuum cleaner you had before. And it's similar to my theory that you don't get an endorphin rush from mid-market retail. You get a thrill from an extravagance, and you get a thrill from a bargain, but you don't get a thrill from the mid-market. market. Right. Buying. Okay. So if you, to stay that simply, getting a really good, cheap cup of coffee is thrilling, paying for a $7 pour over is thrilling, but $250. No, not. It doesn't do anything emotionally for me. It's less than a Starbucks. It's more than I can make it at home. Falls flat. Yeah. What's the point? It's just in the middle. Just in the middle. The only,

The only clue I had is I went shopping for bedding with my wife once. And after looking at bedding for about an hour or so, it seemed like an hour. Anyway, I eventually said, look, can we make a deal here? Can we either spend nothing or a lot? But my wife, I said, well, that doesn't make any sense. I said, well, no, no, no. Because if we spend nothing, we've saved £200, £300, £300, £400,000. Maybe I can go and buy a drone.

Right. That would be emotionally exciting. That's emotionally exciting. That would be fun. If we spent 400 pounds, which is in the middle, I'd basically end up with the same bedding I had already, okay, and I'd spent 400 pounds. So where's the progress? On the other hand, if I spend 900 pounds or 1,000 pounds, I can get excited by thread counts, Egyptian cotton, mattress toppers, Oxford pillowcases, tog values. And I could nerd out in the whole thing. And I will go to bed that night and go, ooh, this is nice. Okay. And so that may be the same object that applies to the Dyson, which is, okay, we've got, we need a bastard vacuum cleaner. I hate paying for the thing. But at least if I buy one of these, I get a bit of a kickout. Hey, do you have a great idea? Do you want to turn it into a beautiful website? This way,

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Yeah, I have a theory about it. run it up the flagpole here and see what you do. Oh, lovely. Good. I think that we've been sold on having what I'll call like this like perfect life aspiration or delusion where we want to feel like, because we watch television commercials where people are in some ultra modern house, they have this ultra modern counter, their hair is perfect and they take that pot out of the perfect drawer where they're all color coordinated. We put it in. We have our espresso. It's perfect crema. We throw it away. we didn't clean. It's just a perfect life. And then you open the door to the, you know, your laundry closet and there's the perfect Dyson hung up perfectly cleaned and aligned. And you mop something up or

vacuum something up and you just feel like your life is perfect. That's what I feel like I'm getting sold all the time is the perfect life delusion. Is that what you guys are doing to us in advertising? Hopefully. I mean, the interesting thing is that one thing is, although Dyson himself is an engineer and is convinced that it is the engineering superiority of the device that commands its premium, he's not wholly wrong in that, but at the same time, if he'd made them beige and opaque, rather than transparent, I don't think he would have sold more than 10. Right. And it's rather like, I mean, we were talking about Tesla's earlier.

I have to admit that 20% of the reason I want to buy a Tesla is because of dog mode, and I don't even own a dog. But the optionality of someday you might get a dog makes it interesting, or the fact that they took the time to create dog mode means they probably took the time to make everything else great. So there is a theory, by the way, which is of huge value to anybody in startup world, which I think bears this out. It's called Kano Theory, a guy called Kano at the University of Tokyo. And he worked a lot with the Japanese consumer electronics industry in the 80s and 90s.

And he divides product attributes into three. There are kind of threshold attributes where they're table stakes. You have to fulfill that role, but it doesn't create any excitement or premiumization. So if you buy a brand of milk, okay, Nobody goes, I love this brand of milk because the cartons don't leak. That's just something you have to do. In fact, if you don't do it, nobody will buy you more than twice. Then there are performance attributes which are quite closely correlated to the central function of the device itself.

And now, threshold attributes scale in terms of human happiness sub-linearly. Performance attributes scale linearly. And then there are these things called delight attributes, which are surprisingly gratuitous. You know, the eject mechanism on a 1980s cassette deck, okay? You know, when you went to buy that thing, you pressed eject. And if there was a beautiful kind of damping act. Yes, the nice slow. With a little bit of a counterweight.

Yeah. Yeah. You know. And he always says they scale super linearly in that they're the, by the way, what's interesting about them, and this is why Mad CEOs, I'm not calling Elon Mad, but he's certainly eccentric, should we say, okay? The value of the Mad CEOs is the, the, delight attribute is often surprisingly tangential to what the product's really about, e.g.

the eject mechanism, for example, or the free cookie you get at double tree hotels. And it's the first thing the finance director wants to kill. Right, because it makes no sense. Because he sees this as a completely gratuitous cost center. Right. And in finance language, it is. In psychological terms, it's an extraordinarily valuable value creation center and distinguishing future. And I think, I think carno theory is really, really useful because, you know, one or the, with Uber,

the real killer was the map. Okay, there's another billion dollar business. Okay. The map, which fundamentally changed psychologically your experience of waiting for a car, even if it didn't reduce the duration at all. Just knowing it's on the map, knowing where it is, reduces the anxiety and delight you because you can go use the loo or have another drink if it's 12 minutes, but if it's two minutes, you want to close your tab and get outside. There's a Kiwi in New York called David Rock, who has this little mnemonic scarf, and it's five things that humans really care about,

which economists and more rational people don't really understand. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness. And you might argue that actually Uber probably provides the first three, you know, at the very least. Actually, the first four, because the rating system is also, in fact, a feedback between customer and company. Okay, so walk me through those again one more time. So the Uber has...

Status. Yes. Now, the status thing is partly the map as well, because I don't know if you do this, okay. I occasionally, effectively, arrive on the sidewalk and time my arrival on the sidewalk to coincide exactly what the car. Of course, you do. That is the, you're having the perfect life.

And it makes you feel like Kaiser Soze at the end of the usual suspects, you know, when Pete Pothelthwaite picks him up in the jag. Whereas standing in the rain going, I wonder if that's my car over there. That's a low status feeling. Not a perfect life. No. Okay. And so essentially,

those things which create the illusion of leading a perfect life, deliver, even if, to be honest, the utility in economic terms they deliver is pretty trivial. The psychological utility they deliver is much, much higher than any logical person would think. But I think your perfect life theory, I think bears, I think there might also be other practical benefits such that because the Dyson is actually a bit of a status symbol, you don't even need to keep it in a closet. it. You know, you leave it out. It says something about you. It says something.

You know, I've talked with Nassim Taleb quite a bit about this, that what we think products are for officially and what they're really for are often not the same thing. And so he came up with three categories. The value of a dishwasher isn't principally that it washes your dishes. It's that it gives you a place to put dirty plates out of sight. Right. The value of a swimming pool is not to swim in. it's that it allows you to walk around your garden in a bathing costume without feeling like an idiot.

Right. And toothpaste is a really interesting one, which features in the book, by the way, that we think we clean our teeth for dental hygiene reasons, plaque, fillings, prevention of gum disease, tooth decay and so forth. If you look at when people really do it, it's really about fresh breath. That's what you might call the proximate dry vote. It may not be the ultimate benefit. it. But if that weren't the case, why is 98% of the world's toothpaste flavored with mint? Right. We want to have fresh-smelling breath in case we're going to kiss somebody or

we're going to have a conversation. We don't want to offend people. So there's two things that work. One is the freshness of it and the other is obviously, you know, preventing plaque and our dentist doing that. And you made the point in the book that putting specs in it or a line in it made people pay more or be more engaged. Why would that be? Absolutely. Stripes. It's simply a kind of heuristic, which is if you want to tell people that the thing

has two functions, when you think about it, striped toothpaste is utterly absurd, because once you put in your mouth, the two ingredients are mixed up anyway, so why keep them separate in the two? But it simply makes believable the fact that this does two functions. Whereas if you had pink toothpaste, it's much, much harder for us to grasp that fact. Right. It's just there right in front of us. It reminds me of we had a really interesting product. I can't remember the name of it.

Producer Nick, maybe we'll look it up. But you could buy peanut butter and jelly, the American staple, in a jar. And it was sections, almost like slices of pie. If you looked at it from the top, a little bit of jelly, a little bit of peanut butter, a little bit of jelly, a little bit of peanut butter. And when you took a swipe of it and made your peanut burn jelly, you didn't have to do two steps. It was just one step, one jar, one knife, not a knife and a spoon and two jars. It's fascinating. Did it succeed?

I don't know if it succeeded. I think it's still on shelves, so therefore it did succeed. But no, I don't think it's like a big breakout hit. I think it's something kids buy because it's really interesting. Yeah. And fun. It is fascinating. And, you know, if we're to be absolutely honest about it, okay, how many people are buying an electric car exclusively for environmental reasons?

Now, I'm not suggesting it's irrelevant. It's a consideration. But I'm not sure that the concern for the environment has quite the same immediacy as fart mode or, you know, or in some cases, by the way, just conversation. So one of the things I think that's very clever, that possibly, what we see logically as a disadvantage with electric cars, which is the complexity, may turn into a strength in another year or two, simply because people love talking about cars. And the problem with modern petrol cars is there's nothing remotely heroic about a journey, okay?

They're boringly reliable, and there's nothing really you can say unless you start bragging about kind of a heated steering wheel or something ridiculous. We've talked about them for too long, right? I mean, we've been talking about like cars since the 50s and how amazing they were, and they haven't really been transcendent for decades. No, they haven't done a Dyson or an espresso, really, have they, for about two decades. And so the interesting thing there is that suddenly you have this thing which is conversationally rich, and you can start talking about kilowatt hours and charging times and range of,

anxiety. And I think people like that. I mean, I think, you know, I think, you know, that conversational value is often hugely underrated, I think, when we buy products, we partly buy them to talk about. Well, everybody, the last few months have certainly taught us what's important in life. It's also taught us what we need to eliminate or even change. It's the same for business. What are the changes you need to make? Do you have a hairball of multiple software systems? And you could streamline on just one? Well, all you need is NetSuite by Oracle, the world's number one cloud business system, finance, HR, inventory, e-commerce, everything you need, all in one place. You save time, you're certainly going to save money, and there'll be a lot less headaches, that's for sure.

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net suite.com slash TWIST. Thanks again to NetSuite for supporting independent media like this week in startups. It means a lot to our community that you've been with us for so many years and supported us so deeply. And I personally appreciate it. Let's get back to this amazing episode. That's fascinating. So the person who gets the latest AirPods or the Apple Watch or the latest iPhone with the new

camera, they get to show it to everybody else. They get to play the role of the vanguard. they get to be the person on the cutting edge, and that allows for a conversation to occur. Nobody wants to talk about, you know, U2's album from 1984, but they would love to discover some new musician and talking about Jason Isbell

or I don't know who, what new artists came out. That's much more interesting to be the person who's on the latest tip. So at the simple level, it buys you a certain kind of status, but it also buys you a kind of convening power, doesn't it? Yeah. You know, that you can become the center of a group. That's fascinating. I mean, by the way, when I talk in these terms,

everybody says, you know, what a really interesting and strange thing to say. And the point I have to keep making is that people have been saying exactly the same thing as me for bloody ages. I mean, Adam Smith, in the theory of moral sentiments, was pretty much a behavioral economist Avent la Letra, as it were, the Austrian School of Economics entirely believe that value is

psychologically determined. It's not determined by objective reality, but by perception. And the Austrians, of course, are the most advertising, favourable economists, because they argue that the ability of making something saleable and attractive through recontextualizing it or storytelling or whatever you use is just as much a creation of economic value as manufacturing is. And there's this great quote by Ludwig von Mises, where he says there's no useful distinction to be made in a restaurant between the value created by the man who cooks the food and the value created by the man who sweeps the floor.

What does it mean? And he explicitly means by the man who sweeps the floor marketing and presentation and so forth. Got it. Right. Yeah. People are not going to the restaurant just for calories. There are plenty of places to get calories.

they're going for some other reasons. And actually, there are plenty of experiments which show if you serve people, Mishland-starred food in the wrong environment, they don't enjoy it remotely. Ah, the context, the set, the setting. The context, yeah. So context setting and framing is actually essential to innovation, really. Because unless you actually can describe something you've invented in terms that changes someone's behavior, you haven't got an innovation, you've merely got an invention.

Got it. And I mean, the way I put this otherwise is, which is useful, I think, for the tech world. The tech world hates marketing, so I don't talk about marketing to the tech world. I talk about behavioral science framing. Yes, that's much more palatable because we look at marketing as like whipped cream. You really hate it, don't you? Well, I've learned to actually embrace. it a bit because if you reach your natural audience, how do you get people who are not in your

natural audience, right? And I've actually thought about that a lot with my podcast or with angel investing. There are people out there who don't know what we do. So how do you get them into the fold, right? You kind of reach a natural audience at a certain point, and then there's no $700 vacuums to be sold. You've got to find some other market, I guess. Peter Thiel in zero to one is one of the few people who gets it, emphatically. I mean, that's That's a very interesting book, I think. But I mean, put it very bluntly, okay, there are two ways you can create economic value, which is you can either work out what people want and find out a really clever way to make it,

or you can work out what you can make and find a really clever way to make people want it. And there's no useful distinction to be made between those two, which are their two sides of the same coin, really. You had a great example in the book of an invasive species of fish. The lionfish. The lionfish, which was just disastrous when it got out in, I guess, the Caribbean or South America because it was killing all the native species. And I don't know where it came from Indonesia or something, but it didn't belong in the Caribbean here, in the Americas.

Explain what happened next. I think it might have escaped from an aquarium. that I think there may have been some sort of hurricane and an aquarium burst and a mating pair of lionfish escaped into Caribbean waters. And it had basically, it was a hideously brutal predator itself, but it seemed to have

no natural predators of its own, partly because of aposomatic signaling, if you want to go in, which is, it was a very weird coloured fish. And so most other fish had learned to avoid strange coloured fish. Yes. And what this is, it's kind of reverse signaling,

which is, I'm such a badass, I don't need to camouflage myself or hide. So very distinctive coloration is, as with toads and frogs and things, often operates as a kind of do not eat signal. Obviously, some other species learned to mimic this with varying degrees of success. Generally, it might work for a time until the predatory species cotton onto the difference. But it had no pre- So what they actually did in Colombia, I think, it was, wasn't it? They encouraged humans to eat it and they turned it into a delicacy and they got

Michelin-starred chefs preparing it. They got the Catholic Church to encourage people to eat it, on Fridays particularly. And so it was an ingenious kind of behavioral solution to a problem, which is if we don't have a predator, the ultimate apex predator is actually man. And so what we've got to do is if we can't get other fish to eat this damn thing, we'll have to get humans to eat it. Yeah, that makes total sense. By the way, I mean, I think it was more successful, too, than they even expected, because by keeping the numbers below a certain threshold, it prevented the problem becoming quite too large.

It's a non-linear relationship somehow between scale of problem and number of lionfish. So even anything that reduced the numbers was having a disproportionate effect on solving the wider environmental problem. Yeah, it's interesting. If you look at the banana, having just read this book, have you read this book, The Fish That Eat the Whale, about the Banana King, Zamore? No, you'll have to tell me,

you're the second person to have told me about it, so I will have to get around to reading it. It's a great book. It's basically about the banana wars. Basically, you know, an immigrant buys ripe bananas on a dock, and Jen tries to flip them to people and sell them because they were ripe. decides to go down and visit them in Nicaragua and Honduras and, you know, makes a fortune.

It's just a great entrepreneurial tale. But one of the things that's interesting about it is they basically did an entire marketing campaign around the bananas. And they, when you got to Ellis Island as an immigrant, they gave you a banana for free. And that was most immigrants first time to ever try a banana. And they associated with coming to the new world, a new fruit, incredibly sweet, and then they did a marketing campaign of, hey, you know, bananas work really well when you cut them up and put them on corn flakes. They work really well in banana bread and they did the same marketing. And you had a story about potatoes in yours. And during our book club, somebody was like, hey, you remember that book we read Alchemy?

Didn't Rory talk about potatoes and somebody who made potatoes into a fancy dish? So what he discovered, it's variously attributed to a king of Portugal and Frederick the Great. I think it is Frederick the Great. And he wanted Germans to cultivate Prussians, technically, to cultivate the potato because it was a third source of regular nutrients. So, or second source. So you were no longer so dependent on corn or wheat. And that meant that bread prices and food prices would fluctuate less because you had a substitute if the corn crop failed, you see. And the problem was is that when you have a king going around telling poor people to eat the damn thing,

they tend to react fairly negatively and they were saying things like, you know, we can't even get our dogs to eat the things why should we eat them ourselves? So he tried this reverse psychology and he declared the potato was a royal vegetable that it was only to be eaten by the royal family and he had a kind of royal potato crop

at the San Suisi Palace and it was guarded, it was guarded night and day but with secret instructions to the guards not to guard it very well. So pretty quickly the neighbouring peasants thought I want a bit of that, and they snuck in and started stealing them. And so it was a perfect case where people doing something voluntarily will adopt that behavior

far more enthusiastically than if they feel it's been imposed on them. Yeah, bottom up versus top down, right? It's a kind of, yeah, I mean, I guess it's a kind of lesson for governments everywhere, that they tend to default to legislation, coercion. So, you know, I know that there are kind of really extreme American libertarians who really dislike nudging or behavioural economics. But what's interesting about government

is it tends to default to legislation first, economic incentive second, persuasion third. Now, unless you're a pretty extreme libertarian, the very least you could say is shouldn't we do those things in the opposite direction? Shouldn't we try voluntary action first?

And by the way, I mean, as though, if you want a COVID lockdown question, it looks as though the disease peaked in the UK before the lockdown was imposed. And that was largely achieved by enough people working from home and self-isolating to a degree to essentially make the difference between more than one and less than one. Yeah. So people were, people convinced themselves, hey, I should stay home out of an abundance of caution. I don't need to be told to do that. And why is it that Americans are so resistant to behavioral economics is that we have such an independent free spirit. We don't want to admit that we can be influenced and manipulated and that we make our own choices.

Is that the core of the issue? It may be, I mean, there may be a kind of hangover from McCarthyism and the brainwashing fears of the 1950s. So if you remember, the advertising industry pretty much turned tail and ran from behavioral science and psychology in the 50s, because you had films like the Manchurian candidate. You had books like The Hidden Persuaders. And there was a widespread paranoia about manipulation. And so the ad industry essentially turned its back on anything to do with unconscious, subliminal action. In a way, they overplayed their hand. and they got too good at subliminal advertising or understanding human nature.

And when they got caught with their hand in the cookie jar, people said, you know what? This is too scary for you to be able to manipulate me like this. But there's also, I think there's also a strange thing that was just a question of timing, which is in the US nudging tended to be associated with the political left because its proponents such as Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler tended to, were Democrats. strangely in the UK, it was adopted by the conservative government, who saw it as a way

to solve problems through, apart from anything else, inexpensive interventions. Efficiency. Essentially through psychological efficiency. Emotional efficiency, I think, is a useful phrase. You can get it done so much quicker than with police, policing. How would you look at masks and getting people. to wear masks? Because this seems to be there are so many psychological

layers to being told you have to wear a mask being shown statistics that you can't perfectly model because you can't say put these hundred people in a room with 100 COVID infected people without

mask and put these hundred with masks and let's see what happens because you can't run experiments like that anymore. They're too dangerous. How do you look at this implementing masks? Do you have an interesting thing about that? which is when smallpox variolation came along as an idea to the UK, they ran a series of incredibly unethical experiments where they deliberately infected people. But they solved the ethical problem in a beautiful way. They deliberately infected people who are due to be hanged with the deal

that if they survived, they could go free. That's called a free roll. That's a free roll in poker. I'm sorry. You've got to say it in poker you call it a free roll. Like you got a free entry into a tournament. So there's only upside. There's no downside for them. There's only upside essentially because, okay, you might have a slightly more painful and lingering death, I guess, than being hanged. That's the only downside. Luckily, I think all seven of them who had been variolated survived. And I was involved in a group of people who discussed whether variolation or some similar form of it might be a form of protection. In other words, you infect people with a deliberately small dose in a part of the body where it's less likely to actually do harm.

Now, we still don't know whether that could potentially work because the kind of experiment you'd have to perform would be considered unethical by, well, me, probably else, okay? Yeah. But it's one of the things we don't know as well, which fascinates me. And it's really interesting. I've long had the belief that there must be some connection between, the size of the initial dose of the virus and the severity of the effects. Yes, this is pretty much no.

Yeah, this is pretty much consensus now is that if you're exposed to it for a longer period of time and more intensely. Repeatedly perhaps. Repeatedly perhaps, yes, the duration, the intensity of the exposure matters, which is why some young people who are working in closed environments got it, but other young people didn't. And it's just hard to understand because you're getting all this anarchist. anecdotal data and the things that our outliers stand out the most and get talked about most.

And also young healthcare workers seem to have a disproportionately high fatality rate, don't they? Because you're exposed repeatedly and in closed spaces. Right. The interesting thing there is that if you tell people this, one of the things that worried me about the binary suggestion that you either get it or you don't, is it can lead to what you might call fatalistic behavior. okay, which is in the First World War, the idea was either Jerry had a bullet with your name on it or he didn't. That essentially your survival was already determined by fate and it was a yes, no question.

And in the same way, I always thought, if you tell people, look, not only is it a question of not getting infected, it's also a question of if you do get infected, get infected less. And then the mask question becomes psychologically much more appealing. Because the idea would be that the mask, at the very least, will prevent you getting an enormous aerosol dose of this stuff deep into your lungs. Right. And if people could understand that, it would be easier for them to wear them. And there seems to be some crazy correlation. And let's go ahead and go there and talk about gender. But walking through our towns here in California, in northern California, I noticed 100% of women wearing masks. And probably, 60, 70, 80% of men, depending on the part of town I was in, were wearing masks. Is there a difference on a gender basis, if you think, and how people look at this fatalistic approach? That's a new one to me, which is, I mean, it could reflect something else, like the demography of the women and men who are around at the particular time.

Sure. There could be a confounding variable, but that interests me. certainly I notice it more commonly marked. Now, here's an interesting way of looking at it. Okay. Until this pandemic happened, the only people, unless I was in Asia, the only people I ever saw wearing masks in public were tourists from Japan or China. Right.

And I have to admit, okay, that not fully understanding what was going on, I took it a little bit badly because my, the implication was that we were, were kind of slightly unclean guilos and that they were wearing masks to protect themselves from the miasma omitting from all these westerners, you see. And when I saw people on the underground in London wearing masks, there was a little bit of me which went, you know, it was only then I discovered that the main reason for the practice is that the person themselves might have a small cold and they were doing it to protect other people as a pro-social act, not a selfish act. And so it may be that once you tell people it's pro-social, it's possible that women are then more assiduous at wearing than than men are.

Because they care more about humanity. Yeah. It kind of makes sense. Without being accused of genetic determinism, I think there might be a bit of truth to that to generalization. Well, I mean, yeah, men murder each other at an alarming rate, right? So, I mean, if you just were to look at violence in society, it's irrefutable. that men kill each other at a much higher rate than women kill each other. I think you're allowed to say that gender difference for sure.

And I had that same experience. I was in Japan and in a meeting, the translator was wearing a mask. And I was like, is normal for translators to wear masks? I thought it had something to do being the translator because it was the first time I had seen it. And they were like, no, she's sick. And I'm like, oh, wait, who's sick? She's sick. I said, if she's sick, why is she wearing?

And they explained because she doesn't want to get us sick. And I was like, oh, got it. But I, because of talking about context, like a confounding variable, first variable that came to my mind was, well, look, the translator came in the room and she's wearing a mask. I wonder if translators wear masks here because why would they wear a mask? And it's trying to figure it out. And I had just totally misattributed the mask to her being a translator. And so it's in fact, and actually I suspect it's doubly valuable because it says,

I'm wearing a mask, so you're free to keep your distance without seeming. standoffish. So there are also questions that may also be a value to the mask as a form of signal, which is by wearing a, if I'm walking down the street and I see three people approaching with masks, I don't have to cross the street because I know they're reasonably assiduous in terms of following instructions. Whereas someone without a mask, I might go, I'll give them an extra wide berth because I can't be entirely sure they're not one of those people who ignores instructions altogether. So it does give you, it does give you a little bit of an early, early warning mechanism as well, I think. The American total horror at it, I don't quite get. I mean,

in one sense, of course, you're allowed to be more individualistic. You haven't had quite experiences as Europeans have, either of being invaded or of being very, very heavily threatened by a neighbouring power, not since 1812, anyway. And so, you know, there may be, you know, Britain's within living memory can remember times where you just automatically obeyed instructions on how high you filled your bath. Food was rationed until about 1950-something in the UK. We accepted that level of government intervention in wartime. Whereas, I mean, what were the restrictions on consumption during World War II in the US?

There must have been some, because obviously Carpans were given over to. I mean, I think there was the War Powers Act where factories were forced to make things that we needed, whether it was planes or tanks or machine guns and people were, I don't know if they were actually forced to work in those factories, but I think, yeah, if you were not at war, you had to go work in the factories to make bullets. So if you weren't firing the bullets, you were making them, I think was the sort of idea.

But looking at, you know, this situation, it seems like the rugged individualism of America and not trusting the government, this can be a very powerful thing. if the government is trying to impose something evil on you, but if the government is trying to get you to wear a goddamn mask for your own good, it's actually working highly against you to not trust the government. And that is one of the weird things that has occurred,

and I'm interested in your perspective on it, is the loss of objectivity, truth, and trust in experts. You and I, I think, are in the same Generation X. I'm 49. I suppose you're in a similar range. to me. 54, yeah. Okay, so we're in the same group.

We were, I believe, educated similarly in that a person who was successful or who had achieved some amount of intellect or, you know, knowledge, you wanted to respect them. And now we live in a world where it's actually, you want to trust your gut over what the intellects are saying to you. People who are scientists have an agenda if they're telling us this global warming, scientists telling us to wear masks, they must have some agenda or not wear masks, they have a different agenda. What are your thoughts about the loss of truth and everybody moving to my opinion is as valid as your opinion? Like, is your opinion as valid as mine when it

comes to investing in startup companies or as mine is it valid as yours and investing in advertising? Well, obviously not. We have two different life experiences. It's a tough one. I mean, I think gotcha journalism does deserve a certain amount of criticism for this. Because I'm not entirely sure. what's going on, but essentially, after Woodward and Bernstein, you know, the high stakes in journalism were all about discrediting people in power, weren't they really? Yeah. And there's a bit of me which suggests that this is a bit excessive and also the narrative that 24-hour rolling media, people always blame social media for polarization, but it's worth remembering that conventional

media also has a vested interest in black and white stories of, you know, opposition and essentially creating an argument. I mean, the classic thing I always notice in the UK, and it's probably the same in the US, is if you're ever contacted by a news station, and they say, we want you to appear on this program about blah, and you say, that's interesting, because I have an extremely nuanced opinion about blah, part of me thinks this, but part of me thinks something else, you'll get a phone call about 10 minutes later saying, your presence is no longer required. Right.

And they'll get some, essentially, they'll get some sort of mannequian black or white obsessive to rant about it. And that is because conflict equals drama equals ratings, no conflict, no ratings. And also, of course, the oversimplification of things is particularly appealing. We'll turn this into a, I mean, in Britain, possibly less so in the US. This is a very rare point of view. But in recent years, I've occasionally gone into the Parliament building in the UK, into the houses of Parliament,

and you look at the meetings that are taking place around the building. And a very large proportion of those meetings are a bipartisan group of MPs from both the left or the right, dealing with some complex problem united in the interests of solving the problem as the best they can collectively. Now, if you watch the... the news or read the newspapers in the UK, you would have no idea than any of that activity takes place at all. The only exposed coverage about politics is entirely about direct conflict.

And okay, you can blame a social media, but it's worth remembering that the very same narrative that, you know, social media profits from is also pretty convenient to conventional news channels as well. Yeah, if it bleeds, it leads. I mean, bluntly, I kind of, I mean, one of the things I generally take as advice from people like Nassim Taleb and the philosopher Alan de Botton is don't pay much attention to short-term news in any case. Read weekly or monthly magazines because the signal to noise ratio in 24-hour rolling news is pretty much 95% noise. okay and so the other thing that i learned from on this is robert chaldeenie i don't know if you've read his great book influence he's in many ways the sort of godfather he's at the university of arizona he's kind of the godfather of behavioral science in many ways and he makes the point that

most news bias okay most bias by news organizations isn't what people think it isn't actually the news outlet telling you what to think The bias is created by what the journalists think is important. And journalists don't have that much power to change my mind about free market economics or whatever it may be. They're not going to change my mind, but they have immense power to put something on the front page or to bury it in the back. And there are two great quotations from film on this, from Citizen Kane. There's a line in Citizen Kane where I think Kane says, make the headline big enough and it'll make the story big enough. In other words, even if, to be honest, this is an arcane dispute only of interest to political nerds,

if you put it on page one, okay, it's huge, okay? On the other hand, if you watch the film Spotlight, there's this extraordinary telling phrase, which is we had, this is about the priests and abuse scandal in Boston, okay? We had this story 15 years ago or 10 years ago, but we buried it in Metro. Right. Now, I've always got a theory that if you'd put the Watergate scandal on page seven and page three and, you know, page VII and the supplement, okay. Right. Right.

You could have put exactly the same information there and the story would have gone nowhere. Back to context. You might argue if you're a paranoid right. You might argue if you're a paranoid right winger that if Nixon had been a Democrat, then the news media. would have done exactly that. Yeah, the framing, it goes back to framing, right? Like the 60 cent and espresso pod feels like a bargain compared to a three or four dollar Starbucks as opposed to a 60 cent pot of coffee and the whole pot being 60 cents worth of beans. And so there is that thing. If you read weekly publications or you read, you know, longer term publications, they don't

have that same echo chamber effect where they're all simultaneously talking about the same thing. When we try crazy ideas, you had an interesting X, Y, or four quadrant graph, and I love a good four quadrant. And I'm trying to remember, for memory, because I listened to the book and then somebody posted it in our book club, the actual graph. But it was, you know, essentially being right or wrong with an idea, being consensus or non-consensus. In other words, a crazy idea or an outlandish idea.

What was the framing you used there? And maybe you could explain that four by four. Things that work, things that make sense. Okay, that's one four by four quadrant. And there are things that work and make sense and where I explanation for why they work is correct. And most of physics, by the way, of what we like to think of science sits in that quadrant, what you call the hard sciences.

So what makes sense? Yeah. And also works. Right. But there's also space for things which don't really make sense, but seem to work. and that's because there's a second or third order explanation for their efficacy. Now, this is going to go down really badly with your audience,

but constitutional monarchies are probably a good idea. Okay? Now, if you look at it empirically, right, we'll make a list of the world's constitutional monarchy. You've got Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, a few Caribbean islands. You've got Japan, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark. it's not a bad. That's about 80% of the countries in the world where you'd actually want to live, isn't it? It's the highest functioning democracies, in fact. Most people say getting to Denmark as a term in the globalist world or, you know, New Zealand as an ideal, an ideal high functioning government.

Yeah. As opposed to a democracy. Yeah. And I mean, very technically, I think the UK is a theocracy, because I think it's actually a monarchy where the monarch derives their legitimacy from God. And then the monarch, through divine wisdom, chooses to outsource decision-making to an elected representative body. So that's the technical structure of British government. But there are advantages. So, for example, if you take the transition from Franco to democracy in Spain, the king was actually decisive in being seen as a person who was arbitrary but outside politics in enabling that

transition. So it may be that there are a Chesterton's, monarchs are a Chesterton's fence. In other words, most of the time they're not very valuable, but in certain unforeseen circumstances, they serve a function that you can't necessarily anticipate. You might also argue that if you have a very divided country, they create a kind of arbitrary unity in that you're fighting for king and country rather than fighting for country and a president you didn't vote for. As a narrative. God save the queen. I have arguments from the scene tell him about this because he believes I'm deranged.

There are people, including I think Stephen Frye says the same thing, that on empirical grounds, you can. can defend, you know, parliamentary democracies. Canada's kind of okay, isn't it? You know, it's not as if the Canadians are kind of laboring under oppression, is it really? Let's be honest. No, no, it's high functioning. I mean, if the correlation between what the public wants and what the government does, I think, is pretty disparate here in America at the moment.

You know, people want certain changes. society that we don't have. The overwhelming majority of people don't want to have machine guns, you know, and high-powered rifles, yet we have them, you know. We want gay marriage. We want cannabis to be legal across the country. And it just, it's a real war to get there. It's a, it's a real confounding process. In a funny kind of way, politics, politics at the moment is kind of dumb, isn't it? Because if you went to a bunch of people from what you might call fairly extreme left-wing protesters, okay, to people on the centre-right, even actually on the fairly far-right. And you said, what kind of country would you kind of live in, or what kind of place

would you like to live in? Okay. Well, people on the left would probably quote somewhere in Scandinavia. I don't think many people would say, sort of Nicaragua or somewhere, okay? Or Venezuela, or somewhere extreme, okay? People on the far right might say Texas. People on the right would probably say, People on the British right would probably say Australia, which is slightly right of centurish. But the differences between Denmark and Australia are utterly trivial, okay, in most respects. Now, if you'd ask the same question in 1910 or 1920, okay, there would have been people on the right who wanted to live in kind of the 18th century, okay, and there would have been people on the left who wanted to live in Soviet Russia. There was an extraordinary level of disagreement about what the nature of a successful and functioning country was. And now we have this incredible political division about what is really pretty pissy distinctions.

So we've basically come to consensus in 90% of what society should be, yet it feels like we're absolutely diametrically opposed as to what it is. And we're fighting on the margins for things that maybe don't matter as much. I'm going to defend conservatism a little bit here. My simple point is that the one virtue of conservatism which is something it doesn't try to do, which is it doesn't try and shoehorn the answer to every question into a pre-existing mental framework.

In other words, it's a bit more Darwinian and adaptive and it's capable of adopting different frames and points of view in a way that dogmatic left-wing opinions aren't. So if you take an example of something like, the assumption that the inequity of outcomes or injustice is entirely down to racism, okay? That's true, but it's also hugely oversimplistic in the sense that actually one of the biggest forces, I would argue, is white nepotism.

Now, when I say nepotism, I don't necessarily mean intentional nepotism. It's that a lot of the most desirable jobs, if you think about how the world works in theory, world works in theory is you have a job and you get 10 people to apply for it and you then appoint the best qualified candidate to that job. If you look at how the world really works, it actually works through referral. And therefore, since people's social networks tend to reflect them ethnically, okay, referral, which often takes place in notionally very, very liberal businesses like Hollywood, is de facto racist. Okay, if you look at the tiny number of Latinos in Hollywood, right?

Now, one of the fascinating things, if you look at, there's actually a Wikipedia page, which is Oscar winners who are related to other Oscar winners. Now, statistically, okay, if Hollywood were a completely objective meritocracy, to have two people in the same family winning an Oscar would be vanishingly rare, wouldn't it? It'd be statistically impossible.

Like, it would be getting struck by lightning twice, yeah. And yet this page of Oscar winners related to other Oscar winners goes on and on and on. And I'll tell you a story which fascinated me because I've never come across anything like it before in my life, but about fairness, which is there was a communist journalist on the Times in London called Claude Coburn in the 1920s and 30s. I read his autobiography about 15, 20 years ago. he had an uncle who got a job with the Royal Bank of Canada. So he boarded a ship to take up a kind of graduate recruitment's job as an entry level manager at Royal Bank of Canada.

While he was on the ship to Canada, a friend of his dads happened to know someone on the board of the Royal Bank of Canada. So sent a letter to this chap saying, young chap called Coburn is coming to join the Royal Bank of Canada. He'll be arriving in a few weeks. It'd be nice if you looked in to see him. And the chap's father got wind of this, wrote to his son and said, when you arrive in Canada, you must resign your job.

Because the fact that this friend of mine has unknown to me, or unprompted by me, written this letter, gives you an unfair advantage over the other nine people who will be starting with you. And I'm not willing for you to succeed on the basis of this connection. So you'll have to resign and go and find employment somewhere else. Now, can you imagine anybody doing that now? No. I mean, he was, I think it's astounding, isn't it? It's amazing. I read it. I was kind of like, yeah. Well, I think what's interesting about this is it's very hard to talk about race, especially in America, especially right now. And people, I think, want to believe a very specific narrative. Hey, there's privilege and there is only one thing, racism. And we're going to apply that, you know, as a hammer, we stop racism. And then.

this solves the problem. But what you just pointed out was, it's not the person caught on a viral video, you know, using racist terms that's actually causing the racism. It might be the most liberal, woke person in the world who hires, you know, their daughter to be in a movie. Who has their mate from Princeton? Right. The guy in the double wide in, you know, in Georgia who's got a Confederate flag is not really on the Appointments Committee of Goldman Sachs. You know, if we're looking it that way, right? In terms of the power. of those people have. That person's racism might be screaming into like a cave. Like nobody hears it. It's just screaming into the abyss. Whereas a person who is, who believes themselves to not be racist,

who believes themselves to be woke and progressive might actually be the blocker as it is in society. And it's fascinating. There's a group of venture capitals who say, I only look at deals that are referred to me. So if you want to get to me, do not email me, get referred. And so with their essentially saying is, I would like to perpetuate the existing system because you probably don't know anybody in the system. That's like saying, coming to my country club or being part of your private clubs in England is you got to get two people to refer you. How is it ever going to change? So this, by the way, happens when race is not a visible factor. So you will get, what will happen is you'll get two towns with a slightly differing level of unemployment. And because most of the jobs,

most jobs don't go through interview or a wide recruitment trawl, okay? What happens is you need a forklift truck driver, you go to one of your forklift truck and you say, do you know anybody who can drive a forklift truck? And by the way, it's a very reliable form of referral because the guy isn't going to recommend anybody who's unreliable. So there's a social dimension to the referral, okay? Which is why businesses universally ask their employees first, who do you know who can fill this position?

And in fact, one of the Silicon Valley techniques is to require each of your employees at a startup to give you three names of the best people they ever worked with. So when you come working a startup, one of the keys is they say to you, okay, Rory, tell me the three people, I don't care what positions they are that were the most impressive you ever met in your life. And that's how companies like Google or Uber or Facebook were built. Who are the three smartest people you know? Let's get them over here, right? And that's going to result in perpetuating whatever statistics you already had. And so one of the things is, you understand what's really going on. And I'd love to talk to Nicholas Christakis about this,

because he really understands network effects. And people like Nassim Taleb would understand it. And the way you intervene, once you understand what's really going on at a kind of second order level or a meta level, okay, is very, very different to the way you'd intervene if you have a totally shallow, one-dimensional understanding of the problem. One thing I do, by the way, I always had the principle. If anybody asked me for advice on getting into the ad industry, I basically say, yes, I'll give you a 20-minute Zoom call. And I always saw that as a way I was being, essentially, you know, helping anybody who needed help. And it suddenly occurred to me that the people who have heard of me may not be representative of the population wanting to get into advertising,

for instance. You know, I thought I was doing the right thing. Maybe I wasn't. Maybe what you need to do, for example, is to have a very brief period of three months of every year where you can only hire people through a different mode. Another thing I've put forward is if you hire people in groups, by the way, your entire

mental approach changes. Because if you hire 10 people, if you've got 20 applicants for five jobs, your brain looks for complementarity and variance. If you hire one person at a time, you look for conformity.

So I got my first job as a weirdo, and I'll freely admit that, I was a complete outlier, and there were four jobs available. And I basically got the fourth one. And someone told me later that someone had said, look, we've got three candidates we know. Let's take a punt on the weirdo. Yeah, let's get a wild card in here. Let's get a wild card in. You know, for goodness sake, you know, because, you know, let's experiment.

because we can afford to lose one. Let's be honest, okay? Now, if those four jobs, instead of being four jobs simultaneously, if I'd applied for all four separately, I wouldn't have got any of them. Okay? Not a chance. And so I think there's an interesting, there's a really interesting way of looking at this, which is, in a sense, it's not institutional racism.

It's kind of institutionalized nepotism. There's credentialism, I guess nepotism, and I suppose, yeah, the whole business of kind of referrals needs to be looked at deeply. You know what? It's an in, it's an unintentional perpetuation of the current system is, I think, the charitable way to look at it because those people are probably at the same time going to meetings and saying, how do we increase diversity? And they're probably sincere about it. And they might be tweeting or Instagramming that they are in support of the protests and they're in support of social justice and they're retweeting and re-tweeting and

reading these important stories, but they just don't understand where to focus the change. The thing to learn, which I've learned, I guess, from Adam Smith and Charles Darwin, et cetera, is that intention doesn't have to be there to achieve outcome, okay? And also, good intentions do not necessarily translate into good outcomes, nor to bad intentions necessarily translate into bad ones. Right. It all depends on the framework within which those kind of exchanges take place. We have a couple of questions from the book club that I want to make sure I don't leave.

Of course. For some reason, my webcam, there we are back in focus again. Yeah, no, I kind of like it that. Yeah, it happens. I thought you put a little Vaseline on it to get that more Hollywood. Exactly. I know to give that kind of misty romantic look. Yeah, absolutely.

It's Casablanca. So Casey asks, what's your favorite behavioral study slash experiment, or one that you found the results to be very surprising, i.e. the Milgram experiment or the Stanford Prison Study, we both know, those are experiments in sadistic nature of human behavior. Yeah, I wouldn't choose either of those. I mean, there was another interesting Mildrum experiment where he went around asking people to effectively ask complete strangers to give up their seats on the subway. And what interested him about that result was that most of the people he'd asked to do that just asked to be excused after the first day because they found it painful doing something which broke a kind of social norm.

Interesting. And so I'm always interested in the extent to which economics does not capture a multidimensional view of human motivation. What would be the ones that would really, that's a great one. mention. Actually, one thing I'm a huge fan of, which I think is just very beautiful, Shlomo Bernatzi and Richard Thaler, and their experiment with the Save More Tomorrow Pension, which is simply designing a pension so that you never get poorer, you get less richer, because the pension only kicks in every time you get a pay rise. I think that's ingenious.

So, explain how that works. Yeah, explain how that works. So the standard way in which someone sells your pension is you sign up and from the moment you sign up to a pension from that day onwards immediately you become $300 a month poorer okay and you're 27 or 34 whatever you may be and they designed it so you signed up to a set percentage amount and the way it worked uh was that um uh you paid nothing you signed up to this pension nothing happened okay but every time you got a pay increase 20%, if you chose 20, 20% of the incremental amount was automatically diverted into your pension. So you never feel pain? So you never felt pain, you only felt less gain.

And that was a beautiful bit of behavioral design, which by the way, without going into this in huge detail, there's a whole field in mathematics called, it originally comes from statistical mechanics and physics, ergodicity. And the question of ergodicity, I don't know if you've come across this debate. No. But it's essentially the idea that economics and probability doesn't understand the fact that an ensemble outcome isn't the same as a time series outcome. And quite a lot of what appears to be human irrationality isn't irrational at all once you consider the fact that we've evolved to live in a world where we're trying to avoid extinction more actively than we're trying to obtain perfection. So I'm always split as to whether I recommend people Google ergodicity because it's one of those mathematical concepts.

But one of the things I would argue, for example, is that economics wouldn't understand, okay, is Amazon Prime. Because what I think Beezl spotted there is that to an economist, you pay three pounds to have your book delivered because it gives you three pounds worth of utility or three dollars worth of utility. And what Bezos realized is that there's a big difference between 10 people buying one thing a month and one person buying 10 things a month. 10 people buying one thing a month don't really mind paying three bucks a month to have the thing delivered. One person paying buying 10 things a month, even if he's kind of pretty rich, goes, Jesus, I'm spending 30 bucks on bloody delivery.

This is adding up. And I think, yeah. And this is really starting to add up. And I think Bezos understood that distinction. And Amazon Prime is essentially necessary if you're to have regular customers. Because I'm kind of, I'm a big believer in that phrase, evolution is cleverer than all of you. So I'm not confident in those people who use behavioral science to shoehorn people's behavior into a preexisting economic model or theory. I'm more the other way around.

I look at where behavior determines where behavior deviates from the economic idea of rationality and asks whether there's a good reason why that might be. And it would make sense because when you think about it, we are in such a dynamic system. And I try to talk about this with founders. You're not releasing your product into the world in which you studied business or economics in college. You're releasing it into a new world and everything that's released into that world then changes that world. So it becomes harder and harder to predict. Whatever worked in your last company

is not necessarily going to work in this one. I have a kind of mantra phrase, which is all big data comes from the same place, the past. Now, there was nothing in the data that would have told you there was a market for an $800 vacuum cleaner. And there was nothing in the data that would have told you there was a market for the 60 cent cup of coffee. And what's very interesting about that is when you start looking at something like the pods, it feels like you go through an arc. After people fell in love with the pods, they quickly realized,

and I went on a rant about this many times. When I realized when I was on vacation one time, how many pods I was going through when I was in Australia for two weeks and my rented hotel, my Airbnb had pods, I was like, I'm going through six pods a day because I like a double espresso and I'm having three of them.

And this is 20 days. I, you know, whatever, I was away, in Australia, I've got through over 100 of these pods. And I looked in the garbage can one day and I said, this is not good for the planet. I'll never use pods again. And I reverse position. And every time you create an efficient system like this, you have the chance of another phenomenon emerging.

In the case of Amazon, they now have something called Amazon Day. So as a Power Prime user, we have so much coming to our house that we can now elect to only get our stuff by default on one day a week in a few boxes. You're the same as me. Yeah. Because I feel too guilty with too many boxes and opening up 10 boxes is more pain and suffering for me or 20 boxes than getting three on one day and the time savings. Absolutely true.

Yeah. This is, it's extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah. And I suppose that's also necessary for kind of environmental reasons and in a sense, I suppose that sort of batch processing and consolidation saves Amazon quite a lot of money as well. Yeah, and it saves you as the user money. So if I told you, you're ordering five books right now, and these are five amazing books we talked about in our conversation, and you said, would you like to get them all on Monday,

or would you like to get them on, you know, days before, up until Monday, Monday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday, Thursday, you'd be like, just send them all on Monday. I don't want to open five boxes. I want to defend an espresso by saying, at least in the UK, we send them back for recycling, because they're aluminium so they can be smelted down and reused. Do you believe that actually happens? On what percentage you believe that actually happens or do you believe that is a virtual signaling function?

And how often, out of 100, how many do you actually recycle? I have got a friend who's a Guardian journalist, and he investigated this and found that there is indeed a warehouse where he's shown me photographs of the recycling warehouse where these things are, in fact, melted down. So it's not entirely bad. It's happening on some percentage. I mean, the other question you mentioned about Amazon is, I mean, the other simple thing is that during lockdown, we've got so much Amazon cardboard in the house, it pretty much constitutes a fire hazard.

So Amazon Day probably reduces that a little bit as well. We have now, the manageability of packaging. We have now looked at Amazon boxes as are art canvases. So I'd encourage everybody who has these coming to get a box cutter and cut your boxes up. put them in a stack and give them to your kids with paint and watch them use the different sizes to paint on. And you will never have to buy. Yeah, well, I mean, it's just the absolute guilt

you will feel over time with people wrapping things three times or four times. Like we wrap things when you buy a set of headphones. How many times are they wrapped? You have the Amazon box, you have the packaging around it. You have the box it comes in. You have the plastic it's in. And you have some velour, beautiful velvet case it comes in.

It's like five cases. I actually had the Larry David experience where I had a pair of scissors in packaging that required a pair of scissors to open it. I mean, this was the way of said. It's pretty meta. All right. Catherine says, what's Rory's favorite alchemist moment of his own from work? Has he had to advocate for an illogical idea? And how did he persuade others to take on that illogical idea?

What's the most illogical idea you made? I'll tell you a very cute illogical idea, which is that price isn't price. It depends what you compare it to. This is a very sweet little story where it proves that what you can do with behavioral science is that it's kind of scalable, it's fractal. You can deploy it in government policy with pension plans,

and you can deploy it if you're running a small cafe, which is one of the reasons I love it. And this is a case with my own father. So my own father 10 years ago, My father's now 89. 10 years ago, I suppose he was 79. And I wanted him to get the equivalent of cable, satellite TV, like direct TV in the States. And he doesn't like films, doesn't like sport, but he loves factual television.

And I said, look, you've only got three terrestrial TV stations. If you pay 17 pounds a month, you'll get 100 kind of documentary and factual stations plus about 10 news channels. And he said, no, it's too much money. And I said, well, look, I don't mind. I'll pay for it myself. You know, I don't mind paying $17 a month. And he said, no, no, I still don't want it because it's still too much money, even if you pay for it.

It's kind of weird. Yeah, that's just like dealing with your parents. Every person dealing with their parents ever. No, I don't know. But I'll buy it for you. No, I just don't want it. No. And so in that weird way, I didn't know what to do.

Because he'd bear in mind, you know, in Britain, we used to pay a TV license and everything else was free. And so for, you know, 70 years of his life or 60 years of his life or 60 years of his life, that's what he'd done. And then I tried this very simple bit of alchemy, reframing, you call it. And I just said, well, in a way, it's not £17 a month, is it? It's 60 pence a day. Okay, and he said, well, what's the difference?

Okay, and I said, well, you spend £2 a day on newspapers. So if you spend £2 a day on newspapers, it's hardly ridiculous spending another 60 pence to get $200. And suddenly it was extraordinary. It was like an epiphany. The incremental cost was only 30. And so he went and got it, okay? He went and then got with his own money. And he's now this kind of evangelist for multi-channel TV going around the elderly population of the Y Valley,

I can't believe you haven't got Sky. And that's exactly the kind of case where it's completely wrong to think that the objective product you design and the objective price you attach to it, on their own determine the success of that product. It's so interesting framing because I had this experience with my spouse, my wife, and she hated upgrading her iPhone. And in our household, I am tech support. So she'd have this three-year-old phone, and she's a power user. How old are your kids?

Ten and four. So I have twins who are four and a ten-year-old. You'll have a very, very nice experience in about seven years' time or six years' time where your eldest child will take on part of that role, which is a wonderful liberation. Yes. Oh, they take on tech support? I bought them a PlayStation 4,

and I was going, oh, God, the trouble with buy this thing is I'll have to set it up. And then I realized, no, no, no, they're 17. I just go, here you go. And the next thing you know is the HGMI cables are all plugged into the right place. And they'll do the same for your new Tesla Y. They'll set up your Tesla Y and figure everything out for you.

And I said to my wife, I said, listen, this phone is $1,000 for the best one you can get. Over three years, you're paying a dollar a day. And actually, you can resell the phone back for $200. So you're kind of spending like $0.75 a day. So if you buy it every two years, you're spending a dollar a day. And if you buy it every year, you're spending a buck $50 a day. Why don't we spend a buck $50 a day?

And then you'll save me 10 hours of pain and suffering. And you wouldn't have to reboot your phone constantly and offload apps and all these other problems. and she finally agreed. When I framed it as the incremental cost and taking out the tech support cost, I said, you know, your time is spent with a broken phone. Every task you do is, and we had the same discussion looking at our ordering of groceries.

She would compare groceries from three different stores and then order delivery of the milk from one place, the cheese from another, and the bread from another based on price. I said, your time is worth more than this. You see, I find this kind of behavioral thing, really. In fact, my brother, my wife was exactly the same, and I just got one of the large new iPhones and said, to hell with it, you know, to be honest, I'd rather take the financial hit that have to answer all these questions where you have to delete apps because they're taking up too much space.

Yeah, or the batteries degraded. My brother is an astrophysicist and was chief scientific advisor on the Anglo-Chilean telescope in the Atacama Desert, okay. And yet he has an iPhone that's something like five generations out of date. And I kind of go, look, the way mobile phones work in the UK is you kind of get free replacements as part of your contract. Right. So I'm going, look, look, I mean, in their cases, there isn't even a financial price you're

paying. Just go and ask them for a new phone. Right. He wouldn't do it. Oh. And it's very strange. But this is why I said that along with moist lavatory paper, our failure to adopt video calling.

Now, if you think of it rationally, okay, there is this yawning gap in terms of, human contact between a whole bundle of technologies like email, Slack, WhatsApp, that are broadly speaking, textual, okay, and the telephone, the post, if you want to get it, okay? And then there's this yawning gap until you get to, you know, $3,000 for a transatlantic ticket. And it's patently obvious that there's a gap in the market there. And yet, to use that famous phrase, yes, there's a gap in the market, but is there a market in the gap? Ah. For two or three years, I kept asking, okay, Zoom and a few other ones,

blue jeans, I think probably WebEx, had basically cracked the technology so it had reached a level of tolerable acceptability. You know, it wasn't like this call now, okay? We've had a cup of glitches, but it's not shit, okay? No, it's fantastic. You know, yeah. I'm wearing headphones. It's pretty much as if we're talking face to face.

It's also worth remembering that the telephone strips out most of the audible rec, most of the tambra, because it's designed for an era of much lower bandwidth. So it strips down the human voice to what is essential for comprehension, but you lose an awful lot of nuance, resonance and all the other things. So the audio part of video calling is almost as important as the video part. And to me, for two and a half years, I've talked to the marketing. director of Zoom talking to Owl Labs who make this wonderful thing called the Meeting Owl. I have it. I have one on the shelf here and one on the shelf here. We're huge fans of the

meeting owl. So are we. Yeah. And it's, by the way, it's absolutely critical after lockdown because you're going to have a lot of hybrid meetings. Three people in a room, three people at home. Right. So the Meeting Al, I said the Meeting Al is a major anthropological leap forward because for a million years, humans have sat in a circle. And the conventional video call forces you to sit as if you're on a bus, all facing the same way. Right. And the Meeting Owl preserves that kind of centered around a fire or a dead antelope feeling of a meeting. Yes.

Okay. So I'm glad you're a fan. In fact, I'm such an evangelist. They gave me one. Just a bit of due disclosure. We buy them by the three pack around here. I got Ogilvie to buy 10, I think. Yeah.

Well, for people who don't know, it's a cylinder. a cylinder, it looks like a big bottle of Voss water or something. It looks like a little robot and it's got a robotic camera on the top and it's got microphones in 360. Whoever's talking, the robotic camera zooms in on them, but you also see a panoramic. So it creates a multi-pane experience for everybody and everybody is on equal footing. So a person who's at their lakehouse in Tahoe seems the equivalent of the three people at the meeting around the table.

It's fabulous. It really is. It's wonderful things. I'm totally happy to evangelize it because it's one of the things. It's a product that I was very happy to evangelize just on its kind of psychological. It's a perfect example of a tech problem that solves a psychological problem. What do we lose by being remote? What do you think will be the counter? Because there's always a counter swing, right? We talked about the, you know, getting your Amazon one day a week and Amazon Day versus Amazon Prime in same day or second day. What will be the counterbalance to work from home? Sure. So, first of all, even me as a fairly much, you know, I occasionally call myself a Zoom Zionist, in that I believe that this is our natural homeland to work remotely in this way, okay, and that it is our future and our, you know, our entitlement in a sense. And the interesting thing there is that even people like me didn't propose that this was a five-day-a-week thing,

I think. And it obviously is different meeting people remotely versus who you've never met before versus meeting people remotely who you know. It's not that different. I was talking to Laurie Santos at Yale, who's originally a primatologist. And she was saying it's a surprisingly good, the research seems to indicate, it's a surprisingly good approximation of human contact. Because as I said, you know, when I go to a conference and people wanted me to flyo, at one stage, someone wanted to be to flyo, at one stage, someone wanted me to fly to Singapore to talk for 20 minutes and then fly home. I'm going to go, do you want to smell me? I mean, what the hell's going on here?

Right. It's insane. Okay. And it's a terrible use of time and fuel and everything else. And I think office spaces need to change, but in an unexpected way, and I've been writing about this a bit. They need to become what Nassim would call a barbell, which is two extremes. either highly sociable, coffee shops, meeting rooms, places for accidental or predetermined human co-location and sociability. And then a chunk of it needs to be like a library

for people who don't like working from home, but do need to escape. Because I think the modern open plan office is a classic example. In my book, one of my bits of advice is don't solve for the average. Right. And the open plan office is neither sociable, nor it's neither sociability nor is it's solitude, and it creates a halfway house, which is actually the worst of both. And experiments bear this out, which is that when you put people into an open plan office, bizarrely the volume of face-to-face conversation goes down and the volume of electronic communication goes up by something like 60%. By the way, nobody, as far as I can ever see, has ever done a test on whether email,

in fact, improves productivity, have they? No. We took this technology. we thought it's free and it's instantaneous, so it has to be good. And of course, for the sender, that is good. But for the recipient, it means that everybody, your inbox is essentially open to the whole world 24 hours a day. Is that good? You know, it also means that what's important and what's urgent.

Have you ever read the Paul Graham thing, maker schedule versus manager schedule? Yes. You must know, he's a Brit, I'm proud to say. He's actually a Brit, isn't he? I'm proud to say. I think he's living there. now, yeah. Yeah. Now, and that's one of the greatest pieces on different modes of work I've ever read, and it's half a page of A4, effectively. And so... What is his basically right there, as stated?

We've got a wonderful thing in Ogilvie, because David Oglevy is on record as saying, I've never wrote a single thing in the office. So his ads, his ad copy, his books, everything he wrote of any significance, he wrote at home or somewhere else. Too many distractions. he said. And bear in mind, that was in 1960 or 70, where he had a ruddy-grade office with probably three PAs with a bank of phones protecting him from disruptions, you know. And so something, what's so extraordinary about email, okay, is we assume it's efficient because we feel busy while we're using it. Now, I'm going to ask you for a little confession here, okay, and this, I suspect everybody does this once or twice a day, which is someone asks you a question,

which is quite interesting and quite important, but it's going to take you 20 minutes to answer it. And you know that there are 170 emails beneath that thing. And you go, geez, I can't quite face answering this now. What the hell do I do? I know. I'll ask a bullshit question in reply and I'll buy some time. So I hit reply and I go, that's great.

I'd love to help. When would you need it by? Send. Right. You basically just put a pause on it. I go, few. Bought yourself 24. hours. Right. Now, as a result, something which in a Zoom call could probably have been settled by me

chatting to them for seven minutes is now eeked out to a five-day asynchronous exchange, which is quite likely to lead nowhere. This is where the quick walk-in-talk. We never look. We never did a cost-benefit analysis, did we? Because it saved money. And the same is true, the same is true of the open plan office. We go, basically what happens is it saved companies a stack of money. So they invented this narrative around teamworking, you know, to post-rationalize the whole thing. It saved money on the amount of square feet because you pack people more in.

And the idea was it created more socialization and maybe on the margin, some collisions, but in reality, because you're an open floor plan, you have to take extra steps to put headphones on and a little posted, do not disturb or whatever. and all of these people who go to meetings who are on open floor plans don't go to a meeting room. They just put their headset on from their desk and talk lightly. So it's what exactly is happening. We spent most of the 1990s talking about the paperless office, okay? And I'm going to propose that for the next decade, we talk about the partly screenless office.

Okay. Now, my point about that is why, and this has annoyed me for ages, why do people get up at 8 o'clock in the morning? travel into the office and then spend the first app, in appalling traffic, and then spend an hour and a half looking at a screen full of emails, which would have been exactly the same at home. Okay. Now, one of my arguments is maybe actually you need an area of the office, obviously this library area where people need to get on with things in a focused environment. They're free to use screens or not.

It doesn't matter, because nobody's going to bother them anyway, okay? So I'd have a library area of the office where the rule is you can't approach anybody or interrupt them. You know, a bit like the, what was it called? Was it called the Diogenes Club or something in Sherlock Holmes? Mycroft Holmes was a member of a club, Sherlock's brother, where you weren't allowed to speak to anybody. Kind of the introversion thing. And by the way, introvert rights is an issue

because extroverts can bully introverts much more easily than the other way around. For sure. Yeah. Okay. You never get in a group of people, the introverts ganging up and going, no, screw that.

We're not going to play softball. we're all going to sit at home and read Proust and you're going to do it too, right? You never get that. Instead, it's all people, no, we're having a softball competition. Okay? And it's completely asymmetrical.

But the screenless office will be one where the whole point of being there is to talk to people. And therefore, the second you get a screen out, you create ambiguity because can people talk to you or can't they? And you can't tell. You can't tell whether someone looking at a screen is, basically desperate for a bit of an interruption or whether they're focused on, you know, whether they're seven seconds away from a cancer cure or something.

Right. You genuinely don't know. It's interesting. A private club here run by some Brits called The Battery had a rule. When they started, they wanted to have no devices in the club, but then they realized people were using it as co-working. It was the main use case. So they came to the conclusion at 5.30, or 5 o'clock, devices were no longer allowed in these

spaces. So they actually timed it. And they said, yeah, by all means, until five o'clock, but then at five o'clock, have a cocktail, put your phone away. If you have to check your phone, that's fine, but you can't be on your phone or your laptop. That's great. It reminds me there's a club in London, I think the beefsteak, where it's, I think it's still all-mail Monday to Saturday, but they have a rule on Sunday that you can't bring your wife as a guest. You can only bring someone else's wife. Now, when you first hear this rule, I don't know what's going on over there in the UK. You guys have some weird traditions, but. When I first heard this rule, I assumed that it was, you know, a deranged kind of, you know, wife swapping things. Yeah. The purpose is that two of you

bring each other's wives. So you're a party of four. Got it. And the reason for that is that they said, if you have people with their spouses, they just talk to each other. All you'd have is a long table with people going, yes, I remember. Yes, it was nice. Wasn't it, yes, and we went to Tuscany, didn't we? Mm, okay, that's totally pointless. So it forces you essentially to create a social group to go, not just a self-contained couple. So the rule is more intelligent or less salacious than it first appears.

All right, a couple of quick questions from the book club. Again, for those of you haven't paused the program right now and by Rory Sutherland's book, Alchemy. It's amazing. And if the Dire Straits album, by the same name, comes up by that as well, because they're both equally good. Have you listened to the album, Alchemy? Do you know it?

Are you aware of it? I know it fairly well, yeah. Yeah. But it's live, isn't it? Yeah, that's the one that, yeah. It's live with 14-minute versions of Sultons of Swing and Telegraph Road. And, you know, Mark Knopf is one of the few musicians who, when you look at how perfect their studio albums are, their live albums are actually even better and more perfect

and perplexing of how in a studio, as perfect as it sounds, it sounds even better. I mean, you remember when CDs came out, your first two purchases had to be either brothers in arms or Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd. You had to buy a perfect, you know, rock album where there was proficiency in playing guitar and drums, et cetera. Well, one thing, not wishing to compare myself with the dire straits at any level, one thing I'm really grateful I did is I read my own audio book. And the point about that is I didn't realize until I came to record it that if you get an actor to read your book as an audio book, they're only really judged on two things, which is clarity and fidelity to the original text.

And I said, I don't want to remain faithful to the original text because there are things I'd write, which I wouldn't say. So I, now, literally, if you wanted to change do not to don't in an audiobook when you're reading it out, you'd have to ring the author and request their permission, okay? I mean, okay. And I said, this is crazy. You know, we say don't, but we write do not. You know, those distinctions apply all the time. And I said, there are whole paragraphs I completely recast, and there were footnotes, which I turned into discursions and so on.

And the freedom to do that and the freedom to put a bit of extra kind of emotive shit. Absolutely. It's fantastic. And I actually read, family podcast. No, it's not. But investing a little bit of kind of emotional stuff. into the reading, I think really helps. Quite a lot of people who said they like the audiobook, which just cheer me up.

The audio book is tremendous. And what I do, I read my own audiobook. My publisher, Harper Business, tried to stop me because they thought I would quit. And I said, listen, I'm a podcaster. I'm not going to quit. I talk for two hours, three hours every podcast. Like, I'm not quitting. And they're like, well, most people suck at it.

They quit. I'm like, listen, if you're a podcaster or you're a public figure, you have to read it yourself because that's the audience expectation is that they're going to hear your voice. It's going to be totally turned off, and it's going to be inauthentic. But I had the opposite one, which was, I would say, the venture capitalists in the book. And then I'd say the VCs in the audio book, and they go, stop. One more time, the venture capitalist. And I'd say, the VCs, and they go, no, the venture capitalists.

And I was like, that's what I just said. And they're like, no, no, the venture capitalists. Let's try that, not the VCs. And it turned out there's something where they sink your audible to your Kindle. So when I read books now, I bought your book twice. So I bought Alchemy, your ebook, and I bought the audio book because it cost me maybe $20 to do that. And the hardcover would be $30. And your retention goes way up.

But in your book, it kept breaking. And I was going to tell you about that. So when you went off on your tangents, I'm reading the book. And I'm like, oh, here he goes again. He's out of sync. I'm so sorry. It never occurred to me that people would flip between drive time and evening time. No, no.

You do it simultaneously. So what they've done in the Kindle app is when you're reading your Kindle book, if you have the audio, Audible book, it shows you on the bottom that you have it. When you hit play, they highlight the words as you're listening to it. So I was listening to your words and watching your words. And this increases retention. So you should try it. Get a Kindle book and look for a Kindle book that says syncs with Audible.

And it shows it on the Amazon page. And I've been doing this now. cost me twice as much every time I buy a book, but my retentions and my focus is going up. Because when you're listening to an audio book, what do you do? You take your phone out and you look at your email. And then you stop remembering the words and you're mixing your email with the author's words

and you're screwed. This forces me to stay focused, which is what movie theaters represent to me now. If I watch a movie at home, I'll inevitably take out my phone. The function of a movie theater for me is to make me surrender to the experience of the movie. Isn't this interesting because the standard idea of everything is that when you

introduce a new and possibly cheaper channel of consumption for any content, okay, that what you're principally doing is cannibalizing the original form. And it's, the risk of this is always overstated, I think, in that, you know, video didn't destroy cinema, television, you know, and so on. And, you know, And the music industry, of course, had complete paranoia about downloads. Right. And live events, of course, have thrived in an age of music downloads, because people can be more adventurous. Weirdly, having the intangible music product seems to increase the signaling value

of going to the concert buying the merchandise and all the other stuff. Or even in the case of my kids buying the vinyl, for God's sake, drives me nuts. Well, anyway. You know what? Is it that your kids are looking at this saying, I got this album for free. I need to experience this. Yeah. In some physical way. Yeah. I mean, buying the vinyl, I can't work out at all. But I mean, there we go. I mean, you know, I'll just have to put up with that. It strikes me as insane. You know, it's a totem. It's like a totem. It's a representation of it. Yeah. And it's costly signaling, of course, because you're obviously. a fan because you own it on vinyl.

You've committed more. So it may have a component of costly signaling to it. No one would have predicted that, I think. No. Vinyl is yet another category. Apparently there was a period where if you were owned one of the last remaining vinyl pressing works in Europe, which were quite often in Eastern Europe, you were sitting on a gold mine, effectively, because most of them had been shut down.

Hilarious. And, but no, I mean, I think you're right that going to the concert, buying the vinyl, buying the merch now has much more signaling power when the actual music itself is free. And I think there's going to be a really interesting question in the whole conference circuit because the conference circuit is, which is most of how businesses communicate with each other, it's not going to return really significantly for a year, is it? Because they're super spreading events potentially. Now, we don't know what do you, we held nudge stock, which is still watchable, by the way,

about 20 or 25 of the world's best behavioral scientists, starting in Australia and ending up in Maui with BJ Fogg. Wait, what is it called, Nudgestock? Nudgestock, yeah. And we always held it as a sort of 500-person festival on the Kent Coast outside London. And this year, of course, we couldn't have it. And so we said, okay, rather than produce a kind of online compromised version of the original intent, will zag spectacularly and produce this 40-year. hour global megathon.

So if you search for Nudge Stock 2020 on YouTube, I think it's also on the Ogilvie page and LinkedIn Live. You can pick and choose from literally 24, really interesting behavioral scientists. There's Cass Sunstein, for example.

We've got Laurie Santos who I just mentioned. Fantastic lineup from across the world. Now the interesting thing is it was free because we didn't know what to charge. We asked people for charity donations and raised quite a few thousand pounds that way. But it was basically free. But we had an audience. Certainly the first four hours have been watched on YouTube alone. I think it's 35,000 views. Wow. Now, if you add LinkedIn, you're getting

to kind of stadium dimensions in terms of, okay, not every, not for a second do we believe that everybody has yet watched all four. Every one of those people has watched all 12 hours. That wasn't really the point. We didn't expect many people other than the few kind of fanatics to go beginning to end, you know, Sydney to the West Coast. A few people did, by the way. But nonetheless, we don't know what to charge. Nobody knows what to pay speakers who appear remotely either. You know, there were established norms around what you pay to speaker to fly to Amsterdam to talk for an hour, give a keynote, etc. Now, when what do you pay if they appear? on a webcast.

Is it half? Is it, is it, I mean, in a sense, it's not any less valuable. I mean, it's a bit less valuable in signaling terms, because I suppose you don't have the show off, look, my company has brought this Nobel Prize winning economist over for your edification. And you also don't get to stage dive and ask for a selfie. You don't get to go to the lobby and talk to other people who also signaled they could spend $1,000 on a ticket.

And as in the same point, points out, a large part of the American conference market was also a kind of tax-efficient holiday market, wasn't it, or vacation market. Yes. So you hold a two-day nephrologist conference in Scottsdale in March, interestingly, on a Wednesday and a Thursday. Right. So quite a lot of people travel down with their spouse, keep the hotel room for another couple of

days. Of course. And, you know, and then there's the networking value. Now, I think what we'll have to do is we'll have to reinvent what the film industry does where you have premiere, you know, theatre release, Blu-ray release. Next year we'll have to work out a kind of price discrimination mechanism for TED did it to an extent, didn't it?

In the attending the main event was difficult and extremely expensive. Then there was a kind of side show event which also had networking potential in Palm Springs, historically, I think, and then eventually it ends up being free on the web. And then there's TEDx, which is you get to pretend that you're, it's like the minor leagues. You get to pretend that you're as important as a TEDx speaker. And what you have to say is Nobel Prize winning potentially. Here's my best idea for movie theaters. I want to know your best thing.

I think you call that, what you call that in fashion? You call it an expansion line. Oh, I know what you're talking about. Mew to Prada. It's called an extension line or a. Yes. And restaurants were doing it too. You had no boo next door at one point.

which was the accessible version of Nobu, where like, oh, you couldn't get the reservation into Nobu, but you could grab some, you know, tuna roll to go for 10 bucks or whatever it is. What's your best idea for theaters, reinventing movie theaters? I'll let you think about it for a second. The other one is reinventing physical theaters.

That's what I'm talking about, yeah. Oh, physical for like Broadway. Actually, real live theater. Now, weirdly, and I can't explain why, it has to be live and it can't be recordable. So you have to create that event thing, which is we all sit down and we watch this. It's not something we can record, we can put on a PVR, whatever. It's, you pay, you watch it.

When I say to people, this is a really interesting framing question, okay, if you go to the London theatre, same as kind of Broadway in New York, I guess, what is it, 50, 60, 80, 100, 120 bucks, a ticket, enough, okay? It's not cheap. Now, if you watch it at home on a 4K TV with, you know, 55, 60 inch 4K TV, whatever it may be, it's pretty good, actually, okay? Now, the interesting thing is, it's worth remembering that could you charge the same as the ticket price or even the same as two tickets to watch it at home?

Now, when I first say that to people, they go, other than heavyweight world boxing world championships, there is no way I would pay a hundred bucks to watch something on my TV. But then I also say, well, hold on, when you actually go to the theatre, it doesn't cost you 100 bucks, it costs you 300. Because you've got to have a meal out, you've got to pay for a babysitter. Or, you know, if you've got young kids. If you look at the incidental expenses, they actually add up to more than the two tickets. And then you buy very bad drinks at an insanely marked up price at the interval. Right.

So you're getting on for an evening at the theatre. once you add the ancillary costs kind of being the price of a holiday or a short break. And I've argued that I would watch quite a lot of theatre if I could do it that way. I would absolutely think about it.

If you look at Hamilton and what a phenomenon it became, if Hamilton was available at its peak for $100 on pay-per-view, unlimited people at your house, I think people would watch it all the time. And I think it would drive more people to go see it in person

because it's repeatable. You would be like... And you do something really, clever. You'd say one night only. It's like 100, hundred bucks, only one night, not recordable, not plausible, nothing else. Now, what happens, I think,

if I'm right, when there's a kind of heavyweight boxing championship, the way it works is the guy with the biggest TV, or could be a female, I'm not stereotyping boxing fans, but they probably lead a little bit male. The person with the biggest TV essentially pays for the pay-per-view, and then everybody else brings the beer.

Right. So it's a kind of collective experience. Now, you could do that around theater. 100%. You could basically go, yeah. The actors would love it, right? Because they can make money while they're asleep. I was meant to be in London right now to see local hero, which Mark Knopfler of Dyer

Shraith wrote the music for, but this goddamn pandemic paused it at the old Vic. And they sent an email to all of us and gave us one of the tracks, which I've listened to 10 times now from the from the show and i don't know why they put these things into like some secret they should do it on the first of the month if you had something like hamilton you said the first of ever or the first saturday of every month you can watch hamilton you would get all these people did you watch it no okay i'm going to see it the next time what i think movie theaters should go to is movie theaters should run the same film over and over and over again 24 hours a day and you should be able to go to a movie theater anytime you want with your key card like a private club

and open the door with your pre-key card from a VIP entrance. You pay 30 bucks a month. You can go into the theater and walk into any movie if you have, just like the, you know, when you go skiing, you have a season pass, a season pass for a movie theater where you can go in at any time with one person

and watch any movie. There's someone in the UK who does it. You don't have a private entrance, but there is somebody who does it in the UK. Really? It may have certain blackout dates like premieres and Saturday night. I'm not sure. But I'm pretty sure it's pretty much an all-season pass

that I think the only, and it's for it it's kind of Amazon Prime pricing isn't it which is yes you know the very frequent moviegoer resents paying the same price as the infrequent movie goer each time he visits and what if the movie and the movie theater is underutilized from you know whatever what midnight till noon it's underutilized there's no 9 a.m. 80m. 10 a.m. movie and nobody's there's there so if you made that you know part of the subscription. So there's something really interesting about experimentation and of course people are terrified of experimentation because when you experiment with different models it brings with it the inherent risk of destroying your old model and what i think

getting fired you know it's getting so it is the innovator's dilemma in a way but generally i think one of the most fascinating things i've ever heard is a friend of mine went to stay on skywalker launch with Skywalker Ranch with George Lucas. Okay. And unsurprisingly, on the Skywalker Ranch, there's a home cinema with massive seats, presumably popcorn and everything else with an enormous screen. And George Lucas said he never uses it.

He goes into town to watch a film because what you want from a film is partly provided by the audience. And so when you're going to a cinema, particularly if it's a comedy, if you imagine, okay? you know, things are funnier when other people are laughing. A hundred percent.

That's part of the jury. And also for horror films, when you get people get scared and they have a jump scare, it's great for the whole theater to cry out at once. What was the horror film? There are two extraordinary stories I know. There's a horror film where an arm reaches out of the lake at the very last moment and grabs the person in the boat. Oh, that's Friday the 13th.

Friday. Now, a friend of mine did that and knew it was going to have. happen and grabbed the person next to him at precisely the moment it happened. And she screamed. Right. When my old Russian teacher was at Oxford, two students were sent down for smuggling chickens into a performance of the birds by Alfred Hitchcock. And in the middle of one of the most terrifying scenes, they basically threw the chickens into the audience. Fantastic. Yeah, absolutely.

I thought that was a bit brutal setting them down because they're exactly the kind of people I want to hire, to be honest. But there you go. All right. Listen, I kept you for two hours. You're amazing. This has been a great conversation. I could literally go for two more, but I feel so guilty. Everybody, buy the book, Rory, we got to have you on again. And then at some point when things are happening in person again, I want to see you over there in London or if you're in the States. I would love to have a meal with you if we're allowed to ever do that again. Next time you're in London, just let me know. It'd be an absolute joy to meet up. It'd be really fantastic. When local hero comes, and I'm trying, you have to find a way for me to meet Mark Knopfler. You must have, I'm in touch with his manager and I was like, listen, because I see Mark- We're in this white person's network thing again, aren't we? Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah. If you could perpetuate a meet and greet with me.

Do you know the strangest thing about society, which is at the top and at the bottom, it operates the same way. It's barter, okay? Right. And the reason it's all barter and exchange are the, bottom of society is because people haven't got any money. And at the top, it's because money is embarrassing. Yes.

And so you get this strange similarity between the way things work at the bottom of society, which is all about backstatching and exchange. Yeah, can you help me out. Also replicates itself at the top because you can't go, you can't go, I've got a Nobel Prize and you go, I'd like you to come and speak to the pupils at my university. You know, here's 20 grand. You can't do that, okay, with a Nobel Prize winner. So the whole thing has to operate through favors and exchange.

Right. And I will find out, my music industry contacts are pretty rubbish compared to my behavioral science contacts, but I'll do my best. I know one or two people who might know. Yeah, I just want to visit British Grove Studios, which is a studio, and just maybe take a selfie and let him know how much his music means to me. I saw him twice on this concert tour, at first row, at the Beacon Theater, was just an absolutely transcendent moment for me,

literally got choked up watching him play. And he's 70 now, and he's just a greater songwriter now that he's ever been. And I just cherish the man in his work so much that I just want to meet him before, you know, either one of us is leaving the planet. That's a tough brief, but I'll do what I can. Yeah, I mean, it's actually kind of creepy and weird, too, I guess, that I want to meet him so bad. But I just told this, I was like, when is his next fundraiser or his wife's fundraiser?

I'll just ship it and get a table. And that's the easiest way. Literally, if you want to meet Bruce Springsteen, I think donating 10K to his charity is the only way to do it. You can't pay him a million dollars to come play your birthday party. It's not possible. No. There's no amount of money. But if you're like, yeah, if you donate it to his charity, I'm sure he would come have a 10-minute

discussion with you about how thankful he was. I'm so interesting. So interesting. Listen, it's been amazing to get to meet you like this. Zoom. Thank you for providing Zoom. The book, Alchemy, the dark art and curious science of creating magic in brands, business and life is a tour to force.

It's one of those books you'll probably read every two or three years and get something new out of. And the book club at this at this weekend startups absolutely loved it. I highly recommend it. Go get it. And if you love it, write a review for the love of God, write a review. The thing I like, which is, I like. I read a lot of reviews where people say they've re-read it or they keep it on the, they keep it in the bathroom and they reread it, you know, with their bowel movements or whatever.

Greatest compliment. The extraordinary thing I was thinking of is that that extraordinarily small number of films, which are not only great films, but a rewatchable films. Give me your, give me a rewatchable for you. What's your rewatchable? Give me one. Okay. So I'll give you two examples.

Citizen Kane isn't rewatchable. It's a great film, but it's not really that rewatchable. The third man, but equally, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, is really rewatchable. Absolutely. Okay. And the only box set I know that's rewatchable, this may just be me, is Narcos. So I wouldn't rewatch Game of Thrones. I wouldn't rewatch The Wire or any of those things.

Strangely, there are two things I've spent under isolation. One of them is watching online YouTube RV reviews. Wow. Are you into RV lives? I'm investing in an RV company. Yeah. Which one? I can't say it right now.

You can't say? But it's a startup that's, you know how they have these vans now? So people are doing something called van life. And it's an extension of the remote work thing where they're converting sprinter vans. And so there's a company that's going to take those vans and make them available for $200 a night or maybe $100 a night. You take them wherever you want. You bring them back. Instant vacation.

So the idea is it's a mobile office as much as a place to stay. Absolutely. Absolutely. So brilliant. This is what fascinates me. So RV is fascinating. You want to get it on the deal? I'll get you a 25K slag.

I'll get you 25K slag. I'll get you. All you're going to do is do one of your 50K speaking gigs. You put half of it towards this. You pay the British crown, whatever they get in the taxes. And then you look at me, Mark Knopfler. I'll get you into this deal. If you know anybody at the U.S. Department of Trade, okay, if we're doing a post-Brexit

trade deal, there's got to be zero duty on American RV import. Okay. That's my first amount. You can give us all the chlorinated chicken you want, but I want that. So what I do is I mix those with rewatching narcos. Right. Great rewatchable. I've rewatched a couple of Christmases ago as a Soprano series. Just a great rewatchable. I'm saving that up, but I think you're absolutely right. Yeah. That's a great one. And then on the movie tip, for me, it's Blade Runner, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, which are my Ridley Scott trifecta. Those three are just unbelievable.

What about the two of, what is it called, Sicarios? Are you not a fan of that? Oh, I love Sikario, amazing. I absolutely love those. I have a great one for you. I thought they're absolutely fantastic. Here's a great miniseries for you, and you have to get the long version of it. It was done by Canal Plus.

It's called Carlos. And it's about Carlos the Jackal, who was the most notorious. Yes, I know. I'll tell you a very funny story. Go ahead. I'll tell you why I know him, because when I lived in London, we used to go to an Indian restaurant, and for about seven years, he lived upstairs. Okay.

And so these guys who served us, he was quite a regular customer. I can't remember what was takeaway on the restaurant, but he was actually, he was quite a fan of Indian food, so it can't have been all bad. And he was a terrorist who at the time terrorists were considered freedom fighters, and whatever they did was kind of noble, as opposed to abhorrent. And so he was sought after as kind of like, it wasn't one cause. It was almost like whatever cause. It was like a Robin Hood kind of vibe. And there's this movie, Carlos, which is a mini-series. Canal Plus did it cost $18 million.

It's in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, like eight languages. It's recorded on four continents. Maybe it's nine hours or something. And it's brilliant. It's Edgar Ramirez, who is. And it's 2010. When I tell you, this is going to be your top 10 favorite films, guaranteed. Carlos, the jet.

Thank you very much. I'll try and return the tip. LeBuro, if you can find it. LeBuro. Very good French ship. Yeah. And obviously, other French thing, Fowder's very good, Israeli series, if you haven't seen that.

Fowder. F-A-U-D-A. I think they're three seasons now. That's absolutely brilliant Israeli. Is that what Homeland was based on, our series in America? I don't think so. I think it's based on, it's a very interesting, group of essentially Israeli special forces people.

Got it. It might be what actually Showtime is about, because that was like the CIA in America, and they just finished up there like seven-year run. It is amazing how, when you think on a global basis, America, the big exporter of culture, of course, England before that, now we're looking for a series in Israel or, you know, Korea, or whatever, to remake those films here. It really does say something about globalization and culture that, movies can kind of, and series can kind of...

I've got a lovely little story about this, which is The Killing, which you probably remember being remade in English, I think, by Netflix, I think it was. Yeah. That was a Danish series, and it ran in Denmark, and the Danes liked it a lot, and then they forgot about it. And someone came over from BBC 4, which is the, it's like the PBS of the BBC.

It's the least funded, you know, kind of arts and, intellectual channel. And he said, have you got anything that might be replayable on British television, from Danish television? They said, we had this thing two years ago called The Killing or Forbred Delsen, I think it was, Forbri Delsen or The Killing.

And he bought it, the English rights for BBC 4, but I think it was 24,000 pounds, which is like the price of a second-hand car. It became so popular on BBC 4, it then moved to BBC 2, it then became a cult on BBC 2. And then, as he said, the Danish state broadcaster should have a statue of me in front of their building

because eventually by the time Netflix picked it up, they were earning millions from this property. Wow. And I said to him, it's a wonderful question. I said, tell me, why did you particularly choose it? And he said, if you're British, he said, there's a great thing about the Scandinavians. He said, anything Scandinavian.

They're just the right amount of weird. It's a very, very good observation, which is you have these cultures which are, we basically understand what's going on, but then occasionally there are things which are, you know, slightly strange. Notable, yeah. It's not so strange that you can't understand the context, but it's strange enough to keep it interesting. So even if you have a bit of a lull in the program, you start looking at their furniture or something, you know. Right. Yes, it is one of the nice things about the international cinema. I mean, the only loathsome thing is now that America is so desperate for the incremental 10% of Chinese consumers and dollars that we're willing to change the ending of our films for an authoritarian, brutal regime that tortures people.

And in America, the woke left, you know, most virtual signaling group is Hollywood. And Hollywood literally would change the ending of their movies. to make an extra 10% from communists. It's crazy. Which is crazy. Yeah. It's insane. And nobody calls them out on it.

It's like, how can you be these incredible virtue signaling folks who get up at the Oscars and give us all a big speech? And this is where I think Ricky Jervais taking the piss out of them is so brilliant. That's the other guy. Okay, listen, you're my representative, Rory.

When I come over, I want to hang out with Ricky Jervais, Mark Knopfler, and you. Well, that's it. It's a very weird concatenation of people, but I'll do my best. They will be brilliant. It'll be brilliant. Ricky Trevace is my absolute favorite.

When he comes there and says, I don't care if I insult you, I don't care of you, I don't care of you ever have me back. But you guys have no standing. You have zero standing to preach to any of us about anything. And they're just looking at him like, who invited this guy? It was extraordinary, wasn't it? It was one of the most brilliant sort of, what was it if Al-Qaeda opened a streaming service or something?

Yeah. You'd all be phoned. them up. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, of course, right. Yeah. All right. Listen, Roy, we're in our three. I got to let you go. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Everybody buy the book. It's amazing.