This Week in Startups - Rory's brain vs ChatGPT, outrageous marketing, work trends and MUCH more w/ Rory Sutherland | E1756

Starting point is 00:00:00 Finally, I've got rid of that lighthouse. Okay? Yes. I'm sorry. I'll just pause for a second. My phone is going to... I'm on a call. Can you call back a little after in about 10 minutes?

Starting point is 00:00:10 Everything okay? Fantastic. Oh, brilliant. Okay. Thank you. Radio. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Starting point is 00:00:16 Come in quietly in case I'm still recording. Okay, bye-bye. Was that a flip phone? This weekend startups is brought to you by Squarespace. Turn your idea into a new website. Go to Squarespace.com slash Twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Release.

Starting point is 00:00:41 Large enterprises pose unique challenges for SaaS startups. Unlock customers with unique needs for private and single tenant hosting without the toil of DIY with release delivery. Get your first month free at release.com slash twist and Notion just launched notion projects, which include new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. Everybody loves when my next guest is on the program because we have very wide-ranging discussions about everything and media, advertising, technology, and humanity. Rory Sutherland is the vice chairman of Ogilvy, the advertising agency. He's been there since 1988.

Starting point is 00:01:32 He's the author of Alchemy, the dark art and curious science of creating magic and brands, business and life. Great book if you haven't read it really will make you think differently. And a follow-up. Alchemy, the surprising power of ideas that don't make sense. He's a contributor to the Spectator, UK,

Starting point is 00:01:49 and all around fascinating, interesting guy. He hasn't been on for a while, almost three years ago. I think the last time you were on, Rory, was it during the pandemic? I think it was just before. At the time, I was debating by an electric car, which I ended up doing. You were on right after COVID hit.

Starting point is 00:02:10 Yeah. That's it. Yeah. We had a really interesting conversation then. The world's changed a lot. The biggest thing, I think, is the impact AI, chat GPT, and this new paradigm have had. I'm going to give you a lot.

Starting point is 00:02:27 I think one of the most important things might actually be the widespread adoption of video conferencing. Got it. Now, we never like to talk about technology that's 20 years old because it makes us look out of touch. But if you look at the history of things like electrification, the really important technologies took 20, 30 or even 40 years, both for people to work out their proper application. but also for actually for their full economic value to make themselves known. This makes sense.

Starting point is 00:03:03 Quite often really important technologies take a huge bedding in period. If you look at the PC, if you look at the smartphone, even if you say cellular phone, we had cellular phones in the 80s. It wasn't until the smartphone brought it all together. We had PCs in the late 70s, early 80s. It wasn't until really the laptops

Starting point is 00:03:22 and the Mac, IMAX. perhaps that these things really started to have an impact in a large way, yeah? And I suppose the famous example is sort of factory electrification, where they started off by putting a great big electric motor to replace what was a steam engine, which wasn't much for an improvement and may have been more expensive and worse. It was only when they worked out you could have lots of small machines with small electric motors, which didn't have to be co-located next to a big steam engine, and which can be turned on and off separately, that the gains really started to emerge. And in the same way, I think, you know, changes to patterns of working

Starting point is 00:03:58 life, which will probably come partly as a consequence of the pandemic and partly as a consequence of video conferencing being now seen as an acceptable alternative. I think those are kind of fairly significant changes. I always question, by the way, all economic models assume that the future of the world is ever greater urbanisation. And I'm fairly confident that there's always going to be a kind of a centrifugal counter movement to that. I don't think it's a safe assumption if you look at history. There are long periods where we move out of cities, particularly very big cities, which I think become unwieldy. I'm also a bit of a georgist, and I'm conscious of the fact that when you operate in a very big city like New York or London, increasingly the gains

Starting point is 00:04:46 from your labour go in the form of rent to your landowner or to transport providers rather than into your own pocket. This is absolutely correct. Now, let's unpack why video conferencing has become so accepted. And in fact, is it better in a way than getting together in person? Because, let's face it, if we were trying to do this in person, this podcast wouldn't happen. We would probably be waiting two or three years for you and I to be on the same continent.

Starting point is 00:05:15 And here we are. We can pop it up. We can reschedule twice. It's no big deal. Easy, breezy. And everybody has proper microphones, proper microphones, proper. lighting the nuance of video conferencing. There were a lot of details to get right, and it required, like, proper participation.

Starting point is 00:05:32 Like, you have to learn how to use a microphone. I can't tell you how many people would come on the program, and their Wi-Fi would be janky. Yeah. And they would be on a Zoom call, or before that, they would be on, you know, maybe Skype. Yeah, and it just would be dropping out. It would, you know, nobody had Ethernet, nobody had a proper microphone. People didn't understand.

Starting point is 00:05:51 So it does feel like there were like all these little granular details that people had to take ownership of. And actually, of course, Zoom got it right in one way over Skype, which is it used the model of the meeting room. In other words, there's a pre-organized meeting which you join rather than the model of the phone call. Because for a business-to-business context, okay, I wouldn't dream of video calling one of my clients out of the blue. I mean, any more than I'd dress up in a clown costume and jump out of a box of their office. It just seems an intrusive and weird thing to do. Whereas the model of the meeting which you join, I think works much, much better just in terms of what we're familiar with. It's what that chap, Raymond Lowy called a maximally advanced yet acceptable or Maya.

Starting point is 00:06:41 You know, it was close enough to what we did before to be recognizable, but advanced enough to be different. And also, of course, it's worth noting that, you know, high-quality broadband has made a difference. And also the fact that it's no longer acceptable to be useless at it. So there's often among older and more senior business people, it's almost a kind of badge of honor to be crap at technology. You know, it's dying. Obviously, I don't think we'll see that in, you know, five, ten years' time. We don't see it much now. But five or ten years ago, there was this kind of, well, all that's...

Starting point is 00:07:17 sort of technical stuff is beneath me. Yeah. My assistant will set up the laptop. I'll come in at the last minute. Let me know. I don't want to press a button. Print out my emails for me. That archetype was the crumagined.

Starting point is 00:07:29 I'm above it. I'm above the technical fray. I have somebody for that. Set it up for me. That's over. That's especially. And also it's what I call simple social norms. And I always call this a sort of Coke effect.

Starting point is 00:07:42 I always say the magical property of Coca-Cola is that you can ask for a Coke or a Diet Coke pretty much in any setting in the world. It's not a weird request. And if they haven't got it, it's their fault, not yours. Okay. And what I always said about video conferencing, it went from being Dr. Pepper for 15 years. You know, a choice you have to justify. Yes.

Starting point is 00:08:05 To becoming effectively a near default. I dare you to say Dr. Pepper in Italy and see what the reaction is. Like, I mean, do it in the United States. They'll be like, have a Dr. Pib, you know, it's... Apart from Texas. I think, which is its home state. Yes. You have Dr. Pepper and Coke in the same way that you might have Coke and Pepsi elsewhere.

Starting point is 00:08:24 Yes. I have a very funny story about that. I actually gave a talk in Italy. And for some weird reason, I was giving the talk to a media company. And they said, does Rory have any sort of riders or, you know, particular favorite food? Of course he does. And my PA said, well, actually, he quite likes Dr. Pepper Zero. And they shipped it out by FedEx.

Starting point is 00:08:46 from the United States. And I said, geez, you know, I'm looking like some sort of prima donna here. You know, I'm looking like a crank. I said, I quite like the drink, but I'm perfectly happy having whatever a local alternative is provided. And they said, no, no, we're used to this.

Starting point is 00:09:00 They said, our two chief executives are Texan, and we ship Dr. Pepper everywhere they go. That's in there, a rider. That's pretty cool rider, actually, isn't it? Yeah. I think so. You know, and there is something about the Zero movement that has just found

Starting point is 00:09:16 a really great balance between the diet and the full sugar. The zero movement, it tastes like the real thing. It doesn't taste like the diet soda anymore. It's completely addictive. Very interesting thing, which is you have to make the diet variant, as distinct from the zero variant. You have to make it slightly more bitter than the mainstream variant. Or people, in other words, it's kind of like perceived sacrifice. If you perceive a very slight sacrifice of sweetness, you then believe it's a diet drink. Ah, yes. So you deliberately had to make Diet Coke a tiny bit more sort of citrusy.

Starting point is 00:09:54 Yes, you have to give something up in the flavor profile to feel you've done your job. Exactly, yeah. I've made the necessary no gain without pain kind of thing. Right. I earned it. It's only done a microscopic level, but it nonetheless applies. But then you take a look at the zeros, and I would say if you have a Coke zero or if you have a diet Dr. Pepper,

Starting point is 00:10:15 if you're Dr. Pepper zero, Sprite zero, I've tried all these zeros. You put it side by side with a regular one. You're much closer. So something has happened here. People have accepted that it's very close. But there's something to the spiciness of a Dr. Pepper that is intriguing. I love the Dr. Peppers.

Starting point is 00:10:35 They always refer to it as a copy of absolutely nothing else, you know. But it is entirely original. You know, it's not a cola. It's, you know, it's patently not a root beer. And, of course, it's very difficult for shops that want to pass off Dr. Pepper to, because there's no real way you can describe it. So they always call themselves, I don't know. It's a Dr. Pepper. They call themselves Professor Salt or something, you know, as an attempt to basically mimic it.

Starting point is 00:11:02 But there's no actual descriptor you can use that describes what it is. No. The formula is safe because it's undescribable. You can't make a mock beverage of it. It'd be, yes, you'd have to, like, professor, doctor, you know, yeah, it's, it's a. There's a museum. If you're ever in Waco, Texas, and I nearly went there, but unfortunately, couldn't make it. In Waco, Texas, there is the official Dr. Pepper Museum, if anybody feels like a pilgrimage.

Starting point is 00:11:33 Yeah, that does seem like a pilgrimage that a full two dozen people a year probably made. If you're going to the Dr. Pepper Museum, it's time to assess your life, just a wee bit, I think. Listen, we have been doubling and tripling down on Founder University here at launch. In fact, it's kind of the future of our firm, and it's amazing for us to work with hundreds of early stage founders, even before they incorporate, right? They have ideas, and they're trying to figure out what tools to use to make their ideas into our reality. And we're seeing so many of these Founder University startups using Squarespace. Everybody knows Squarespace has beautiful design templates. They're all mobile optimized.

Starting point is 00:12:12 And of course, they have powerful e-commerce integrations, but did you know that Squarespace also added member areas? This is where you can sell members-only premium content, okay, educational stuff, et cetera. And if you're a consultant of some type, you have now appointment scheduling built into Squarespace. So listen, if you build it on Squarespace, everything's going to work. They keep adding amazing features, and you're going to load super fast on your desktop, and mobile. It's going to look great, super easy to edit, super easy to evolve. And if you're looking to start your business, you can't go wrong with Squarespace. We all know that. So I want you to head to Squarespace.com slash twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer

Starting point is 00:12:50 code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. We love your Squarespace, our longest running partner here on This Week in Startups. Thank you so much for supporting our founders and for supporting this week in startups. But to your point, how you frame something. is so important. This is, you know, a Skype was kind of instant messaging, you know, one-on-one instant messaging turned into a phone call. Slack and Zoom were meetings turned into chat rooms and video conferences. And the fact that there was a URL of a meeting, that the meeting was independent of the

Starting point is 00:13:33 people coming. Absolutely perfect. That URL idea was a piece of absolute. genius. And I thought it was, you know, just such a brilliant, brilliant thing, which is that obviously then eventually companies added slightly more security and passwords and things. In the very early days, you had a very simple sort of nine-digit number. You had a URL. You clicked on the URL. No need to download software. Because, of course, in anything, in any of those network things, you always face the problem that the quality of the meeting

Starting point is 00:14:07 basically sits at the level of the most technologically incompetent individual participant. And so if you add any degree of difficulty like a software download, it only takes one person to be struggling with the tech for the first 15 minutes of the meeting to be ruined. It's also worth noting, by the way, that because Zoom worked on a cloud basis, I think it crossed the threshold of non-crapiness first. In other words, other alternatives always were prone with depressing, regularity to essentially kind of, you know, fail. The ease of use and the reliability, really, that is what made it.

Starting point is 00:14:47 But it existed, that URL exists just like the conference room exists. You know that conference room is on the third floor in this building. You know, this conference exists at this, you know, URL. It just made you feel like it's got a reliability. We go to that room and we're there. Yeah. It worries me a bit because I often talk about this sort of, the age. of things being invented and things becoming really usable so that when video conferencing

Starting point is 00:15:14 was novel, it wasn't much good. And by the time it became good, it was no longer novel. And that's why I made that caveat at the beginning of the core, which is that we like talking about novel things generative AI. We like talking about maybe the metaverse, although that seems to have suddenly fallen out of favor. And we love talking about what's next, which makes us look forward thinking. And actually there's a big role for backward looking thought, which is what is it that was invented? I've got a terrible story, by the way, to tell about this, which is before the pandemic, I met a senior person from Zoom. And we were discussing from a behavioral point of view what we could do to destigmatize a normalized video conferencing.

Starting point is 00:16:00 And our best suggestion at the time was effectively to make Friday video conferencing day for everybody, kind of thank Zoom, it's Friday. So you'd at least solve the coordination problem. A lot of people were working from home. It was kind of don't ask, don't tell. But a lot of people worked from home on a Friday anyway. And what you'd do is you'd effectively make Friday the day in which people did their video call.

Starting point is 00:16:23 And then we suggested that. I thought it was a pretty good suggestion. And just as she was leaving, I said almost in passing, of course, what you really need is a major transport strike or a minor pandemic. That was in August That was in August 2019 And every time I look back on saying this I'm kind of

Starting point is 00:16:40 Wow, you cursed us This was your power, Rory. You set it in motion. So we'll put you in touch with the Wuhan Institute of Virology And now they know where to point the finger Right to Rory But I always felt because It wasn't a totally flippant point

Starting point is 00:16:57 Because I had been reading coincidentally About the effects that pandemics tended to have on behaviour I'd also been reading about the fact that, of course, we assume that we've completely forgotten the kind of things that would happen. So if the Titanic had avoided the iceberg, it would have been held at a point outside New York. Then slightly dubiously, the first-class passengers were allowed to go straight through on the assumption they were healthy. But other people would be inspected in advance. and second and third class passengers were treated differently on arrival but had to go through kind of quarantine procedures

Starting point is 00:17:40 in the case I think of the third class passengers. You know, we forget that that was once completely normal. Right. Sounds like how we executed it here. Gavin Newsom was up in French Laudrie having like dinner parties while they were arresting people who were surfing and you're like, wait a second.

Starting point is 00:17:59 That's what I knew. Something was up. I was like, wait a second. These mother melon farmers are up at the Michelin Starred restaurant with no masks on, in a room, living it up. And they've literally got people patrolling the beaches with whistles calling the Coast Guard on a surfer. And you're like, you know, I don't think the surfer needs to wear a mask. And this is where like it got a little concerning to me. I don't know if you had this moment where I was like, it doesn't seem like we have a logical approach here.

Starting point is 00:18:31 So when did the pandemic break for you? And you said, the logic is getting thrown out. And this is people being, this is their chance at authoritarianism. And given a chance, some people will take that authoritarian stick and swing it. Also, this has a bearing on AI in the sense that I think we are right to come out of the pandemic with a slightly reduced reverence for science. quite simply because with the best will in the world with the best intention of the world no one can really predict the uses to which inventions will ultimately be put anyway so this isn't say that scientists are necessarily evil it's simply the fact that secondly

Starting point is 00:19:13 I would argue that regardless of where the pandemic originated the practice of collecting batshit from obscure caves that no normal human or animal would even enter and then taking them to a laboratory in the center of a city of 12 million people, where you investigate the peculiar viruses that might be found there under what I think was something like level two biosafety conditions.

Starting point is 00:19:41 And I asked an expert what that meant, and he said it's basically what you get at your dentist. They wipe things down. Also, the failure to spot that it was airborne was, I think, very, very interesting. because I had, early on in the pandemic as a little bit of a kind of bit of arbitrage. I bought a hepar air filter, big powerful, 500 pound, 600-dollar heper air filter. And the abuse I got on it online by people saying

Starting point is 00:20:09 that the virus is smaller than the hepa air filter. Yes. And therefore my filter is useless, completely failing to understand that the virus travels on droplets. Right. And the fact that, by the way, NASA have shown that, air filters remove far smaller particles than their billing suggests.

Starting point is 00:20:29 Never mind that. I mean, one of the interesting things is that there seem to be the assumption that particles of sputum or whatever it may be above a certain size would not be airborne. Now, I hate say this. If you've ever had somebody talk to you too close at a party when they're drunk and they're spitting your eye, you've got evidence to the contrary, and that happens once a party. And actually, I hate to say this, but if more scientists, still smoked, they would have known perfectly well that very large particles can drift in the air

Starting point is 00:20:59 because the air is kind of sticky at the level of small particles. There are those wonderful spiders that actually produce a great big sort of rope and then ride on the wind using that very fact. It's a fantastic thing to see done. That's a good use of YouTube. But the fact that they failed to spot it must have been largely airborne and promote ventilation sooner than they did. You know, okay, in Britain, in January, February, you know, opening your windows wide is not a particularly practical solution.

Starting point is 00:21:32 But once you get to the spring, large parts of the U.S., ventilation would probably have saved a lot of lives. Yes. And they were very, very slow on that. We said, stay home. And then so what did people do? They said, great, I'll have a party at my house. I'll invite 10 people over my house. You can't come on my front door.

Starting point is 00:21:47 I'll keep the doors closed, the blind's closed. And you won't be able to see us with our masks. So it's like, you would have been better off being in the backyard having a party. So in terms of the uses of AI, I think we have to be, and by the way, I think there's a very creative use for it, which is suggesting things coming up with random variants, you know. Brainstorming, you'd put that in the category of? Yeah, emphatically, sort of what you might call turbocharged brainstorming. Yes. I think, and possibly turbocharged small scale, very safe experimentation.

Starting point is 00:22:17 I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of it making final decisions without the same. scope for human correction. Because something over-optimized to do, or something optimized to do anything is likely to end up over-optimizing that thing. I mean, humans have a kind of

Starting point is 00:22:37 instinctive notion most of the time when they've kind of, when they're practicing overshoot. It's hard to brainstorm. You brainstorm for a living. And the preconditions for brainstorming or being open-minded. The human brain is because of evolution.

Starting point is 00:22:58 We are trained to be conservative, to look for patterns and to stay in those patterns because sticking with what has worked means you stay alive and your baby doesn't get eaten by a lion. You don't get eaten by crocodiles because you thought, hey, that's a great river. I wonder what's on the other side. Habit is perfectly rational once you understand the evolutionary, as is social copying, of course. Yes. If I've done it lots of times before or if lots of people are doing it, then I can discount significantly the risk of doing such a thing.

Starting point is 00:23:29 It's why people buy big brands to a great extent, you know. Yes, safety. Tide is not going to ruin my clothes because people have been using Tide for a long time. So let's do it right now. If it were ruining clothes, I would have got to hear about it by now. It would have been cancelled. Now, here is our brainstorming session. I'm going to ask Rory and I'm going to ask Chat GPD4. And we'll see which one can brainstorm.

Starting point is 00:23:53 better. Open-minded brainster. Here's your prompt. I'm giving a Rory prompt. There's a Rory GPT prompt. What would a variant of Dr. Pepper that most people wouldn't want to try be, but that a small percentage of people would become addicted to? A variant of Dr. Pepper that most people would not want to try, but some small percentage of people would become addicted to. What are some variants on Dr. Pepper you can think of? My God, did it do such a good job here. Your kind of mind is going to be blown. One interesting thing would be simply to sell Dr. Pepper in a very narrow, tall aluminium can.

Starting point is 00:24:36 Because the effect on taste and experience of the receptacle. The vessel. This is anecdotal, and I'll admit it, but it fascinates me. And I had some corroboratoring evidence just a couple of days ago. I basically didn't drink water at all. My father doesn't drink water. I'm not saying, but he was an alcoholic. He drinks a lot of tea and coffee and he drinks wine and he'll drink, you know, other

Starting point is 00:25:03 flavored drinks, but he just doesn't drink water. I didn't really drink water either. And then they started selling water in a can. And I discovered that once it was refrigerated, I really quite enjoyed it. And I have no idea where this is. I mean, what's going on there? absolutely no clue. But I wouldn't drink water out of pet containers, but water out of aluminium cans I quite enjoyed. And then I discovered a drink which I can't name for reasons of

Starting point is 00:25:31 obvious confidentiality where someone got to be only two days ago, bizarrely, where although the drink is widely sold in tall, narrow aluminium cans, I might add, in pretty much all the multiple retailers in the UK. And it sells well. Nonetheless, about 50% of their sales, you a direct to consumer. I said, what? So people are ordering, you know, cases of 2448 cans, even though the thing is readily

Starting point is 00:26:01 available in your local shop. Right. And that strikes me that they've probably stumbled on some weird combination where a certain percentage of people just find it absolutely amazing. Because it would be a clue,

Starting point is 00:26:15 wouldn't it? I mean, I have another theory. What if it's because it's stackable and because they're narrow And Paul, you can fit more in your cupboard or your refrigerator. It's stackable if you buy it from the shop. So that's a fair point. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:26:27 That actually you're, that, but it seems to me unusual, put it this way, that you would see that, you know, because normally, if you knew someone who is selling a drink that was selling only online, the first thing you'd say is, look, you've got to get wider distribution because, you know, distribute. I mean, as Coke discovered, what was it? Refreshment at arm's reach. as they great mantra, the distribution is sort of three-quarters of the law. But it's occasionally called in marketing, it's both mental and physical availability.

Starting point is 00:27:00 Oh, I like that, mental and physically. Is it mentally available and salient and is it physically available? Yeah. Well, and it's very interesting. So now, I wonder if it also has to do with something, not just the mouth feel, but the hand feel.

Starting point is 00:27:15 Because you can fit your hand all the way around those cans, even if you had small hands. those cans are very, there's a great hand feel to a thin tall can, where a fat, the short fat cans, you know, you got to wrestle with them a bit. Probably the perfect container would be, and I was, you're not going to believe this, I was actually talking to someone because I have to record a talk for an aluminium conference in Chicago. And I said probably the perfect container would be something shaped like a Coke bottle but

Starting point is 00:27:47 made out of aluminium. and they said they do exist, but you can only buy them in Japan. Yes, I have seen these. They look like the classic Christmas Coca-Cola, as we call them here, but they come in the aluminum. Yes, you're right.

Starting point is 00:28:01 All right, here are your Dr. Pepper flavors. Go on. These are some flavors. Dr. Pepper super spicy edition. Now, that. That's an interesting idea, that no one has... Kick in even more spice.

Starting point is 00:28:16 This could be a hit with adventurous drinkers. This is Chat GPD. Spicy beverages have a niche market, but there are people who enjoy the thrill of spice. Number two, Dr. Pepper, this one is going to be pretty horrible or pretty great, salty caramel it. But they do talk about Dr. Pepper having a little caramel to it. Combining the sweet, iconic flavor, Dr. Pepper, with a touch of savory saltiness. Ah, interesting. Developer talent is the most precious resource for B2B startups.

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Starting point is 00:30:04 What a great domain name. That's up to $10,000 in value at release.com slash twist. Okay, here's number three. This sounds disgusting right in the garbage. But this is brainstorm. Dr. Pepper Macha edition. No.

Starting point is 00:30:20 Dr. Pepper does not... Does it go at macha green tea? You would do that? The weird thing about matcha is it is kind of brilliantly polarizing

Starting point is 00:30:31 in the same way that Dr. Pepper is. So I can see why I've made that inference because I occasionally have a matcha latte at Starbucks, for example. I like a macho. Whatever you do,

Starting point is 00:30:44 by the way, do not ever tip it in your car because Oh, it's over? A pint and a half of snot basically. Yeah, you're basically having a green car now. Yeah, you turn your car to the 60s edition.

Starting point is 00:30:56 It was an absolute catastrophe. But if you manage not to spill it in your car, I quite like it as a tea alternative. It's actually quite heavily caffeinated, match, if I'm right. I know. You know, I like to make it at home. If you go on the Amazon or whatever, you can buy a macho whisk. A little mixing kid.

Starting point is 00:31:11 A little mis. Mastor Wist. Just whisk it up. Kids love it. Put a little honey in it. and a little steam milk. This one will sell out. Green tea ice cream is a fantastic.

Starting point is 00:31:21 Absolutely extraordinary. Yes. Coffee ice cream. I had the best coffee ice cream variant. Somebody made Vietnamese coffee ice cream. I love coffee ice cream. Vietnamese coffee ice cream. You know,

Starting point is 00:31:31 like with intense milk. Incredible. Of course. Yes, of course. Yeah. Dr. Pepper.

Starting point is 00:31:36 Now, this one is going to sell out and is going to create a TikTok phenomenon. This will be a TikTok phenomenon. The Dr. Pepper Durian edition. Everybody knows Durian is the fruit, notorious for a strong smell. love it or hated kind of food. That one would sell out.

Starting point is 00:31:50 What's very interesting about the durian is, it's delicious, by the way, and I found the smell completely inoffensive, and apparently it's genetic. Yes, I heard this. It's like the asparagus in your pee thing. Yeah, the asparagus in your pee is also genetic. Yes.

Starting point is 00:32:04 With the durian, effectively, I can't remember what the percentage is. It's sort of 10 or 20% of people find the smell absolutely repellent. I'm completely unconcerned. There's a fantastic thing you can do. in one of Steve Jones' books on genetics, he names the chemical, which is undetectable to about 80 to 90% of people. Huh.

Starting point is 00:32:26 But to 10% of people, it's the most disgusting thing they've ever tasted in their life. Wild. And it was discovered sometime in the 30s because a German manufacturer of ice cube trays used this chemical and were suddenly bombarded with complaints saying that every drink I put this ice in tastes absolutely foul. but they couldn't diagnose it because 90% of people they were all going, I have no idea what you're talking about. And the brilliant thing, apparently Steve Jones and his geneticist mates used to do in Oxford was you'd invite a load of people around for tea,

Starting point is 00:32:57 put a few drops of this chemical in the teapot. And what was brilliant is, of course, you just have a massive argument because two people would basically spit out their tea. You'd make the tea very well, okay? Yes. And two people would just spit it out and go, what's wrong? You know, you try to poison me.

Starting point is 00:33:13 And the other eight people, will be there going perfectly delicious tea. I have no idea what you're talking about. This is the original gaslighting. This is the original gaslighting. Fantastic way of gaslighting people. Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:33:24 Dr. Pepper, savory herb edition. Like rosemary or time. This sounds horrific, but I'll try it. I'll try. Yeah, I actually think that the whole food industry has been possibly overadventures with spices, underadventious with herbs. Yeah, that's probably directionally correct.

Starting point is 00:33:45 Yeah, I had an extraordinary thing. We get one of these food delivery kits from a company called Gusto. It's a kind of blue apron or holletri that you have in the U.S. And it was a Peruvian herb stew, which was very herb heavy. I imagine in Peru being at altitude. They probably have quite a good supply of these kind of things. It was utterly, I mean, mesmerizingly fantastic. And so I think the herb idea combined.

Starting point is 00:34:12 with the idea that we automatically assume that herbs are good for us? Yes. Herbs have we been trained to think that if you do something, like from the Greeks on, you take these herbs, you mash them up, you make some kind of tincture, it's going to do something good. It's got to be good. It's got to be good because it's herbs. It could also be poison. I think they also poison people with herbs back in the Game of Thrones days.

Starting point is 00:34:33 Last one, Dr. Pepper, smoky barbecue edition. Smoky barbecue edition. That's obviously that's a what is a potato chip flavor, isn't it? Smoking barbecue. And what they're doing there is that they're almost a couple of those flavors have basically come from ice cream, I suspect. Now, what is interesting about AI where it might be valuable, and I hate to say this, okay, is that when humans make creative, wacky suggestions, they're very readily discounted, regardless of the humans' track record or experience. When a computer does, people are much more likely to try. So in a weird way, one of the...

Starting point is 00:35:16 Okay, I always say this about behavioral science, okay? There are two ways behavioral science actually works. One way is because behavioral science is right, and you stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing, so far fairly conventional. The second reason is that behavioral science gives you reasons to test things that are counterintuitive. and quite often those counterintuitive things

Starting point is 00:35:40 just by the law of averages turn out to work and they tend to work disproportionately well because being counterintuitive nobody else has tried them before just as before Red Bull nobody tried making a sort of weird tasting drink and so they tend to occupy rather a nice market niche

Starting point is 00:35:59 that is fairly heavily uncontested fairly largely uncontested and so one value of AI is similar to the value of behavioural economics or behavioral science, which is simply by coming up with reasons to test more things than the things that make sense in advance, it will actually contribute to progress. So my great phrase is, we have to acknowledge, this is true of science, by the way, just as I think it's true of, you know, consumer goods.

Starting point is 00:36:29 Okay. There are more good ideas out there that you can post-rationalize, and there are good ideas you can pre-rationalize. I think this has to do with shame. Now that I hear you explain it, there is an inherent shame in saying a crazy idea out loud. This is why weirdos, no offense, go work at ad agencies. Because you go to an ad agency and you're having a meeting without the client,

Starting point is 00:36:52 you say some weird shit. And everybody's like, oh, that's crazy and weird. Got any more? But there's very few places in life that you could say, I got a weird idea. Can I put it on the table? And we just like give it a minute to breathe. Everyone else in life, you say Dr. Pepper Dury in addition, they're like, idiot.

Starting point is 00:37:10 But in an ad agency, you try to, is that what you try to do at agencies at Ogilvy? Yeah, I mean, tragically, I always say it's the only, and it's almost becoming, if you're not careful, it's becoming a kind of refuge for weird people and that there's nowhere else in the business world in which certainly not in the kind of operational fields where eccentricity is much tolerated. And so I always said it's the only job where you can actually make stupid suggestions and get promoted. Right. It's the only job probably where someone's asking alongside, is this a good solution? They're asking, is this an interesting solution?

Starting point is 00:37:48 Because when you solve an advertising problem, it's not enough to solve it in a way that sort of logically works. You have to solve it in a way that logically works and gets noticed. So it therefore puts a premium on solutions that are slightly divergent or weird in a way that no other part of the business world does, other than, I guess, art would be, you know, that's probably a similar kind of parallel. Yeah, but art is not always corporate. What I love about the ad agency model is there's a corporate, there's a building, there's commerce, there's a big price tag, we're going to take 10% of your ad spend, whatever you guys try. There's going to be some big consulting fee to come up with this. So you're getting paid to big outrageously. That's such a cool little refuge that exists in the world.

Starting point is 00:38:37 If AI merely suggests weird things and companies go, I have no idea why it's come up with this, but I'm going to try it. In a way, they wouldn't if a weird person came up with the idea. Right. Okay. Why? Why is that, Rory? Why would they trust the GPT with a weird idea and discounting him?

Starting point is 00:38:55 I think we just probably we just place disproportionate faith in these things because despite the fact that we know that generative AI basically makes things up. I mean it has an extremely active fantasy life. It has

Starting point is 00:39:12 hallucinations. Chat GPT is convinced that I was awarded a CBE which is kind of British honour for services to advertising in 2019 which I certainly don't remember. It also thinks that I studied politics, philosophy and economics at Cambridge, which is, of course, that doesn't exist at

Starting point is 00:39:31 Cambridge, and that I work for McKinsey and Company, which I almost sued it for libel at that point. I mean, a fate worse than death. I spent 10 years of my life writing reports that people paid six figures for, and nobody actually read. Can you, I go speak at Stanford every twice a year, and I ask, please raise your hand if you're considering going. into like McKinsey or consulting, like a third of the room raises or an I say, this is the one piece of life advice you're going to get that pays for your whole $250,000 degree at Stanford. You will regret every year you spend doing that.

Starting point is 00:40:07 If you must do it to pay down your bills for two or three years, fine. But please, when you get home, do something meaningful with your life, like learn an instrument or a foreign language or learn to be a chef. Do something entrepreneurial because you will regret that you burn those years. Sorry, shout out to McKenzie. I think it does worry me. the extent. You know, I actually spend a bit of time encouraging my younger staff to be a bit lazy because they seem very highly committed. And I always say, look, if a meeting is cancelled at 5 o'clock,

Starting point is 00:40:36 go home. You know, you've got to take the smooth with the rough. And I slightly, and the reason I do that is I'm 57. And I realize that to some extent, I, you know, took health and energy for granted. and learning the very best of your 20s and 30s in the pursuit of Luca at the expense of almost everything else may seem like a good idea at the time. It probably isn't, to be honest. Okay. You know my team runs on Notion. I've talked about it a hundred times. I'm addicted to Notion. I'm addicted to the phone app. It helps me run everything smoothly as a remote company. And they now have project management built in. And it is awesome. I just got the update on this. and we're managing the entire process of putting on this 200-person Angel Summit event in Notion.

Starting point is 00:41:25 We're doing all our project management there. This means the sales pipeline, the AV checklist, the schedules, who's responsible for speakers, the dinners, everything is done seamlessly in Notion. And then next year, I might have two or three new members on the team. You know what they do? So today I'm excited to share that Notion has launched Notion projects, which includes new powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of of their built-in AI features too.

Starting point is 00:41:50 Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI. So you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them too. All right, that's one of the great things I love about Notion is it's not people coming to me saying, oh, we have to buy more SaaS software. Oh, we've got four more products we have to buy

Starting point is 00:42:06 to do this one task. It's like, no, just do it all in Notion, okay? So here's your call to action. Do your most efficient work with Notion Project. You can try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. That's all lowercase letters. Notion.com slash TWIST. When you use the link, you're supporting our show.

Starting point is 00:42:23 So go right now to notion.com slash twist. Just get your skiing in when you're young. Get some skiing when you're young. Exactly. Skydiving, rock climbing, basketball, all good for your youth. Here's an issue. Go ahead. Also, I think there is this thing which I've called, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:44 it's sort of gone slightly viral, which I call the Dorman Fallacy, which is that one. technology tends to do is it takes a role performed by a human, okay, redefines it very narrowly in a way that's suitable for technological replacement, replaces it with a technology and then declares that it has saved the salary of the person who previously did that job. And it tends to achieve that by effectively defining the role of the hotel dormant as opening the door. It then says the doorman costs $35,000 a

Starting point is 00:43:21 year or whatever they cost, okay? We will now get rid of the doorman, replace it with an automatic door opening mechanism, job done. We lay claim to the cost savings and we wander off. Two years later, the stature of the hotel, regular guests are no longer being

Starting point is 00:43:37 recognized, taxis are no longer being hailed. And I think there is an absolute obsession in the tech industry, not with actually finding the optimal balance of human touch and technical or algorithmic automation, but by replacing human touch wherever it's even theoretically possible. I think it's a terrible mistake.

Starting point is 00:43:57 I was once trying to offer an MBA for people working in service industries of any kind, where I simply said, you know, first term, curriculum, answer the phone. Second term, answer the fucking phone. I mean, answer the phone. and then don't hang it up until you resolve the person's problem. Exactly. Or when they say what the problem is, take the rulebook that they gave you, throw it in the garbage,

Starting point is 00:44:27 and then listen with empathy to the customer, and then try to make them happy so they come and give you more money and tell their friends to give you more money. I don't know who is training customer service these days. And now with AI, it's like, oh, we don't need customer service. That's not customer service. That's customer loyalty. The reason is that loyalty is slow to measure and therefore it gets discounted.

Starting point is 00:44:51 So we have this problem which is not only does all big data come from the same place in the past, but we vastly prefer fast, highly attributable data to slow hard to attribute data. Now obviously slower data is harder to attribute directly because more other things have happened in between. Okay. I don't know if you're familiar with the work of Ian McGillchrist, a kind of British neuroscientist and philosopher, really, who basically claims that, you know, we're at a cultural point where the left brain, and he believes this literally, by the way, that's separated by the corpus callosum, the right brain hemisphere does the same thing as the left brain does, but it does it in different ways. Yes. The left brain only knows what it knows. The right brain is sensitive to context and will ask questions and so on. And I think there's a huge danger that in our love of winning, and I met him a couple of days ago, and I said, I think a large part of this left brain problem is because in order to get anything done nowadays, you've got to win an argument.

Starting point is 00:45:58 Right. And we've come to assume that quality of reasoning correlates perfectly with quality of decision and quality of outcome. And I don't think it does. I mean, I think in a lot of cases, actually, quality of reasoning or the ability to reason, a lot of reason, possible hypothesis for something working, maybe not a bad kind of filter. But the idea that the person with the best argument, therefore, has the best solution, is not safe because it discards creative possibilities by the shedload. Once you demand that things make sense in advance and that you can only do things, the effect of which you can measure down to the last penny,

Starting point is 00:46:38 large numbers of solutions basically disappear from your solution space. They come off the table because a lot of things only work in time. You know, fame, for example, I think there's a huge value to a business being famous, but it's impossible to predict how that value will manifest itself in advance, simply because the point of being famous is that people you've never heard of come to you with demands you never anticipated. Okay? You know, so one value of being famous is that if you want to perform very highly targeted precision marketing,

Starting point is 00:47:17 where you only pay to communicate to people who are in the market for your product, okay? Yeah. You are limited by your own imagination and conception of what your market is and what need states your product may satisfy. Now, if you become famous, you may discover, in fact, that there are whole incremental, unanticipated markets for your product. product, and that your product satisfies need states you never even imagine for a second. This is so true. Okay. And so you have to have enormous faith in the capacity of your own imagination being

Starting point is 00:47:51 better than the imagination of 20 million other people to determine what the value is. I think there's something really interesting in that I've made this point about online estate agents. I think it applies to online dating as well, okay, which is Rialtor, sorry. for Americans, real estate agents. Yes. Okay. Now, what used to happen with an estate agent was when you went to an estate agent,

Starting point is 00:48:16 you would have an idea of what kind of house you wanted. Now, an estate agent will tell you that actually, in the majority of cases, people end up buying houses that meet none of their initial criteria. The initial criteria is aspirational? So, it's probably just seemingly logical. You know, we want a bit of a garden. We like this. We want that.

Starting point is 00:48:36 And then they see an apartment with an amazing river. view and they decide they're not all that keen in gardening after all. It's kind of recursive process, okay. And what happens when you go to a human estate agent is he's also doing, now this all comes, I think, from the assumption in economics that people know what they want and can stipulate and describe it perfectly in advance, which is a kind of foundational assumption of neoliberal economics. No one, no psychologist on earth believes that to be true. I mean, okay. Now, what the real estate agent is also doing is he's asking a second question, which is actually

Starting point is 00:49:13 quite important for the efficient functioning of a market, which is, what house could I sell this guy, which I couldn't sell to anybody else? And so if I went into a real estate agent, they'd probably go, this guy's a bit of a weirdo, I can finally get rid of that bastard windmill I'd be trying to sell. You know, you know what I mean? Okay. Or, you know, the Coast Guard tower, you know, on the shore. The lighthouse.

Starting point is 00:49:39 Finally, I've got rid of that lighthouse, okay? Yes. I'm sorry. I'll just pause for a second on my phone as well. I want to call. Can you call back a little after in about 10 minutes? Everything okay? Fantastic.

Starting point is 00:49:54 Oh, brilliant. Okay. Thank you. Radio. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Coming quietly in case I'm still recording. Okay, bye-bye.

Starting point is 00:50:04 Was that a flip phone? Yeah. Now, actually, that's a very... Wait, is that a flip phone? No, no. No, no, no, it's just my landline. Oh, it's your landline. I thought you had a flip phone.

Starting point is 00:50:16 I'm like, whoa, is Rory going backwards in time to go flip phone? There is a movement. There's a movement. Absolutely. There's the old-fashioned feature phone movement, you know. I love it. Which I think, to be honest, if it went for about four or five applications like parking apps and Uber. I think I'd consider regressing, actually.

Starting point is 00:50:35 Actually, if you've got an electric car, you've got a Tesla, so you only need one app for that. I've got the Mustang Mac E and you need about seven. Absolutely gorgeous car, by the way, absolutely. Yeah, wonderful looking car, yeah. Lovely, lovely job. And Ford did something very, very clever, actually. They were about to produce a separate electric car division and create new brands matching those usual car segments of crossover utility vehicle, SUV, you know, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:51:08 and someone very brilliant went to them and said, you're making a complete mistake because you're looking at this problem from the top down, not from the consumer up. You've got five unbelievably strong products, which I think were Explorer, F-150, Bronco, Transit and Mustang, make electric versions of them. Because anybody, Tesla included, can make an electric car that meets the definition of some sort of car segment or other.

Starting point is 00:51:36 Yeah. They can't make it. a Mustang. They can't make a Mustang. Or a Corvette or an iconic car. The only thing I thought they should have done was, I think there's a market to take the existing, iconic looking cars, like the Corvette from the 60s or 70s, a Mustang from 1970 or 1965, the pony car.

Starting point is 00:51:55 And that would be a great juxtaposition. A 1965 pony Mustang with an electric engine. It's funny you say that because I was just, I just received a press release today for a British company that has worked out a way of doing drop-in electrification for Jaguarie type. Ooh. And it's actually lighter than the original. Don't ask me how they managed to do that. I suppose a V8 engine is, a V-12 engine is pretty expensive and pretty heavy.

Starting point is 00:52:24 But you can basically take the shell of a Jaguar E-type. And by the way, it's reversible as well. But you can basically drop the electric skateboard into what is probably the most beautiful car ever made. With cars, I think, as with yachts, they reach their kind of apotheosis of beauty in the kind of 50s and 60s, shouldn't they? Yots have actually, you know, rich people's yachts have become uglier progressively, I think, since. But what it means is that car manufacturers actually now have a back catalogue. Yes.

Starting point is 00:53:00 It's a really fascinating thing. Greatest hits. They could remaster the Beatles and make everybody buy it again. Buy it all over again. Yeah, absolutely right. And I mean, old people have money and are dying and they want to recapture their youth. Well, I've wondered about going around and buying, well, you could go buy the Tucker brand if you wanted to do, for example. Tucker's available?

Starting point is 00:53:20 I don't know. It sounds like a burden as much as it is. You remember that three headlights thing, which was sort of, yeah. And I've always wondered about brands like Austin Healy, you know, who owns them? Because. Sob, didn't Sob go out at some point? Sob of cars. Which I think is.

Starting point is 00:53:36 DeLorean. Absolutely right. Yeah. So. There's a couple of these that you could get. Mini Cooper was one, right? And then I guess. That's owned by BMW.

Starting point is 00:53:45 BMW now, but that had been dormant. My wife, you just rang just a moment ago. It has an electric Mini Cooper. Ah. The range is tiny. The range is only about 110 miles. Wait, it should be the opposite. Well, the battery is pretty small because it has to fit into the standard body so far.

Starting point is 00:54:02 Got it. Of the Mini. But actually, range anxiety in the UK. I totally accept the US is completely different. But range anxiety in the UK is pretty much irrelevant because of the density of population, really. So I mentioned this, that the US needs gas stations to serve a geography, whereas we only need them to serve a population. I did them little maths, and we've got about 9,000 gas stations in the UK, and in the US you've got 116,000. because obviously you have a road

Starting point is 00:54:34 between sort of Teos and Farmington, New Mexico where if you didn't have a gas station on it, no one could make the trip. We don't really have those roads in Britain, in fact, you know, basically every six miles you run into a time, even more extreme in, say, the Netherlands or Belgium. And so the range question is, actually, to be honest, I think it's a perfectly rational American fear

Starting point is 00:54:58 which we've imported to the UK. Yeah, I mean, when you have Tesla's have hit 320. That is, and then the model S has a 400-mile version. I can tell you the 200-mile version of my model X, not enough. 320-mile model Y, plenty. Because there's a certain amount of time that you want to get out of your car. And it's about three or four hours that you want to get the hell out of your car. I mean, it's probably less in the UK because we're driving on more crowded roads.

Starting point is 00:55:27 I've driven huge distances in the US through western Pennsylvania, and you sit on the interstate and you go at 60 miles an hour. It's pretty chill. You can do that for, you know, as you say, for three hours without stopping quite easily. In the UK, you tend to want to stop every couple of hours. Also, as we get older, our bladders tend to dictate the... There is an upper limit. You and I are in our 50s now, and there is certainly a bladder issue.

Starting point is 00:55:54 Let me ask you about this. What do people want employees today? And what's motivating people? You and I are part of the Gen Xers. We wanted to have some amount of autonomy. We wanted to maybe be, we wanted money. What's driving this next generation? And then you have work from home. You have this sudden fear that, oh, my. And it's really interesting how five years things have swung. Because we had people who were white collar thought, I'm going to have five job offers from five different people. And it's always going to go up and to the right. Now they're like, okay, I can't get any job offers. Google and Facebook are not hiring. Everybody wants to do more with less, and now my job's going to be replaced by ChatGPT. The psyche of the white collar worker has got to be really fragile right now. What do they want? It's very complicated.

Starting point is 00:56:44 I mean, Gen Z are both different and not different from other younger generations that have come before them in some ways in what probably makes them different to a large extent. One very significant difference, by the way, is they drink. much less. That is, and less sex. Yeah,

Starting point is 00:57:01 well, no, no, absolutely that as well, yeah, yeah. Wow, the Overton window

Starting point is 00:57:06 has shut. People are corny and square. They're squares. It is kind of, I mean, certainly the level of, among the gen Z

Starting point is 00:57:14 people I work with, the level of what you might call dissipation and general, you know, bad behavior is shenanigans. Remarkably,

Starting point is 00:57:21 shenanigans, beautifully part. Yeah. Incredibly low. They're very, They're very conservative and they don't, they're not going to like jump into somebody's pool without being invited. No, absolutely not. No.

Starting point is 00:57:35 There's less of that, which may partly be explained by the lower drinking habits. Fair enough. And drink being replaced by other drugs, by the way. I mean, interestingly, the first thing you've got to do at the US is get rid of this ridiculous two weeks vacation thing. Yes. That has crushed people's souls. Which I think is monstrous, okay? Now, I'm a Brit.

Starting point is 00:58:01 I'm right of centre politically, okay. I get the gun thing. It's probably too late to do something and anything about it. You know, it's not an ideal situation, but I can just about get that, okay? Now, I can promise that I've never met anybody in the UK at all. This is the example of status quo bias that is so right wing that they think we should actually have less vacation in order to grow the economy by a couple of percent. I've never come across anybody with that belief.

Starting point is 00:58:31 And in fact, if you had that belief in the workplace, you'd be just generally regarded as nuts. And so one of the reasons with flexible work is you almost need a degree of flexibility just to visit your parents, if they live 500 miles away or not. Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:58:46 Because you get two weeks vacation. If one week is spent visiting friends or parents, that leaves you with one week to see what is actually the world's most fascinating country, even if you never leave the borders of the United States. Yes. Okay. That's kind of tragic to me.

Starting point is 00:59:04 Also, we're taking too much leisure at the beginning of life with higher education and with retirement, and there's too little leisure in the middle. I agree with this as well. When people have the money and the health to actually enjoy it, that seems to me kind of weird. Why is it if I went to my employer and said, I'd like to take a year off unpaid.

Starting point is 00:59:24 They were terribly hungry. I don't know about this. But I'd still be back in a year. Whereas if I said, I'm retiring. So I'm taking everything I know, my roller decks, my contacts, etc. And I'm just walking off the stage. That's okay. That's called retirement.

Starting point is 00:59:37 That's perfectly okay. Whereas taking a year right as a break is considered heinous. That's silly. It does interest me because previously Labor Economics basically said there are two things that were at play here. There's time, leisure time, and there's money. and the employer pays the employee to compensate them for their lost leisure. Okay.

Starting point is 00:59:59 And so pretty much because of the norm of the five-day week, which I think Henry Ford was partly responsible for. Yeah, I think fully responsible for you. He wanted people to be able to take their cars and go somewhere on the weekend. Absolutely right. And actually, by the way, if the U.S. had more vacation, I'm not even sure it wouldn't grow the economy because actually experiences are more labor-intensive than goods. and the money tends to be spent locally

Starting point is 01:00:24 rather than on importing materials. Three-day work week, a four-day work week is becoming a discussion of this great negotiation that's going on to get people back to offices. And I think where this might wind up is exactly how Europeans look at the United States, which is like two days,

Starting point is 01:00:43 it really winds up being four weeks off a month with the holidays, six days, etc. So you wind up talking about 25 days off a year, which is five weeks. four weeks, but we put them into sick days, etc. We don't give a full month of August. One interesting thing about flexible work, by the way, and I was talking to someone at Deutsche Bank who'd done, because it was a theory of mine, and I wanted to see if it was born out, and it is born out. The single sick day or the two days off ill have more or less

Starting point is 01:01:10 disappeared, because those are kind of illnesses where you're actually well enough to work, typically, you're just not well enough to commute. I mean, the most obvious one, without going into huge graphic detail is the stomach upset, where provided you're at home at a desk within reasonable reach of a toilet, you're perfectly capable of working. You're damned if you're going to go into the office. Yeah, no way you're getting out of subway, you know. No, no, no, not a chance.

Starting point is 01:01:33 So interestingly, there's a kind of possibly an uncastlogged gain is that, you know, when people have the option of working flexibility, you don't have all those sort of wasted. And actually, of course, a single day taken off can have a large, knock-on effect on complex projects, by the way, as well. So that's probably a gain. It's also the interesting thing that people now have, if you like, rather than just time and money, they have a third negotiating counter, which is what I call third and fourth, which is as well as free time, there's also free wear and free where.

Starting point is 01:02:09 In other words, if I can work at a time that suits me and at a place that suits me for at at least some of the time, that has a value. Now, it has a value, by the way, economically, you know, in that people who have other commitments can still work, which they arguably couldn't, undoubtedly benefits maternity arrangements. Sure. A large part of the disadvantaged women experienced while they were off on maternity leave was just being invisible. It wasn't that they weren't working. It was just, you know, you were. Really interesting, the maternity thing you bring out, because I came up with a system. because I had a particularly hardworking woman who still works for me.

Starting point is 01:02:49 And she wanted to do some work, even after she had the baby, but she didn't want to come back full time. No. And it was like a light switch on or off. You're either back to work or you're not working. And I said, how about we do this? Every two weeks, you just tell HR if you're working quarter time, half time, three quarter time or full time. And you can vary it just so we have an idea. every two weeks, set yourself out for quarter time, half time, whatever, and you can round up.

Starting point is 01:03:19 We'll take a little bit of the, you know, if you're going to work 20%, just rounds it up to quarter time. And we just came up with quarter time, half time, three quarter time, full time. So you can pick. And it might change. You know, your kid might get colicky or something. And you might want to, you know, go back down to quarter time after being at three quarter time. Things can change. And so that kind of flexibility, I think, is the thing that's changing.

Starting point is 01:03:39 I have the same epiphany because I have a PA who is a single mom. the only downside of it was her ex-husband had run off with a Canadian. And I couldn't understand why, you know, I never seemed to get any business trips to Canada, which I've seen. She had a sort of aversion to Canadians. But apart for that, she was absolutely fantastic. And I suddenly realized, okay, look, the things that make your job difficult to do are actually of no concern to me.

Starting point is 01:04:10 I'd rather you were above ground and reachable between 9 and 10 than traveling in on the underground and out of range. And so eventually we reached this kind of interesting time shifting arrangement where, for example, if I had expenses to do or anything administrative, I'd post them to her home and she'd do them in the evening when her son was asleep. And what I said, the whole part of capitalism, okay, is it's the creative generation of value exchange. Now, if people value flexibility of time more than they value money, for example, even Google now has an arrangement where you have four weeks with a line manager's permission, you can have four weeks of working from anywhere. Perfect. So, you know, that strikes me, because I had a friend who's British who turned down a job offer from Google. precisely because they wouldn't move on the two weeks vacation thing. And she said, look, I'm a Brit.

Starting point is 01:05:08 I'll have to go back to the UK for a week every year. I've got parents and my partner has parents. That leaves me one week to see the US, you know. And she said, I can't do it. And so that was the deal breaker, effectively. Yeah, I think four day becomes the where we're going to wind up on this. And it's going to be three days in the office, one day from home. And we all move to a four day.

Starting point is 01:05:32 work week at some point or just because certain people don't want to work and I think we'll have a two-class system. People who are working to live and people who live for their work. And there's no judgment there, but you'll be able to have both of those things in the same organization. It should bring with it, I think, a slight reduction in salary for people in office jobs with a corresponding increase in salary for people whose presence is required. Yes.

Starting point is 01:05:58 Whether it be a postman or a nurse or whatever. And most of us, I think, probably feel that the premium paid to knowledge workers is, I think, excessive in general. Yes. It's closing, though, because if you look in the United States, we have two for one jobs, and they're all service jobs. And now we have plumbers, electricians, all these positions, they make six figures, and we can't get anybody to do those jobs. So, young people in the United States, I think, are going to increasingly look. look at the landscape and say I can work for some, I can work for myself as a plumber electrician,

Starting point is 01:06:37 do drywall, whatever it is, some service job, get paid really well, set my own schedule, and be in demand, and control my destiny, or I can work for a giant corporation

Starting point is 01:06:47 that's not loyal to me, that's going to leave me off, and Zuckerberg's going to be like, you know what, whatever, it's a year of efficiency, you're not efficient. And I think people are going to have to think about that.

Starting point is 01:06:56 One of the things I love about what's happening with AI is there's a group of people who are embracing these tools, and becoming 30% more effective at their jobs. And I think those people are going to survive this change or this fork in the road. And then the other people are going to realize, I don't really like this never-ending efficiency race. I'd rather just, you know, be an electrician or manage a restaurant or whatever it is. And we might actually be able to navigate these bad feelings that people have about this.

Starting point is 01:07:26 There's a wonderful thing in economics called the GVon's paradox, which is that Givons correctly predicted that an increase in the efficiency of steam engines in Britain would lead to an increase in demand for coal. And I've already said, well, how can that be right? Because if the engines are more efficient, they need less coal. You need less. When the engines are more efficient,

Starting point is 01:07:48 we will find more applications for steam engines. And therefore we'll ultimately need... Now, I would argue that probably LED lights in 20 years' time, okay, which are vastly more efficient than incandescent bulbs, will possibly consume more electricity than incandescent bulbs did, because they're now so cheap that why wouldn't you just light up your home with Phillips Hugh color-changing bulbs for the lulls, right? I see it with landscaping.

Starting point is 01:08:15 People are now putting LEDs everywhere outside. Absolutely, yeah. And they're like, and they don't turn them off. They're like, they'll leave them on 24 hours a day. It's like, why would I even program them? Because they draw nothing. They draw nothing. Right.

Starting point is 01:08:27 And they don't need to be changed. That is, I think, the big revelation here. Forget about cost, but convenience of not having to change a bulb, but every five years is life change. Great annoyances in life. I completely agree. Gvons probably applies to labor, that labor-saving equipment, that's something that makes a human more effective, in the longer term, not immediately, immediately you may see a reduction,

Starting point is 01:08:52 will actually lead to effectively, you know, more worthwhile jobs to be done, because if you can be four times more efficient. Now, there is the slight problem which is creating bureaucratic masses of text that nobody reads. There's probably, you know, there's a wonderful guy in Britain called Andrew Orlovsky who makes this part, he writes for the telegraph, and he says, just what we don't need, in other words, generative AI is yet more kind of unremarkable but plausible sounding text to surround every single activity that we undertake. So I'm prepared to believe that quite a lot of, I think quite a lot of text generation in business is probably value destructive. But there probably is a GVON's aspect to it,

Starting point is 01:09:36 which is that if you can make people miraculously, you know, architects, for example, I can imagine might be a really, really interesting area where you go, show me 10 ways to fill this space. And like you said before, the brainstorming aspect of this, just give me 10 one-liners to describe this project or this product, this new product or service, give me 10 one liners, and they all have to be between five and eight words. Now you've given it constraint, you start seeing it brainstorm, then you say, okay, I'll let you go six to ten words now. Give me the same 10, but say them in eight to ten words. And you kind of get that brainstorming going. I think this is where the writer strike in America, where the writers of television shows

Starting point is 01:10:16 and movies, they are trying to ban chat chippy tea as part of their negotiation. And now it's gone from like number 20 on the list of like important items to number one. So they're the modern day Luddites effectively who are... Essentially, yes. They're not only saying, but, but Rory, what they're saying is crazy. And well, I know you've got to go. We'll end on this. They're not only saying, we want to ban this from the writer's room.

Starting point is 01:10:40 They're saying you can't use this to generate ideas. So they want the studio heads to not be able to say, what would be like as popular as Spider-Man? but be for, you know, this community of people, this demographic, this age group, what would be like a modern day Spider-Man that could work for older people who were part of the boomer generation? And it comes up with some new superhero. They don't want them to be able to do it because of IP ownership. Well, there is the issue of plagiarism because chat GPT is in some senses a highly plausible plagiarist. and the fact that it's plagiarizing from everything rather than one thing

Starting point is 01:11:21 doesn't necessarily make that totally excusable. There's also the argument that something that just generates the most expected word to follow the pre-existing words. Is it likely to come up with a real breakthrough or can you actually, can you recalibrate chat GPT?

Starting point is 01:11:39 So as I said, it's artificial inquisitiveness, not artificial intelligence. And rather than being a generalisation engine, you set it to look for the most peculiar and unexpected findings. Yes. Not the most generalizable ones. Like we just did with Dr. Pepper, the Dorian fruit. Absolutely, right.

Starting point is 01:11:56 The Dorian Dr. Pepper is definitely an air. I'll tell you a lovely story about this. There was a creative director of Ogilby called Neil French, who believed that if you took two stupid but successful ideas and combined them, okay, you might create a third idea. You could kind of breed. Take two things that people think is stupid, but which seems successful and breed them.

Starting point is 01:12:18 And so his friend said, okay, what do you think is stupid but popular? And he said, karaoke. Okay. He said, what do you think is stupid? 24-hour rolling news. And they created in Singapore a 24-hour karaoke channel. And it's a huge hit. That was a big success.

Starting point is 01:12:37 Of course it is. Of course it is. It makes total complete sense. And the other thing that writers want to do is they don't want it to be trained on their previous work. So this is where it gets really interesting. If you took all the Marvel films, you took all the Sopranos films, and you made an AI based on all of that writing, you know, and you have some giant corpuses now, which is what these writers do anyway. Like, whoever knows the most Star Wars folklore, watch the most Twilight Zone episodes is going to make the best Black Mirror episodes. So they don't want you to be able to use the previous work in Am.

Starting point is 01:13:08 These are hilarious in their, their demands are hilarious in that you can be certain that every writer in a writer's room before they come to work is doing chat GPT to come up with brainstorming ideas, just like they watch old films or look at old comic books or they buy old magazines to look for what was in vogue in the 50, 60s and 70s and try to reinterpret it and become inspired. So I love it as an inspiration tool. I suppose I worry that there is the, you know, the really defining works of literature and of creation come from a completely unexpected place. So, you know, for example, the murder of Roger Akroyd, where, you know,

Starting point is 01:13:46 Maydanger's reputation was where the narrator was the murderer, which I didn't think had happened before, for example. Spoiler alert, everybody. If you haven't read it. I'm joking. It was written in 1926. If you need a spoiler alert, a century is a pretty good benchmark. One of my favorite crime things was I think it was in the second season of CSI, which looked like a murder, but was in fact a very peculiar accidental death.

Starting point is 01:14:11 I always thought that was very interesting. Yeah, way to go. Yeah, no victim here. No victim here. No. And so it was all to do with someone trying to retrieve their bin from a skip after they left university. You ever do Colombo? You ever watch the Colombo?

Starting point is 01:14:29 Yeah, absolutely. That's untouchable. It's wonderful masterpiece. I was fine enough, I was going online to watch precisely those only a few weeks ago, and every single one is tremendous. Masterpieces. There's one great one where what I loved about, Columbo is they use new technology

Starting point is 01:14:45 like we're using here as we discuss things. This is like the Colombo of podcasts. Rory and I were bumbling idiots who have profound insights once in a while. They would take whatever the new technology is and embedded in an episode. And they embedded in one episode speeding cameras. These were brand new. I don't know if you ever saw the

Starting point is 01:15:04 speeding camera one. I won't tell you the ending. But go watch the speeding camera episode because this person basically knows there's a speeding camera and the speeding camera is his alibi. I'll just leave it at that. Perfect. There's another one where this, you know, really rich guy who's kind of like a Hugh Hefner type,

Starting point is 01:15:22 he buys himself and his wife a beeper, a watch beeper, because these new beepers have come out and they can beep each other. They both have matching watches, gold-plated beepers. And the beepers in this 1980 episode are the key, you know, Lynchman. I just love that the writers were watching new technology. Don't tell me. The beepers were they swapped? Is that how something would happen?

Starting point is 01:15:44 It was not a swap, but one of them dies and the beeper plays a role. I'm just leaving it at that. It's just, Colombo was so great. It's just one more thing there, ma'am. You said you had regatta pasta on a Sunday night. I talked to the guy at the Luigi's, and he said, no, the man of gotten regatta, that's Monday night. So my wife says I'm a nudge. All right, everybody.

Starting point is 01:16:12 Rory, you are a treasure. Just sort of an interesting detail. Two interesting things, just to add a bit of more more content. One, of course, a speed camera is quite an early example of an artificial intelligence which legislates absolutely. Now, I would argue if the technology exists to film cars which are breaking the limit, it should be possible to demand that a human watches the footage to understand what you're doing in context. Because there are occasions where breaking the speed limit is necessary and right.

Starting point is 01:16:46 They're rare, but they exist. The second example is that if you have a speed camera which catches an awful lot of people, there are two possible inferences you can draw. This is a bit like Wittgenstein's ruler, which is, are you using the ruler to measure the table or the table to measure the ruler? It could be that that means that there are a lot of very dangerous drivers on that stretch of road. It could be that your signage is inadequate. or that the speed limit comes unhealthily suddenly after a corner and people don't have time to

Starting point is 01:17:18 slow down safely. Right. So this is the point where a human brain and a speed camera are fundamentally different. The human brain has the capability, or at least perhaps the right hemisphere to go. Is this huge incidence of speed camera fences at this particular thing? Is this a product of the drivers or is it a product of the environment? Okay. Now, I think that this is where I'm very uncomfortable.

Starting point is 01:17:42 I listen to my sat nav. I try and understand what it's telling me to do, but I don't always obey it because I sometimes understand contextual factors like wanting to see nice scenery, which lie outside the speed cameras field of consideration. Yes. Sorry, not the speed camera, the GPS. GPS.

Starting point is 01:18:01 I have the same thing here. We have a 101 freeway in the Bay area that is dystopian. Yeah. And then we have the 280, which is against the nature preserve, which makes you feel like you're driving through Jurassic Park. Of course. And at under, when it's single-digit minute difference, I am going to take the Bukalek view every time. I want to have a delightful escape for me to enjoy the ride. And Google, you know, Google's little thing of saying eight minutes slower does at least provide you with the facility to deviate. Eight minutes more delightful.

Starting point is 01:18:33 Yeah, absolutely right. People travel everywhere on the world for this. This is quantification bias. We don't have, you know, a numerical measure for idyllic journeys. You know, you can't say this journey is 30% more idyllic and 10% slower. Therefore, you should use it. The other thing that does interesting me, by the way, about flexible work is, as a Georgist, it strikes me that I basically believe in Henry George's objection,

Starting point is 01:19:00 that the problem with capitalism is that land and you could even argue fossil fuels. and not like other markets because they're rivalously consumed, and that arguably they belong to all of us as our kind of heritage. Therefore, in the absence of a single land tax, as George proposed, the reason, George's problem is quite simple, which is that whenever you get a form of economic activity, which depends on its location for its performance, the gains don't go to the person doing the work,

Starting point is 01:19:33 or coming up with the inventive idea, the gains go to the person who owns the land on which the activity takes place. And therefore, rent-seeking by landowners basically sucks out rewards to entrepreneurialism or invention or just work. It's a giant tax. It's a giant tax. So, you know, if you own a restaurant with a fantastic view of the Acropolis, you know, effectively you're working for the person who owns the land in that sense.

Starting point is 01:20:02 Okay. So it strikes me that the second best. thing we can do other than the land value tax is to come up with technologies that make location irrelevant. And the car was, the train was one, the canal was another, I guess, okay. But undoubtedly, I would say that the car was, I think, spectacular in its importance, because you could go and buy, you know, start a restaurant in the middle of nowhere. And if it was good enough, people would drive to you. You are no longer dependent on footfall. And it does strike me, by the way, that Zoom is very, very important in that it provides what economists call gains to agglomeration,

Starting point is 01:20:42 without necessarily needing to agglomerate people in tighter and tighter spaces where, as I said, the landowner makes half the money. And so as a piece of Georges technology, it strikes me that this, what we're doing now. It's absolutely fantastic. It's fantastic. It's just taking a while to calibrate the gains. You have people who were living in a city who were getting paid a surplus, a benefit, a higher salary. Then they fled to a rural area where somebody else was getting paid 60 cents on the dollar, but now they've maintained, they've been grandfathered in, and they still make, you know, a dollar on a dollar instead of the 60 cents that somebody who was remote. I think this is going to be one of the great gains that we see. Absolutely right. Is that over time,

Starting point is 01:21:28 these salaries are normalizing on a global basis. And with chat GPT, a person in Manila or Uruguay or Croatia, wherever, we see this with developers and a tiny resource that has massive demand. If you're a brilliant GPT prompt writer, potentially you can make money absolutely anywhere. Yes, with a Starlink, with a Starlink anywhere, with solar panels. You know, I'm tempted to buy a Starlink, even though my actual broadband is by just another piece of I have both of them as backups. And two or three days a year, I have to record this podcast.

Starting point is 01:22:03 And this podcast has advertising. So I justify the $1,200 a year to have Starlink backups as if it happens once a year and saves me one day a year, which it has, it pays for itself. Perfect. You only have to pay for the mobile bit if you move it. Is that right? You can go from the 70. There's one that's movable.

Starting point is 01:22:19 And there's, yeah. And then there's other ones that aren't. I think it's going to all become one thing where like the moveability is going to be kind of built into it. Or it'll be, it'll be like a closer. gap, but it has been a massive change. Let me ask you a question. Yeah, of course.

Starting point is 01:22:33 Or if I may, you're a Brit, you live in the UK. I'm a Greek. We have a bit of an issue that I think you and I should resolve right now. Is this the Elgin Marbles? I was going to bring on the Elgin Marbles here. Now, you bought them. You paid a pretty penny for them. They are very beautiful, but they're ours.

Starting point is 01:22:54 And by I say, ours, I mean the Greeks. And you brought up the Acropolis and the view. We have now the Acropolis Museum. It's time for the Elgin Marbles to come home to Greece. What do you think as a Brit? Maybe you and I can find some common ground here. How do we resolve this issue of the stolen marbles that you bought? And you paid for and you have ownership of.

Starting point is 01:23:15 We did buy them from the Turks, if I'm right. I think Lord Elgin bought them from a warped of the then Turkish occupying government of Greece. But the Acropolis is the most important piece of architecture on the planet, arguably, next to... The pyramids. We did actually save them from very likely destruction, had they remained where they were. Credit where credit is due. Yes. Equitable solution would be to split them, to rotate them every few years.

Starting point is 01:23:41 Okay. Acceptable. We'll take it. The Greeks will take the Rory proposal. By the way, if you want my personal opinion, I would give them back, were it not for the problem with precedent in God knows how many other situations. Yes. a lot of people get to see them in London.

Starting point is 01:23:59 I mean, it's a hugely visited city. There's some value to it. Personally, if you could confine it to that one particular thing, which is, after all, architectural rather than artistic, in a sense. Not that you can replace, put them back on the building, but nonetheless, they belong where the building is. If it were purely a matter of taste rather than fear of precedent, I'd be pretty happy giving them back in perpetuity.

Starting point is 01:24:23 I think a solution where there's a rotation would be probably pretty good. There you have it, folks. Rory and I have come to an agreement and now it's but up to the UK and the Greek governments to paper it. But we've come to consensus, rotating it's great,

Starting point is 01:24:39 and I'll throw something in. We'll rotate some stuff to, I'm not sure which museum you have them in. Where are the Elgin Marbles? The British Museum, yeah. I'll tell you what. We got some other stuff. We'll rotate in a collection from our great Greek collections to replace the

Starting point is 01:25:02 Elgin marbles during this great rotation that we do. And this could make the two countries stronger, but we're still going to retire at 56 and you've got to pay for the last seven years over there, okay? Whatever the difference is. No, you guys are out. You guys Brexited, right? You don't have to argue about retirement age. It's an interesting question, by the way, about flexible work, which suddenly occurred

Starting point is 01:25:21 to me, which didn't occur to me before. which is that when you demand that someone chooses a single date of retirement, okay, so you go from five days a week to zero, right? You're effectively playing a game of chicken with your own mortality. Go too soon and you run out of money or you have an impoverished retirement. Go too late and you just replace a life full of business appointments with life full of medical appointments. Okay.

Starting point is 01:25:47 And it's worth noting that the risk falls entirely on you, not on your employer about how you make this decision. Now, it would be equitable, I think, if people were allowed to taper off towards retirement. Yes. So, in other words, you go to a four-day week to a three-day week. Right. And then you would continue on a three-day week for as long as your health allowed,

Starting point is 01:26:09 or pro-writers. Yes, this would be much better. For as long as your health allowed you to do it, okay? Yes. My father worked in his 80s. He started selling books on Amazon, something you can very well do remotely. And he was much better for it.

Starting point is 01:26:20 A lot of people who, quit work completely. They die. They lose their cognitive ability and then they get depressed and it all spirals. So some sort of tapering option would be much, much fairer, in fact, because you're forced to make this decision and if you miss time it, you don't get a second chance. Yes. And how delightful would it be for a young generation to be able to come into Ogivie and see an 87-year-old Rory there on Tuesday and Wednesday's holding court talking about the arc of history or for me to be 87

Starting point is 01:26:54 and be at my incubator and doing podcasts and interviewing people once a week, once every two weeks and meeting with founders and telling them stories of you know, startups in the 90s and 2000s to give some context. This would be a beautiful future.

Starting point is 01:27:07 Why are we shipping these old people away? It would also be good in banking where you'd actually have some people around you can remember the last disaster. Yeah, I'd be like, hey, yeah, we'd be that up too. Yeah, here's how we blew it up. Exactly.

Starting point is 01:27:19 By the way, what we did was we took all of these high-risk securities and we bundled them together and we called them SPACs. We took the inventory, we called them you know, what did they call those mortgages? Mortgage back securities. Then there were CDOs

Starting point is 01:27:36 with collateralized debt obligations. Yeah, what a great fancy word. Then they started breeding on them so you had things that were squared, didn't you? Yeah. I can't remember what that was. Nobody can tell what's in here. unless you go to Vegas and you knock on the door and you go look at the buildings and realize,

Starting point is 01:27:54 which is what the big show is about. That's the brilliant thing about the big short, which is that, you know, for example, I mean, you only had to go to the south of Spain and open your eyes in 2007 to realize that the building boom was completely unsustainable, that, you know, even if the entire population of northern Europe planned to retire there, you know, it's... There were just too many buildings going on. It was upset. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:28:20 Yeah. And you just had that. There's some funny money here. Yeah. Have you made it to the UAE yet or anywhere in the Middle East? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was just there for the first time.

Starting point is 01:28:31 I'd never seen Dubai. I've been to Qatar, as they call it. And the UAE, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. And I had this like flashback to Shanghai 20 years ago or Shenzhen where there's more cranes and more people building buildings than there are in the city. Yeah. And I'm like this. And they showed me pictures from 20, 30, and 40 years ago. And you're like, there was nothing here.

Starting point is 01:28:54 And now, if you're a founder in India, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, the UK, whatever, there's some pretty compelling case to go to the UAE and pay no taxes, get tax credits, get investment, and just base your company there because all these people are fleeing Hong Kong or UK or whatever. I rent districts to go live in the desert. Essentially, there's a small designated area of Dubai which runs on British law, Anglo-Saxon law. Yes, the financial district. And then there's a media zone.

Starting point is 01:29:28 It's kind of like Shenzhen in China. And I asked them, like, well, why are you doing this? And they're like, changing existing laws is very hard. Creating a zone that has its own operating principles from scratch and just saying these 10 square miles are the media-free zone. They're creating a casino 45 minutes outside of Dubai, I understand. So they're not saying, hey, in UAE, we have to allow gambling and we have to allow free press. We have a zone for free press.

Starting point is 01:29:55 We have a zone for free commerce. We have a zone for wagering and gambling. And that's it. Whereas, like, in the United States of the UK, we're so many years into this, a couple of hundred years into, you know, progressiveness, let's call it. And we're like, you know what? Cannabis, 70% of you want it. We'll decriminalize it when it hits 50. We'll make it like a medical prescription at 60 and 70% you just can buy it in.

Starting point is 01:30:17 a store. Okay, gay marriage. Okay, 60% of you want it. Okay, we'll allow it with a certificate. Oh, we'll just give you a full blown. And, you know, it's, it's very interesting for me to watch now. I think, I think, by the way, the-society is all, you know, chasing the same goal. I think also the decriminalization of cannabis in the U.S. I found it very weird that you're told off for vaping on the pavement, but I was driving into the Holland Tunnel in New York. Yeah. There's a massive smell of dope. I opened the window down. Okay. And the person's I assumed it was passengers. No, it was the driver of the car next to me, okay, was basically toking away happily.

Starting point is 01:30:54 Okay. Yeah. Now, my only concern with that is that there are things we ban or we restrict, not because they're bad for most people, but because they're really bad for a few people. Yes. Okay. And I think gambling would be an obvious example of that. Alcohol is a, you know, tobacco actually is quite bad for a lot of people.

Starting point is 01:31:13 Bad for all people. Yeah. But actually, in defense of nicotine, okay. the, what you might call the negative externalities. I mean, if you're an unborn child and you said, do you want to be born into a home whether dad is a heavy smoker, a heavy drinker, or a heavy gambler, you'd probably choose the smoker in terms of, you know, less like you to have violence or bankruptcy or whatever, you know.

Starting point is 01:31:35 It would be more stable. You know, it's very bad. It is very bad. I'm not disputing this for a second, okay. But it's kind of evenly bad, and it generally delivers its badness in your 60s rather than making you incapable of functioning in everyday life. Okay. Now, by contrast, I think alcohol, gambling and possibly cannabis, particularly with very,

Starting point is 01:31:59 very strong forms of cannabis, okay, may be entirely beneficial and enjoyable to 85, 90, 95% of the population. Yeah. If they induce psychosis in 5% of the population, then making cannabis consumption universal may not be a brilliant idea. Now, it's a bit the same with salt consumption, okay? So doctors tell people to basically avoid salt. Most people actually salt is pretty harmless, completely harmless if you listen to some people, okay?

Starting point is 01:32:28 But there are 5% of people whose blood pressure can't actually compensate for it. And so they basically force food manufacturers. Now, I would argue if you can identify who the 5% is, maybe you should tell them to quit salt and leave the rest of us alone. But I'm not sure you'll ever be able to identify the 5% of people who are going to be compulsive. gamblers or the 5% of people who are going to be driven psychotic by smoking very strong cannabis. This is where I think, you know, I've come to in my life. I love personal freedom. I love people owning the consequences.

Starting point is 01:32:59 And the more you abstract away consequences, the more of the nanny state you're coddled into thinking that you'll, whatever mistake I make, why didn't somebody protect me? Like some dopey kid jumped off a boat. I don't know if you saw this go viral over the weekend. but it was a graduation ceremony in the Bahamas and somebody's like, hey, dopey kid, jump off the boat. It'd be funny on our graduation cruise.

Starting point is 01:33:23 He jumped off. There's apparently a shark seen in the water, but he just gets taken out to the tide, apparently to be eaten by sharks. He's dead. He's 18 years old. Frontal lobe not fully formed. We can't ban boats.

Starting point is 01:33:36 We can't, you know, ban stupidity. No, no. We have to have people have ownership of behavior. And this is where I think, like, education and licensing plays such a great role. Educating people on gambling, if you had to go to Vegas and in order to gamble, you had to sit through a one-hour seminar and it said, here are the odds at each table, here's how to calculate odds, I would be totally fine. Let people rip, they could spend their whole mortgage, but just one hour of education. You get a driver's license to play the tables in Las Vegas. Then the same thing for, let's say, gun ownership, which we have here in the United States, some states, you have to take a test, some you don't. But what about for startup investing? In the UK, you're allowed, anybody can invest in a startup, right? Anybody can put 50 bucks in. You can throw 50 quid in.

Starting point is 01:34:18 I don't know if that's 50 bucks. If you say quid, throw 50 bucks in, you know, it's a, what do you call it when you make about a toss or something? Various things, wage of flutter. A flutter. You put a 50-quit flutter in. Take it, lose it. People will bet on Manchester United.

Starting point is 01:34:34 They can bet on a startup. Here in the United States, you realize we don't let people bet on startups. SEC blocks 96% of people, non-accredit investors from betting on a startup. But you go to Vegas. You can smoke the strongest cannabis and go to Vegas. You could take 50 milligrams of an edible and then go put your entire life on a crafts table. Because a weird way, you're a weirdly unfree country in some ways, in that, for example,

Starting point is 01:34:59 you know, the number of states in which you need all sorts of qualifications to become a hairdresser or barber. Yes. Now, in the UK, as far as I know, a pair of scissors basically qualifies you. Oh, yeah, you're good. A pair of scissors and a fancy chair and you're in business. Okay. Now, obviously, if you're incompetent at it, people won't come back. Okay. But it has always surprised me that the Americans are both, quite rightly, I think, you know, committed to freedom in certain respects. Yes. But for example, I mean, not being free to drink alcohol out of doors,

Starting point is 01:35:34 I mean, that's one of life's great pleasures. It's so weird that we have this patriarchal, weird belief that, like, you have to put it, and it's even worse. In some places, you just put it in a paper bag and you're good. Yeah. So it's the sign that you're drinking it. And by the way, is Dr. Pepper one of your clients at Ogilvy?

Starting point is 01:35:54 Can we? Coke is, but a fellow of Coke and Dr. Pepper are weirdly aligned in the UK. I think they're distributed by the same people or something. Yeah. I have the greatest idea ever.

Starting point is 01:36:04 Now, I don't know if we'd allow it in the United States. But what spirit could be mixed with Dr. Pepper and put into a tall boy can? Rum. Probably. Rum?

Starting point is 01:36:16 Rum? I was thinking like, I'm trying to think of something spicy or smoky, a bourbon or a scotch. I don't know. Actually, Jack, Jack and Coke is, of course, one of the great combinations imaginable. So Jack and Dr. Pepper would be a kind of... These crossovers would be, I think you and I would start an ad agency. You could quit Ogivie. I'll quit Angel investing.

Starting point is 01:36:38 You and I start an ad agency to create stupid products that sell out. I think one of the reasons the US economy is so successful, I think, is because there is this breed of people who are effectively entrepreneurial salesmen in that they don't necessarily invent anything. No. They see something that exists and suddenly go, I know how to sell that. I think it's actually a very, very valuable part. You patently have, you know, fairly adventurous consumers who believe that, you know, life is capable of continual improvement. and so are quite adventurous in terms of their purchasing habits. Not cynical.

Starting point is 01:37:16 No. I mean, if you have a really conservative consumer base, it's very, very hard. But you also have this breed of people. UK is kind of mid-Atlantic, I'd say. France is really odd because they're both incredibly innovative and incredibly conservative. It's very strange. So they'll completely invent a new category of car or do something really amazing. Right.

Starting point is 01:37:37 But, you know, they can only come from Champagne. Absolutely. You know, they haven't innovated a breakfast. ingredients since like, you know, 18. Why would you? They've already. Eggs Benedict. What more do you want?

Starting point is 01:37:48 No, they didn't invent eggs. Benedict. Oh, that's yours. I think. Well, what do they make? I think it might be American. But isn't the sauce? What's the sauce called?

Starting point is 01:37:56 Oh, that's true. That is Hollandaise sauce. Hollandees? Who created Hollandaise? Hmm. I don't know. The Dutch, I guess. Maybe the Dutch.

Starting point is 01:38:02 Yeah. Yeah. I'll get to find out the origins. I love the fact that the origins of, we were talking about accidental discoveries, right at the beginning of the talk. And there is actually a guy called. nacho, who was the inventor of nachos. Fantastic.

Starting point is 01:38:17 It was some sort of restaurant. Okay, Hollande sauce, also called Dutch sauce, mixture of egg yolk, butter, and lemon juice as we know. Absolutely. I'm assuming. Eggs Benedict. French for Hollandeic sauce. The name implies Dutch origins, but the actual connection is unclear.

Starting point is 01:38:32 The name Dutch sauce is documented in English as early as 1573. Hmm, hard to know here. There is, what does it say about Eggs Benedict? What's the origin there? Because sometimes these places are invented in a single hotel or a single place where they actually know. Eggs Benedict. Dominocos in Lower Manhattan says on its menu, Eggs Benny was the first created in their ovens in 1860.

Starting point is 01:38:55 I thought about it in American because breakfast with eggs in would either be British or American. Yeah. British food's gotten better. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The food in the UK. We've always been good at breakfast and tea, in fairness. We've always been the two optional. The two optional meals of the day, we've always been kind of world-blast.

Starting point is 01:39:13 I always think breakfast, the only, the really great breakfast countries, the places I've been to make, Turkey is fantastic, a full Turkish breakfast. Mexico has Cuevos rancheros, which are utterly fabulous, days. And the United States and the UK are probably the, I've never got into this Chinese stuff like conji. You know, it's too weird. Yeah, no. No.

Starting point is 01:39:33 I do like the Japanese mixed breakfast with a little bit of fish. You have the bacon roll. How do I know this? My favorite musician, Mark Knopfler of Dye Straits fame. He has a song on his recent album, My Bacon Roll, just about a working class guy who likes to fold money and have cash in his pocket, and he's just trying to get a bacon roll. And it's this song about a guy who's forced, you've got to hear the song.

Starting point is 01:39:57 He's forced to go on a corporate retreat to go whitewater rafting and go bowling. And he's like, they're trying to do team building exercises with a guy who just wants to get his bacon roll. And they're like, what swat do you like, brown or red? And so I'm like, I'm looking at the lyrics. What's brown sauce? What's red sauce? I realize.

Starting point is 01:40:13 Okay. I must explain. Okay. This is actually a bit of a divider because there are fair purists in the UK for the full English breakfast or the bacon roll who believe in ketchup. Brown sauce, more typically either HP sauce, which stems for houses of parliament, which has been around for about 100 years, which is brown. And it's spicier.

Starting point is 01:40:34 Or indeed, daddies, which is another brand. I would argue that the real people. purists would tend to have brown sauce with a bacon roll, not red, not catch up. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean, ketchup would be a more... By the way, as an entrepreneurial idea, if anybody wants to steal it in the UK,

Starting point is 01:40:50 I often thought there's a wonderful... Effectively, it's a behavioral science bias, which is sometimes called the jack-of-all-trades heuristic, which is, you assume that if someone only does some... Does one thing. It's better. Or it's going to be better. Okay. Perfect.

Starting point is 01:41:04 The Japanese heuristic, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, now, interestingly. you know, I'm going to a, there's a bar this evening and deal in the Kent Coast where I'm going, which is called Bloody Mary's. And when I go to Bloody Marys, I always have a Bloody Mary because if you call your bar Bloody Mary's, you've got to make a pretty good Bloody Mary. That's the rules, okay? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:41:24 And I've always thought, if you opened a restaurant, which was just called bacon roll, and all you served would be strong builder's tea and bacon rolls. And you could probably choose. Let's have a couple of things. you could get a little adventure. You can have a choice of roll, a bit like, you know, you can have several choices of roll. I think it should be dusty. I think it should have dusty flour on the top. You could have a whole meal roll, and you can have several types of bacon, crispy or less crispy.

Starting point is 01:41:50 But that's it. Now, I think you'd make an absolute fortune. The other thing you'd do, you'd also have a really perverse and slightly annoying rule, which signals your commitment to the cause. Now, the one I love about this is, I don't know if you've ever been to Threshers, the French fry place in Ocean City, Maryland, I think it is. I have not. Now, they are very, very, they basically only sell fries, I think, in a great big, they're

Starting point is 01:42:18 more like British chips, actually, in a great big of fish. Thrashers fries, yeah, you found out of Eggerson. Now, what I'm brilliant about that is that they, now, bear in mind they're in America, this wouldn't be that controversial in the UK. They won't supply ketchup. You only allowed to put salt and vinegar on the fries. Yes. There's constraint.

Starting point is 01:42:38 And I think that kind of constraint, perverse constraint, is just a really clever signaling device. It is. By the way, it was thrashes who five guys went to when they wanted to work out how to make perfect fries. Which makes total sense. I'm sorry. Very quickly take this.

Starting point is 01:42:54 Hello? My favorite part. It's when Lori takes calls. This is the best part. It's so great. Got to ask me to leave it in. Okay. There's super stuff.

Starting point is 01:43:03 All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. All right, everybody. Rory and I could talk for hours. But that's a thrashist policy, you only do one thing. They've been in business. I think they're founded by a guy called Price, who I like to think of as Welsh.

Starting point is 01:43:15 But you only do one thing. And also, you actually deny people perversely one thing they'd expect. You know, I think there's some genius there. I think it's absolutely fantastic. There is, I've had times where I've gone for coffee. And there are one or two coffee places I've been to that do not have milk in the establishment. No. They will have sugar, but no fake sugar.

Starting point is 01:43:40 Because they don't want you to ruin your coffee experience. You're like, well, my coffee experience, I'm a narcissist. I have been made to believe that my design here is important. And it's like, no, the artist who made your coffee will tell you how you will drink their coffee. Do you know, by the way, interestingly, why an Americano is called an Americano. It's American troops coming up through Italy in World War II. Yes. Couldn't cope with an espresso and ask people to water it down.

Starting point is 01:44:05 Makes total sense. And now Americano is, yeah, it's translated. It means we don't have a drip coffee machine. The literal translation is we have one machine for coffee and it's not an American machine. That's a weird thing, by the way, which is that espresso in the U.S., traveling, I went through Western Pennsylvania because I wanted to go to falling water. By the way, Western Pennsylvania is absolutely gorgeous, as is West Virginia. I mean, absolutely wonderful countryside. You're talking about the house, the Frank Loder, right?

Starting point is 01:44:35 House? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yeah. It'd be my life's ambition to go there, and I finally got there. Beautiful house. It was tremendous. But it's surprising how many places in the US only have drip coffee still, because in the UK, basically having some sort of espresso machine pretty much universal now everywhere.

Starting point is 01:44:55 I'm surprised in the US that Starbucks actually have a lot of grounds still to cover if they want to. Yeah. I almost bought this Franklin Lloyd Wright House. When I lived in L.A., Ah, which one? Go on. The Ennis.

Starting point is 01:45:08 The Ennis House, which is the one featured in Blayriner with the tiles. The one with the tiles. Yeah, yeah. Fantastic. Problematically, it's only like a two-bedroom. It's his giant house, but it's only a two-bedroom. And it's kind of like living in a dystopian, Aztecian science fiction film, which is also my nirvana. Absolutely fantastic.

Starting point is 01:45:26 I absolutely love it. And I almost got my wife to let me buy this. The problem was the $4 million price tag wasn't the problem. The fact that you had to have it open. for, you know, people to see. Also not a problem for a couple weeks a year. No. The problem was you had to go through a preservation society,

Starting point is 01:45:43 and I think it costs the billionaire who bought it, spent $15 million, having the tiles redone. And he had to manufacture these tiles that were like Aztec inspired. But if you ever see the movie Blade Runner, this is the apartment where Tyrell Corporation has this and also the type of apartment. There's a website called Right on the Market, which you can go. which has all the Frank Lloyd Wright homes currently for sale. And there is.

Starting point is 01:46:11 I think it's still for sale for about half a million dollars in, if I've got this right, it's in Idaho, but it might be in Nebraska. I think it's in Idaho. There's the world's only Frank Lloyd Wright gas station for sale. Wow. So if you wanted something less ambitious, that's your solution.

Starting point is 01:46:29 That is incredible. Look at all these Franklin Royd House. Oh, wow, I just found it. And these go for a premium. Amazing. I mean, this is also like talking about like dropping in the EVs into like the classic cars. Why somebody doesn't work with the estate of Franklin-Lor-R-R-Right to take these homes, these incredible ones, and then make a modular home style. That is a... But Mr. Fuller as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:46:52 Sure. And obviously the Ennis House probably not appealing to as many folks as the Falling Waterhouse. But everybody copies the Falling Waterhouse anyway. So you might as well just sell them the plans to make exact copies of it. and then seek out locations for it. Frank, great welshman as he was, he actually did that because he sold the plans to, is it the Usonian home or the Prairie home? I can't remember. But you pay a certain number of thousand dollars and then you could build a house to his own plans.

Starting point is 01:47:23 I love it. Yeah. So he was actually ahead of the game there and actually, you know, I mean, when it comes to zoning, if you just had a zone where you can build what you like here, but it has to be to a fact. Right, plan. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever been to the Spanish city in Whitley Bay? No.

Starting point is 01:47:41 Tell me more about it. Have you been to Whitley Bay? Like that's a seaside town north Tinside? Yeah, yeah. I've been there. There's a very, very beautiful promontory there with seals, I think, on it. Oh, yeah. So anyway, it's just, there's a very famous dire strait song, Tunnel of Love, that talks about Mark

Starting point is 01:47:57 Mark Knopfers youth spent here. It's kind of like a Bruce Springsteen-Asbury Park equivalent. And so he had heard Bruce Springsteen. talk about Asbury Park in New Jersey and the seaside and all the stuff. And he was like, yeah, you know, I should do something like that for England and I'll do it about the Spanish city where I used to go play and I used to go try to flirt with girls. They took the lyrics from the song and they put it on some steps there. So on my bucket list is to go see the Spanish city and to meet Mark Knopfler.

Starting point is 01:48:27 This is your assignment. Just keep your ear to the ground. Mark Nuffler, Sir Mark Nuffler must have some cause that he cares about. that I can make a donation to and just snap a picture with the legend at some point to put on my desk and just to tell him how much his music means to me. Let me see what I can do.

Starting point is 01:48:44 I can take a... Deep your ear to the ground. I'm going up to Newcastle and hence South Shields in a couple of months' time. So I'll also go and take a picture of the steps. Yeah. Well, in Newcastle, I think they play the song from the film, Local Hero.

Starting point is 01:49:01 Perfect. Theme song. it's called yeah anyway the theme song from that is what they play at the Newcastle when they come on the field

Starting point is 01:49:09 brilliant yeah so anyway the two army that's been fantastic thank you very much indeed thanks for coming on again let's do it again in six months or something

Starting point is 01:49:19 we shall of course and J Cal just breaking down everything going down rabbit holes you got yourself an hour and 45 family couldn't ask for more

Starting point is 01:49:27 we're going to keep your two phone calls in there just to show how delightful it is that you push you off of these meetings We'll see you next time in this being service. Bye-bye.

This Week in Startups - Rory's brain vs ChatGPT, outrageous marketing, work trends and MUCH more w/ Rory Sutherland | E1756

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