TRIGGERnometry - Why Has Advertising Become Political? - Rory Sutherland

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive and is the Vice Chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. SPONSOR. Augusta Precious Metals: our trusted gold IRA partners. Click to learn more: https://learn.augustapreciousmetals.com/trigger SPONSOR. Stash. Go to https://get.stash.com/trigger to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Introduction 05:00 Bud Light 12:24 Brands Pushing Agendas On Social Issues 16:02 The Jaguar Rebrand 28:57 The Explore-Exploit Trade-Off 36:53 Moralistic Lecturing From Companies 52:51 Getting The Media We Deserve 57:54 Rory's Thoughts On Political Marketing And PR Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Democrats in the United States are the biggest sort of marketing up. You can possibly imagine. Why do you say that? I think I know what you mean. But remember, Americans are very weird. Americans are very absolute story. But they don't in too many Germans. If they want to walk around with their sh**es out,

it's, you know, and there were children on the beach, and no longer you're going to be a shit. Basically, what you do to construct a farmer's market is you take a Tesco Metro and you make it really shit. People love the fucking things. Country's gone to the dogs. Look at it. Let's say you were an advisor to the Conservative Party. You can't...

Look at that. In Italy, you can't get a... You go to a motorway service station. The coffee's fantastic. You go to France. It's everywhere. I have no idea what's going on. Rory, we've got to wrap up.

So Rory, thank you for coming back on the show. It's a pleasure. We have seen adverts becoming more and more politicised as we've gone on through time. We're thinking of Jaguar, the latest NFL advert, Gillette, and so on and so on and so forth. What's going on, Rory? Various things. It's not all bad, by the way. It is rather ridiculous when it all happens simultaneously.

Okay, so it's perfectly reasonable that advertising should reflect the population. However, if you end up, it's one of those things that makes perfect sense on an individual level. but fails collectively if everybody simultaneously decides that it's impossible to have any white people in a commercial. That becomes ridiculous. It's also interesting in that the ethnic mix in commercials tends to reflect London rather than the UK as a whole, by the way. In that London's actually, if you like, unusual in having what you might call a black population that's roughly commensurate with the Indian population. in the country as a whole, would have to be two or three to one ratio

would be more normal. So it doesn't necessarily reflect an accurate view of a diverse British population. I think there's a second facet which was there was a very big trend in advertising towards what was sometimes called brand purpose that you adopted, if you like, a social mission.

And that effectively advertising became weirdly ideological. Now, there's always been an element of that. If you look at Coke Hilltop, I'd like to teach the world to sing, which was, of course, a completely diverse group of ethnicities and backgrounds representing the whole world on a hilltop when you think about it at the time of the Vietnam War. Okay? Coke has traditionally been, by the way, I mean, historically, Coke was Democrat and Pepsi was Republican. And going back to the 60s, the 70s, when you had a Republican president, they'd basically order in Pepsi.

And that was simply because Pepsi was from the north and Coke was from the south, largely. But you had this weird divide in the United States, which obviously Trump has broken with completely, because I think he's a fairly regular Coke drink. Yes. Yeah. In fact, does he have a Coke button on the desk? I've got a vague idea. They installed a button, which basically, when he presses it, someone brings him an iced Coke.

But there's always been a component of this in advertising, and I would argue that some brands, some of the time, are big enough to carry it off. And, you know, one of the cases which I would cite, because it's one of ours, would be Dove, which was described as internally the campaign for real beauty, which was about beauty without artifice. In other words, it was a cosmetic brand, which wasn't about makeup and what you might call it. rivalrous displays, but was something else. And it was a very necessary space in which that brand sat perfectly comfortably, was entirely consistent with what that brand did. But then you got weirder stuff like Gillette, which was almost to the point of insulting your own target audience.

I mean, I found that an extraordinary weird advertisement. By the way, I'm going to be very even-handed here. The case with Dylan Mulvaney was really a scandal which was to some extent synthesized by people on the right. So for people who know in a way... Okay. So this was, if I'm right, it was... I was trying to remember... I think it was 2020.

It was 2023. Effectively, they sent Dylan Mulvaney some personalised cans of... Bud light. Okay. And effectively, this was just something done by, you know, a young person in the marketing department. It would have been a social media influencer campaign, where they sent personalized cans of beer to lots and lots of celebrities and people who had a social following. Perfectly reasonable thing to do. And for some reason, this was taken by the press for its own convenience,

as though Dylan Mulvaney had become the new face of Bud Light. Okay. Now, it was simply one part of an enormous campaign of sending, you know, free, personalized beer cans to, you know, a whole swath of people. It didn't really, in itself, I don't know what was going on in the marketing department in and around it, but in itself it was not intended to do that. Well, this is the interesting thing. because, and I think that's one of the reasons the story did get big,

is that there was a marketing executive. Do you remember the woman where she was talking, I think, to a reporter or something, and she was asked to explain the thinking behind their new strategy. And she basically said, well, you know, the customer base that we have, we don't really like those people, you know, their sense of humor is out of day and this and that. I don't think she's any longer with the company, if I'm right. No, no. I'm a businesswoman.

I had a really close. the job to do when I took over Bud Light. And it was this brand is in decline. It's been in decline for a really long time. And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no future for Bud Light. So I had this super clear mandate. It's like we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand. And my, what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does evolve and elevate mean? It means inclusivity. It means shifting the tone.

It means having a campaign that's truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different and appeals to women and to men. And representation is it sort of the heart of evolution. You've got to see people who reflect you in the work. And we had this hangover. I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty. kind of out-of-touch humor and it was really important

that we had another approach. But that was unconnected really with the Dilma-Malbany thing. I'd also make the point that I was telephoned by the telegraph about it. And neither of us, neither the telegraph journalist

nor I could see anything to get angry about. We went to research Dill-Malvaney. We found her pretty amusing. Okay. You know, there are people who object on both sides of the spectrum.

but we couldn't find anything to get angry about, fundamentally. By the way, I think there is a point here, which is that Britain is not the United States, but it speaks the same language, and you will suddenly find yourself either bemused by things that upset Americans. I mean, apart from the other, you've got to remember, I grew up in the 1970s with people like Danny LaRue, okay? There were a lot of people who were never out gay, but who, well, Larry Grayson apparently never, okay, are you being served, okay, right?

And you grew up with this as part of your, it was just part of the panoply of, you know, human life, you know, rather like Shakespeare. There are lots of different people in Shakespeare. to whom, almost all of whom, he has some degree of affection. Okay, the very British thing, which is, you know, this is a, you know, this is a, you know, the fabric of society is made up from, you know, very, very many different fibres. And we're pretty okay with that. I mean, we're not very conformist as a culture.

And therefore, the idea that we'd be desperately concerned or threatened by Dillman, I think would be alien to most Brits. I mean, I've, yes, because I think. I think we're also, I know what you mean because... It just doesn't bother me. I think I know what you mean. But remember, Americans are very weird.

I mean, the problem in the US, I think is... Dylan Mulvenny's fine. Americans are very weird. No, no, no, no. But part of it was... There is something quite absolutist about them. I mean, I remember... That's true. I've just come back from Fertaventura and there were Germans walking around

naked on the beach, okay? Germans do that kind of thing, you know, health and efficiency, all that sort of stuff. They're probably into a bit of the... what's it called? Peroneone. sunning. Have you come across this? No. So it's a sort of Taoist belief that you should expose your peridium to a lot of sunlight. But as Brits, we just go, well, it's probably not me, but it doesn't really bother me if they want to walk around with their schlongs out. It's, you know,

and there were children on the beach, and no one would have given a shit, to be honest. Okay. Now, in the United States, that would have been a police matter. Okay? Americans are very absolutely sorry. But they don't know too many Germans. I mean, this is absolutely true. It's the problem of the United States. And Benjamin Franklin warned about this. Benjamin Franklin was violently opposed to German immigration. And you do have this very, very weird.

You see it in obviously the person who, in a sense, plays with it a lot, is Larry David, which is a very, very weird rule-based culture in some ways, which is there has to be a rule for everything. Yes. And if you notice, have you driven in the United States. Yes. It's very, very strange because if you make a mistake, okay, in the UK, there's a sort of, there's a sort of 20-second period of bargaining where you put up your hand. What happened to me?

I'd driven into a, it was a sort of strip mall thing, and I'd driven into what was actually the exits to the car park unwittingly. And I came face to face with a car that was trying to leave. My sister-in-law, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, said, this is going to take two minutes. because all I could do was reverse onto a really busy high-speed highway. I wasn't prepared to do that. It was simply too risky.

So all he needed to do was reverse 10 feet. I would then pull over to the left. He could exit. In the UK, we would have done this by a process of kind of bartering where I would have put up my hands to say, sorry, my bad. And he would have gone,

yeah, we all make mistakes, slightly grudgingly, would have reversed. I would have then pulled away, all sold. He would have called you a prick as he was driving off in his head. My sister, he might have done that, but my sister-in-law said, this is going to take about a minute

and a half. I said, what on earth do you mean? He said, because they're not meeting this with, oh, I see something unusual has happened, therefore I have to adapt, okay? I had broken the rules, and therefore there was something fundamentally

wrong about the situation. And consequently, sure enough, that's exactly what happened. About a minute later, the guy got sort of pretty irate, but just accepted that he had to reverse. But what would have taken like 15 minutes of mutual understanding here was kind of like, was literally a case of total incomprehension. Yeah.

No, I agree with you about Americans. And this is all very interesting. But I think the Dillam. The Dillam of any case is different because, as I'm sure you're aware, there's been a raging debate about the trans issue and how it relates to specific things. and there are a lot of people that feel that we are all very happy to tolerate people being different. But when companies feel like, to some people, deliberately thrust this agenda, you know, there's a rainbow land yard everywhere.

Everyone's gender fluid and all of this. That's when people feel like, why is a mainstream product? And this is you're the advertising guy, so you push back on this if you want. But why is a brand that's a very common household beer, light in America, inexplicably for us. Why is it lecturing me on something where it doesn't really have any particular? Why is it, forget about lecturing? Why is it wading into very contentious social issues that are very divisive and polarizing?

And then maybe you're telling me this is what you're supposed to accept. It's worth noting that if you take the Big Five personality values, variously called canoe or oceans, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, et cetera. The people who work in marketing are all disproportionately wackily high on openness. Right. They're creatives, yeah.

You kind of expect it. They're people who like to expose themselves to other stimuli, who are generally, you know, quite experimental. They tend also to be young. I think I'm fair in writing, saying that whereas most of those values are fairly stable,

I think openness does decline slightly with air. which makes perfectly evolutionary sense, in the way. Which is if you think about it, if I'm young, I go to different holiday destinations every time, and now I'm 59, I tend to like to go back to the same place. And the logic is, twofold, I have both more experience to draw on, so I know what I like, okay? The likelihood that I'll make a fantastic discovery that suddenly I want to take up kite surfing, okay, is at the age of 59 fairly remote as a contingency. but also I have less remaining life to benefit from any discovery.

So it pays you to be, so there's a double whammy there where it pays you to be experimental in youth and slightly conservative with old age. And that's why having teenage children when you're about 50, which is kind of the age at which people tend to have teenage children nowadays, is particularly maddening because just as you're getting to, let's go back to Madeira for the fourth time, Your kids are going, I want to go to the Rio Carnival, okay?

Which sounds to me like a living nightmare. But so marketing people, Madison Avenue doesn't understand Main Street brilliantly well in some ways. Doesn't matter with certain brands, which are also targeting those people. But advertising has probably served mainstream brands less magnificently than it has kind of what you might call prestige brands. Or in other words, there are those two human motivations, which is the urge to stand out and the urge to fit in. And I think people in marketing understand... Kevin Chester's, a planner in advertising,

who's written about this little bit, which is advertising people tend to understand the urge to stand out to do something different, to be the first in your street too, okay? They're not so good at understanding the concomitant human urge, which is, I just want to fit in. Well, this is something that actually I was going to talk to you about,

that you've perfectly segues us into because I was driving through London the other day and I saw Jaguar. Now, Jaguar, obviously, had this ad that everybody thought, I don't know what everybody thought, but many people thought was terrible. And then they had the slogan on one of the advertising hoardings,

which I thought was very interesting and very telling in a political context, which was copy nothing. And I thought... By the way, that phrase... Tell me you didn't come up with that. No, no, no, no, no. I'll tell you who did come up with it,

which is Sir William Lyons, who is the... founder of Jaguar. So it's actually... His whole mission for Jaguar was to be a copy of absolutely nothing. Yes. And you might argue that Jaguar

at its absolute height with the XK-120 or the E-type was a staggering the original you know, extraordinarily revolutionary car brand. I'm much more sympathetic to that campaign than many people

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to that campaign than many people and the reason is that what they're doing is not good brand management by the standards of someone who has a great brand in a growing category which they want to maintain. So it breaks all the rules of what you might call brand consistency if you were tides detergents, okay? It breaks all those rules. However, and this is important, I think there are cases where you do break those rules, one of which is challenger brands, okay?

In other words, if you're Octopus Energy, for example, you don't behave in the same way that you would if you're British gas or BD. Okay. And secondly, brands where their category is undergoing enormous kind of cataclysmic disruption. And in this case, first of all, I think it's quite important, by the way, that one element of Jaguar, the Jaguar brand, which should be important, is a large part of the cars should be manufactured in the UK. Consequently, they're going to be expensive. Consequently, you are not going to be a volume car maker. You're going to be much closer to Rangerover, if you like, or even more expensive still, if you want to maintain that kind of element of where your cars are made.

But it's fair to say that the coming of electrification is a little bit like the coming of the iPod in the music industry. the usual assumptions and therefore the usual brand hierarchies no longer really apply. So we are seeing people who migrate from an Audi to a SCADA. In other words, they migrate from a petrol Audi to an electric SCADA. Quite a common pattern of behaviour, by the way. Okay. Both find by the same company, actually. I know.

Yeah, so it doesn't actually make any difference. But it's something that no one envisaged would happen. Yes. Okay. Take it. Yeah. Take it. Okay.

And so consequently you have, you know, for example, German brands which have built an enormous amount of heritage around their competence in manufacturing, in particular, the internal combustion engine. And suddenly cars are about software. Suddenly cars are basically software. I mean, there are very, very few moving parts. I think the drivetrain of an internal combustion engine has something like 230 moving parts. Electric cars are about six or seven. I took my car in for a service and they said yeah the brakes are fine

and the what did they say the brakes fine and the tyres are fine I said what about all the other stuff there isn't any other stuff so in the end I got to replace the cabin hepper air filter because I felt sorry for them and wanted to give them something to do

because I suddenly realised these poor garages who once made a fairly pleasant living replacing your air filter and tweaking various parts of your car effectively, I mean, I'm sorry, but Faraday kind of wins this one just on the basis of simplicity. Once you have reasonable battery, energy density, you can't compete. And so you have this very interesting position where what is the standard hierarchy in, you know, the automotive world,

which has been pretty, you know, it's pretty stable, suddenly everything changes. And it is one of those cases like the music industry where therefore doing something completely radical because you're going to need a completely different target audience. You cannot survive as an electric carmaker, particularly selling low volume super premium cars, selling to people who are highly nostalgic about driving gloves. Okay?

So to some extent you have to acknowledge that the... the market is going to move very dramatically, and therefore you have to do something which seems, you know, in some ways it seems slightly counterintuitive. You have this amazing heritage. Why would you turn your back on it? But it's a little like the problem of red telephone boxes, okay? Everybody loves them, but nobody uses them. And it's no good as a brand being widely loved if people aren't prepared to pay for the thing you offer.

But surely there is a market, Rory, for the... nostalgic experience in which you have the battery-powered car, but you have it with the Jaguar wood paneling, where the moment you get in, it evokes George Best, the 1960s, the E-type, blah, blah, and it feels like heritage, which is completely different to sitting in a Prius, for example, which is utterly functional, does the job, but let's be fair. Bear on, the car hasn't been launched yet, and certainly the early prototype had really interesting use of things like stone within the car. It's going to be a craft-built car

given the price point they're envisaging, okay? But you've got to remember that the Jaguar XK-120 was a super car at a bargain price, 120 because it could go 120 miles an hour, which at the time was serious shit, okay? And the E-type was they were modern cars, okay?

I mean, I don't think, you know, you can argue, yeah, okay, Both of those cars, when they came out, were futuristic. It's completely wrong to say, you know, I mean, undoubtedly, by the way, there is a very, very interesting business which takes old classics and electrifies them. Fascinating business, because in some ways it's a gorgeous car, because you have all the reliability, quietness and everything else and performance of an electric car. I mean, there's someone who makes electric classic range rovers. I mean, literally from the 70s, they take range rovers. rovers from the 1970s and electrify them. I think it's a fantastic business,

but I don't think it's where JLR should be. So I'm defending, by the way, I'll also defend it on the basis of that, okay. This is not a rich company. I think in the United States, okay, I've got a vague idea in the last year they were

selling Jaguars. They sold 7,000 cars, and that's not a business. Okay. And they haven't got a huge advertising, budget, and yet this and it wasn't an ad. Just to be clear about this,

just as Dylan Mulvaney was not an ad. It was a piece of what you might call other communication. I think it was probably a brand film, which people watched and assumed was an ad because it was being shown on television or on YouTube repeatedly.

I think the media budget for that ad was probably zero. I don't think they actually paid for that ad to run anywhere. I think it was shown at the lawnshore. or it was shown actually as a kind of, I think, precursor to the launch. Now, about five days later, I was on a call with Rick Rubin, who was in Hawaii. And I said, I don't suppose you've heard of the, oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard of that. So, yeah, achieving, you have to, you have to have to see, but.

But do you think with advertising, no such thing as bad publicity is true? No, it's not. It's not. I don't think it is. No, no, no. I mean, that would be ridiculous. However, being ignored is a problem. No, I agree. So I take your point, which is this as a brand that's in a very difficult situation. They have to shake things up.

I also accept the fact that, you know, people like, you know, I respect great. Be Byron Sharp, Mark Ritz and sort of marketeers, get very cross about it because their whole point is how you effectively stay true to long-established brand values that are. have been bought at great expense over time. But you have to acknowledge the fact that those values were making a lot of people love Jaguars, but not many people were buying them. Yes, but what I'm asking, Rory, something else, which is you talked about how people in advertising and in marketing are disproportionately young, disproportionately open to experience on the trades, et cetera. And I think what a lot of people sense is that they're really talking to themselves. And the problem is, I don't know how many 28-year-old marketing,

advisors or consultants are buying Jaguars for 80 grand. The only argument I'd make is that you could say that there are two ways in which you can be perceived in the electric car market, okay, which is a willing and enthusiastic early adopter of the technology or as a heel-drager. In other words, we're going to hold on to this petrol stuff for as long as we possibly can. Now, Jaguar has done a very remarkable thing by basically closing down production of all ICE cars.

I think for about a year and a half, it will not make a car. Okay? And then it will start to launch, I think this is the double zero, isn't it? It will start to launch two or three electric performance, pretty high-priced vehicles, for which what we have to do is say, okay, well, before we start agonising

about who the market is, we've got to say, how big is the market for this? My hunch will be worldwide. Is there a market for a super premium luxury electric car from a brand that's known, you know, for a brand that actually has probably lost relevance? I mean, my sister-in-law wouldn't buy a Jaguar because she saw them as an old man's car. Hmm. Okay. You know, you can't, you can have loads of people loving a brand, but if they ain't buying it, okay, it's the, you know, it's the red telephone box problem.

We all love them. Okay. And so consequently, are there enough very rich people who want to be very cool in Los Angeles, Miami, you can imagine the kind of places, London included, okay? Yeah.

Because they're probably not planning to make very many of them. Okay, so it's not a, I don't think it's a, no, no, no, no, bear in mind, I'm partly defending them just to be a little bit perverse because I thought the degree, The degree of a probe rim didn't take account of the business situation in which they found it. I think it speaks to the political dimension.

And this is what I was trying to pick up on with the slogan, because it's interesting that it's the original slogan. But I just thought the slogan, copy nothing, is the most progressive slogan that you could ever possibly conceive of. Well, it's from 1928 or something. Well, quite. Exactly, right. Yeah. So this, because copy nothing essentially is, you know, it's year zero.

That's kind of the mindset behind it. And in fact, it's not possible to make a car while copying nothing because it's still got the wealth of human history built into it, right? The world would be a much happier place, I think. If it understood that there is a kind of universal law to things, which I would include evolution, animal foraging,

algorithm design, business behavior. Okay. And that thing is occasionally is usually called the explore exploits trade-off, which is what part of your resources do you spend exploiting what you already know, and what part of your available resources do you spend exploring what you don't yet know or what's changed or what, you know. In other words, in an incredibly stable environment, you could be where you had perfect information. You could be 100% exploit, naught percent explore.

Okay. There is a, the two actually, I think it's wrong to call it a trade-off. I think they're actually a yin and yang thing. I think they're deeply complementary. You can't afford to explore if you don't exploit what you discover, okay? Right? But equally, you become decreasingly good at exploiting because you exploit less and less and less if you don't refresh your knowledge by exploring.

Okay. And that's why, by the way, I would argue that marketing and innovation are the two parts of an organisation, which are not exclusively, by any means, but are the epicentre for exploration. And I think they're the same thing, I take a very extreme view. I think marketing and innovation are the same thing. One of them is effectively, okay, there are two ways you can make money. You can either work out what people want and find a really clever way to make it, or you can work out what you can make and find a really clever way to make it, or you can work out what you can make and find a really. really clever way to make people wanted. Okay?

Now, most successful businesses are a combination of both in some way and some extent there. But that is effectively an exploratory activity to some degree. What I think has happened in business is business has been taken over by the finance function, for example, which is obsessed with deterministic gains to what you might call efficiency because they're an effective. it becomes an exploit business which no longer explores adequately. And in the short term, it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. In the long term, you actually go out of business.

And an example of this, by the way, which never occurred to me, despite the fact that I worked in marketing for bloody years, it's in John Kay's book, The Corporation in the 21st century. The companies that have been around for 150 years in the Fortune 500 or the Bootsie, okay, If you look at the really long-lived companies, their Unilever, their Nestle, their Procter and Gamble, their marketing-led businesses that are constantly having to effectively rethink what they do

on the basis of changing tastes, perceptions, needs, etc. Okay? And it's the focus on the consumer that effectively keeps them dynamic. If you focus on your internal efficiency metrics, which I think a large part of businesses actually do now, you gain short-term, very predictable gains which finance people love

and which arguably the stock market loves at the price of long-term fragility or irrelevance. Okay? And so we'd be a lot happy. So I made this point for ages about bees, which is that a large proportion of bees follow the waggle dance. They take information on where there is a source of nectar

or pollen or something. else they collect and they follow instructions based on existing knowledge and they go and collect in very easy accounting procedure you know energy expended has to be less than energy recovered okay you know that's double entry bookkeeping it's easy okay but to their surprise bee experts discover that a proportion of bees ignore the waggle dance and go off at random which in the short term is inefficient however if you think about it okay what happens if you don't have those random bees. One, you can never get lucky because you never discover anything new. So consequently, you can't actually grow because you're limited by the extent of your own knowledge.

Second, you're highly vulnerable to a change in circumstances because if cows break into your favorite field and eat all the bloody flowers, you suddenly got nowhere to go. So bees have built in this apparent inefficiency, which isn't an efficiency at all. I think it's actually a benign loop. The explore exploits trade off. And I think the two are complementary activities, but we see them wrongly as being in opposition. And so I would argue that I'm totally sympathetic to that conservative point of it already works, don't mess with it. In fact, Hayek kind of wrote a piece to me why I'm not a conservative.

This whole argument was, well, it's because actually things have to change. I don't think intelligent conservatives think things shouldn't change. Agreed. Okay, right. But you're absolutely right in things like respect for Chester. tonian fences that your exploratory activity should be, to some extent, ring-fenced and constrained, and not only in extent, but also in speed, you don't want people bees jumping on every passing fashion, okay? You know, they will actually, effectively, it will take time

for a discovery made by a scout bee to filter back into the waggle dance. But, I mean, I I actually meant a scientist who's an expert in neurodiversity, who makes the same point, which is she believes that neurodiversity in humans is actually a manifestation of the same thing, which is you don't want everybody to think alike. It's very, very valuable in any group of people to have people who see things differently. One group of which would I include, by the way, comedians in my few.

Okay? I would argue that comedy and humour, which is a human universal, would probably get suppressed in some adults, I would argue. That was the weirdest thing about having young children is how early the sense of humour develops. I mean, you can actually play jokes with, you know, with infants who have no faculty of speech.

You know, you can actually do silly little, okay, it's a bit slapsed. You know, it's not verbally sophisticated, but you can make them laugh. That astonished me. Well, my son is two and a half, and he's discovered toilet humour, So he's worked out that if in the middle of a conversation he answers a question with the word poo,

then this is... It's fantastic funny. Exactly. Yeah, I had these two imaginary places with my children called Pooh Town and Weetown. And I had to tell these incredibly long, convoluted bedtime stories about basically a place that was absolutely obsessed

with feces and another other place. I remember my friend at university rang the professor of Hungarian at the University of Cambridge. And his son answered the phone. He said, don't call. Can I speak to your father, please? No, he's on the toilet.

And of course, the Professor of Higarian then appears, takes the phone. He says, I'm terribly sorry, that was my son. I was, of course, not on the toilet. But Rory, let's go back to something, because I think this is a very important point, which is the thing that gets my goat personally, and as someone who doesn't identify as conservative, despite what everybody else says, is the moralistic aspect of this.

Oh, yes, I completely agree. I completely agree. And particularly Ben and Jerry's, and they start lecturing me about Palestine or whatever it is. And I go, hang on a second. What, you're owned by Proctor and Gamble. Unilever, I think it is. Oh, Unilever. Yeah.

Unilever. Who are you to be lecturing me about Zilch? And it angers me. In that case, the founders of that brand are, I can't know where it's Vermont or somewhere, isn't it? Yes. Okay. You can argue, okay. It's not a very good idea.

It's not a generally it's not a good idea to align your brand along political lines because for the obvious reason that it's not a good idea for a brand to alienate 50% of its target audience. In the words of Michael Jordan, Republicans buy sneakers too. That was absolutely right.

He was asked to endorse, I think, a Democratic candidate, wasn't he? In his home state. And his argument was Republicans by sneakers too, which they do. And it's not a good idea to do that. I mean, it doesn't seem to have hurt Taylor Swift, having said that, but nonetheless, it's probably heard Elon, by the way, if you look at Tesla sales in Europe, there seems to be

some sort of, your cars are very visible part of yourself. The other thing, by the way, which is really important, okay, and for crying out loud, the ad industry should be better at this than it is, which is there is the intention and there is the outcome. Quite a lot of wokeism is perfectly well-intentioned. I wouldn't wish any harm on any of the groups which they intend to support, okay? And some of it, by the way, has been actually pretty healthy. I mean, I'll give an example,

but John Cleese and I both agreed on this, which is, I mean, there are creative artists who don't agree on it, but I don't think the trigger warnings at the beginning of films are an altogether bad idea. If you've had some traumatic experience in your childhood, I had a friend who went out of a film

when I was much younger in tears because as it happened, he'd shot a friend in the eye with an air rifle in his early childhood and the film showed someone being injured in the eye and the whole thing. I don't think that's a...

No, you can argue that it sometimes ruins the dramatic aspect of surprise, and I'll listen to script writers on that question. I don't think that's a bad thing to do. And the intentionality is good, okay? The intentionality not to upset people is, after all, behind things like politeness and gentlemanly behavior and very, very traditional conservative values, okay? You know.

However, what is what you don't understand if you live in a bubble is reactance, which is there are behaviors that people are actually perfectly willing to adopt, but if you tell them to do it in the wrong tone of voice, they will actually develop a counter-off. In other words, this is literally a case where the activity is well-intentioned but counterproductive. And I think there's been a lot of that. I mean, I, you know,

I think that when things become patronising, moralising, when, for example, I mean, this was particularly true. I voted Remain, okay, and I actually became a lever because I was so horrified at the fact that the people who were remaniacs, it wasn't just a question of they disagreed. They were incapable of acknowledging that there might have been a contrary opinion. Apart for anything else, okay, the quality of that decision was unknowable for 10 or 15 years, okay?

The idea that you could be that certain of the rightness of your cause just struck me as fundamentally alarming. I mean, life's deeply ambiguous. You know, I think in order to survive and maintain our sanity, we actually have to believe contradictory things. And you find that all through, I mean, okay, and what worries me, okay, is that our education system is all about winning an argument. And there's something deeply hubristic

about the whole idea of human rationality, which is rationality. In rationality, it's not enough to be right. you have to prove that everybody else is completely wrong. You see what I mean? That when you win an argument, if you use a, it's James O'Brienism, okay,

just because I can string together a logical sequential argument about something, okay, does not mean that I'm right and that everybody else is an idiot, okay? There are different starting points, there are different contexts, there are different viewpoints, they're different framings of the thing.

And I, what's lovely about working in, advertising, because I keep making the points that the opposite of a good idea is another good idea. Okay, this is the glorious, gloriously bonkers thing. You've probably done this. You live in Canada. You've probably been to a farmer's market. To construct a farmer's market, first of all, it has the completely bizarre thing, which is that you buy direct from the manufacturer, but you pay more.

Secondly, it's an unbelievably inefficient way of buying anything. Basically, what you do to construct a farmers market is you take a Tesco Metro and you make it really shit. You've got to pay in six different places to buy five different things. There's a cheese guy, there's the guy who sells the olives. You're going back a few centuries in human history. And it's effectively, exactly, it's a reversion to some medieval concept of what a market. People love the fucking things, right? And it's partly, it must be human exchange, it must be human exchange, it must be

the relationship nature of the exchange. I think a large part of markets a street theatre. I think it's kind of performative. That we like being seen there. We like exercising discernment. We also, in a sense, there's probably an element of the Jack of All Trains

heuristic, which is, well, if you only sell dips, they're going to be pretty fucking good, because otherwise you wouldn't be around in six months' time. It's why we buy... I mean, very interesting question. Why are fishmongers and butchers always totally different shops.

You know, say it's a similar mystery to why do the people who do heel repair also do key cutting. I like to think of myself as a kind of market Darwinist going around the Galapagos Islands. But you have to be comfortable in this business with the idea that, you know, large parts of life are inherently contradictory.

That sometimes the right answer is not B, it's a mixture of A plus C. Simple as that. And consequently, it's not safe to say that just because my motive for producing this Gillette ad is well-intentioned, that therefore it will have the consequences that I wished for. And by the way, I think a large part of DEI in the workplace has had the unintended consequence of really, really pissing off a large proportion of your own work. through the implication that they don't deserve to be there. Okay?

And if you're really cynical, okay, you'd say that it suited the interests of employers to reduce the sense of legitimacy of its own workforce. Because, you know, in other words, I can't really ask for a pay rise anymore because, you know, I probably shouldn't be here in the first place. Okay.

Now, I mean, there's a great phrase from... Have you... met Dan Davis, who wrote the book, The Unaccountability Machine, fantastic book. But this comes from cybernetics. Cybernetics, by the way, brilliant idea, branding disaster. It's a very, very interesting idea which studies the flow of information within organisations and the biases and constrictions and bottlenecks that affect information, whereas what we tend to do is look at businesses through the lens of the flow of money. This is looking at things through the lens of information.

And the problem with cybernetics was about six years after it was invented, Doctor Who came up with the Cyberman, which, broadly speaking, ruined the chances of this discipline through a completely unpredictable necographical misfortune. But one of the great phrases of Stafford Beers, I think, is the purpose of the system is what it does, which is you can have this system, which is intended to do this wonderful thing, and it can actually end up having not only unintended consequences, it can end up being massively counterproductive. And I think that happens all the time,

because when we intervene in a complex system, this isn't a simple Newtonian relationship between input and output. Completely weird and strange things happen. By the way, I mean, I'm going to go off on a slight tangent here, which I actually do. There's a problem with the NHS, there's an informational problem with the NHS, which nobody's talked about nearly enough.

There's also a problem with journalism to the same effect. Now, in the United States, the customer, if you like, of a hospital, for example, is to some extent the patient. He's also insurance companies and everybody else, but ultimately it's the patient. If you're a doctor at the Mayo Clinic and you go on the record saying,

actually, the Mayo Clinic's a bit shit and we haven't got enough equipment and their patients in all the corridors, none of the other doctors will ever speak to you ever again because you've basically shut on their turf because it might discourage customers from coming to the hospital so it's in the interests of American hospitals to pretend they're better than they really are

although to be fair the Mayo Clinic is incredibly good so I don't want to have a I don't want to make enemies there in the NHS your source of funding is the government so the collectively healthy thing to do is to say we're really beleaguered their patients lining up in the corridors now let's say you're an NHS

consultant dermatologist, and you appeared on Sky News and said, frankly, it's a bit of a piece of piss. I knock off early on Fridays. I've got a nice house in Spain. And frankly, you know, frankly, you know, I've got a nice office with a swivel chair and I've got all the funding I could possibly want. None of the other doctors will ever speak to you ever again because you've broken the rule, which is you have to say how bad things are. Now, I'm not saying the NHS isn't in a bad state, although many of my experiences with it are actually much better. than I expected.

It's got a particularly bad user interface and it's not very good at presentation. Okay? But actually the fundamentals of what it does for the most part, I personally, I've found pretty impressive. Usually when you get the treatment is pretty good. I think the reason people are very concerned

about the state of it is the fact that you have to wait a long time to be treated, which you do for many, many things. This podcast is brought to you in part by Stash. Are you still putting off saving an investing because you'll get to it someday, stash turns someday into today. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster.

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dot stash.com slash trigger. Paid non-client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments, LLC and SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk and investments may lose value. Offer is subject to T's and Cs. Yes, I mean, I personally I think there are technical,

and psychological ways we can probably solve that problem to an extent. I don't think the waiting list is the correct unit of proxymetric for effectiveness. There are many conditions after all where actually back conditions, a lot of people get better off their own bat. You know, over intervening. It's worth noting that the US system is probably biased towards intervention. Oh, definitely. It's one of the reasons that the trans issue was much more prominent,

particularly when it comes to surgery and puberty blockers, etc. It's like there's money to be made from this. You know, over there. So, so that you have this fundamental problem. You also have a problem in journalism. And I'm interested because you're from Venezuela and you're from Moscow originally, is that right? And you quite like the UK.

Yeah, yeah. Okay? Yeah. Now, in journalism, if you write anything that's positive about anything, okay, you are regarded to be basically in the pocket of the PR industry. And you're not a serious journalist. the only, everybody's trying to be Woodward and Bernstein, basically in journalism, aren't they? Everything's really shit.

I mean, Paxman actually said it. Who is this liar and why is he lying to me is effectively his default position? Yes. I mean, I was surprised when I first had vague experience of practical politics that there are quite a few cross-party bodies where people perfectly ably get on with people across the political divide to try and solve a problem to mutual advantage. I didn't really realize this was going on. I assumed the whole thing was just about into Nissan content. Now, you have this problem in journalism, particularly in the UK.

In the US, they will hero a company. In fact, they'll show an unhealthy degree of deference and respect towards just very rich people in the US. In the UK, we do have an opposite problem. I think there are really, really interesting businesses in the UK. you know, extraordinary businesses like Octopus Energy, for example, or Wise or Monzo, FinTech, Arcado, okay, actually the fact that, you know, what you can get delivered, which by the way, is of huge benefit, by the way, to the elderly, no one ever mentions this fact. But my dad, the last three years of my dad's life were undoubtedly, and he won't,

up there, he won't mind me saying this, were absolutely heightened by the fact that. that he could get, you know, the entire, not quite the entire range, a large part of the range of M&S food delivered to his door when he was no longer able to travel into the local town where the M&S wasn't that big anyway. I mean, that, you know, those things are, you know, material benefits, okay? If they were run by a charity, we'd think those people were heroes, okay? And the complete negativity about Britain in the press, I find unbelievably depressing. I think it's ridiculous.

But isn't that just a reflection of the culture? Because just as we get the politicians that we deserve, Rory, we also get the media that we deserve. Because if you're putting out content and articles or whatever it may be and it's getting no engagement because it's very positive, then why are you going to continue to do that if the negative articles that you put out get far more engagement? This is a bit complicated because there's a very, very bright marketer at the Financial Times.

who argues, I think very convincingly, that what sells papers in a newsstand, which is what journalists are trained on, okay, is undoubtedly daily mail stuff. You know, this is awful, my God, it's terrible. The country's gone to the dots and looked at it. The daily mail, the daily mail, I really, I was in the Canary Islands only yesterday.

I have to confess I bought a copy of the mail on Sunday. Paper, right? Fucking trees. I really rather enjoyed, I rather enjoyed reading it, okay. But it does also worry me in the sense that it has this knee-jerk horror of any kind of new thing, whether it's electric cars or drones or whatever, that may have a negative consequence. I'll come on to that a little bit later. And when you say that it's the culture, if you look at old Pate newsreels, they're insanely upbeat. You know, plucky British troops, you know, fending off whatever.

They're very, very patriotic, first of all. And they are actually very, very optimistic about the future. Okay? So, you know, the 1930s, which is probably the high point of innovation, to be honest, in, you know, certainly outside the field of bits. my grandmother went from collecting rents in a horse-ponion trap to effectively jet travel in her lifetime. It was very, very, you know, positive. And so something bothers me about this,

that there are a lot of things where there are very heavy informational asymmetries. And I think we just have to be conscious of those. I mentioned the NHS, which is, it is in no one's interest in the NHS to speak, spread a good news story unless it's about how brilliant the director of the local trust is, okay, because effectively you will lose social, you'll be a social outcast for suggesting the problem is less than it is, okay?

There's undoubtedly a negativity bias. Now, where this FT marketing person is very clever is she says that that's true of what gets someone to buy a newspaper or go to a website. But most of our business is subscription. And what people like to read is not the same as what makes people buy a publication. Now, if you look at successes, I would say the spectator, I would say this, wouldn't I, is actually reasonably balanced between optimism and pessimism and between, you know, positivity and negativity. It's not a doom-mongering publication. You know, I can write positive articles. You know, I can write positive articles. I can write negative articles.

The week, which is a fantastically successful, again, that's probably, what, 80% subscription-based? Okay? The FT, her argument is that actually, once we're a subscriber to a publication, rather than once we make friends with someone, okay? We don't want them to be a massive great doommonger, okay? That's an element of journalism,

which actually comes from the days of newsstand sales. and that actually the negativity bias in journalism might be excessive. It's simply an interesting thing to explore. So it's rather like sugar and salt in food and with nourishment. So you can put lots of sugar and salt into fast food, for instance, and that will initially make you crave it and want to buy it, but it won't give you sustenance in the long term. But that's what we talk about on the internet is clickbait.

It's one of the reasons that, look, you always want to make sure that the way that your episode appears on YouTube is appealing to people. But there are certain lines where you see people taking shortcuts where they are putting the sugar and the salt all over it. My trans dog attacks me. I joke about this, which is David Ogilvy very famously wrote that ad at 60 miles an hour. The loudest noise in the New Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the electric clock. I always joke that 2025 David Ogilvie would write,

what are the ten noisiest things in the New Rolls-Royce? number seven will astound you. There are all those things like lists, the whole thing is... Yes, exactly. The whole thing is effectively, effectively reveals that the human brain is to some extent hackable. The most extreme case of that being social media, of course, where there's the eternal paranoia that someone might be talking about you. Yes. Rory, let's take a detour from our side now.

One thing we wanted to talk about, because we're running out of time, is marketing and kind of PR when it comes to the political environment now. Go on. So with the political parties in the UK and also with Donald Trump, is there anything that stands out for you that you think this is interesting to mention?

One thing that struck me as a bit weird is that Trump derangement syndrome seems to be much less this time around. Oh, yeah. Well, it's because he's won. Everyone, everyone... Well, he won decisively, I guess. Exactly.

Okay. Exactly. So, but why does what is after all, I mean, the difference between the decisive win and a narrow win is probably only, you know, 600,000 votes in the right place? It was a very demoralizing defeat for the Democrats in America. One also has to contend that the Democrats in the United States are the biggest sort of marketing fuck up you can possibly imagine. Why do you say that? Well, I mean, first, first of all, the decision of Biden to run again should have been. suppressed very, very early on. This must be suppressed. No, no, no, no. But I mean, if you've got

some sort of party operation, there must, there has to be a mechanism where you go, look, you cannot win or rather, you know, in other words, the chances are that in some debate or some other thing, you fall down a flight of stairs, whatever happens, that, you know, that renders the whole thing impossible. They're incredibly bad, I mean, you know, their candidate selection seems to be incredibly bad for some extent. And it's, and I suppose their failure to understand

Main Street. I mean, it was always a mess the US Democrats. I mean, it was, I mean, back in the 60s it was kind of coalition of sort of southern racist and non-liberals. You know, and it was a weird it was always a kind of very

bizarre hybrid sort of entity. But one would hope now they've got four years to get their act together. But by the way, I'm also baffled because I don't fully understand the United States. And there are a few people who, now, your regular listeners will probably go insane about this. But I've always found Elizabeth Warren completely sane and fascinating. And I'm really interested to read everything she says. But apparently in the United States, she's viewed as completely barking mad.

Bernie, after all, I can't work out. any animus towards Bernie either. I don't think there's a huge amount of animus towards Bernie. No. What about UK politics? Something I wanted to ask you. Let's say you were an advisor to the Conservative Party.

Bloody hell. Look at that. You look like you've got a splitting migraine. But you've got a brand. Much like Jaguar has been around for a very long time, was very successful at one point. The oldest party in human history

in democracies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, utterly self-discredited by its own actions over a very long period of time. Some of that was contrived. Some of that was synthetic scandal. Look, I'm not talking about cake gay and party getting all this moronic shit. I'm talking about...

You want to remember this country. Our scandals are really shit. Oh, absolutely. Our corruption scandals. I think one of them involved in motor caravan. Well, I remember. I remember there was some kind of sex scandal in the Lib Dems where somebody was accused of having touched someone's back in a properly. And the line of the time was only the Lib Dems could have a sex scandal without any sex.

So I agree with you. But what I'm saying to you is I think the Tory party is widely discredited within its own electorate now. Widely. Very widely because of failures of immigration because of failures to, you know, we are all three remainers or remain voters who've then become, you know, very antagonized. by the behavior of our fellow remainers, all of these three. But nonetheless, on Brexit, they didn't really do what I think people voted for. There's a wide sense of disillusionment with the Tory party.

How would you rebrand them, is what I'm asking? Well, there's a similar question here where I'm generally in favor of a reasonable degree of immigration. But I don't think it's a, I think it has to have a democratic mandate. Of course. Who your populace is. And what's happening is decisions on that are being taken by two groups of people who are lawyers and economists. Yes.

And the first thing you've got to do is you've got to break this appalling stranglehold that there's a combination of lawfare and economics. It's also worth noting, by the way, that the economic interests of a government and the economic interests of an individual do not actually align that well in that government would like to grow GDP rather than GDP. GDP per head in terms of paying off debt. But, Roy, give us a sorry branding. How would you rebrand the Conservatives?

The first thing you've got to do is it, well, true of all political parties, are far too much enthralled to neoliberal economic theory, which only has partial explanatory value, doesn't have that much predictive value. And the extent to which the first thing you've got to do is effectively, I would have probably, first of all, I'd probably go heavy on localism. I think there's a massive case for the devolution of power. If I'm right,

Kent is actually effectively devolving. Is that right? Yeah, well... We're going to have a mayor. Yes. You're going to have a mayor of Kent. Different parts of Kent are going to have mayors, actually. I think there's three or four. No, I thought Medway and the... Anyway, but because it's got a population of 1.8

million. It's not a... I mean, a lot of people don't fully... Localism. Yeah. I think the extent to which economics drives decision-making and drives the narrative is completely unwholesome. Most people aren't narrow wealth maximized, okay? I always say in business, okay, there are people who behave as economics suggests is rational. Those people do exist. I mean, famously, John Kay always says that economics decisions.

described the behavior of his cat very well. Entirely self-interested, totally solipsistic, you know, narrow short-term concerns for food and warmth and comfort. No zero empathy. Broadly speaking, psychopathic. By the way, I like cats. That's the weird thing. But charming.

And equally, I'd say, there are people who behave exactly as economists think people should behave. You don't want them as your customers, okay, as a business. Yeah. You know, they're the last people you want to do as customers. They'll just go to someone who's 3% cheaper, you know, with no particular loyalty, affinity or anything of the kind. They're awful people to have as customers, e-cons. And my great complaint was that I think a lot of people feel cheated, having voted Labor, because, as I said, having someone from the Bank of England, who's an economist as Chancellor of the Exchequer, okay, in a Labour government, is a bit like going on a club 1830 holiday and taking a

a parents along. It kind of defeats the object of the whole exercise. But if you're going to vote Labour and yet you're going to have exactly the same kind of, you know, financial paranoia that you had before, what was the point? And this

comes down to an interesting thing. I don't think, actually, Liz Trust tanked the economy. I think there was something entirely different going on, which was to do with interest rates and bonds and pension funds, which happened to coincide with that. But the narrative that as soon as you do something fairly dramatic economically, you know, effectively you're at the mercy of the bond market, effectively means now that nobody will try anything economically interesting.

My problem is that I don't really fit comfortably with the next thing we've got to do, and of course no one will get elected after they've done it, is we've got to start taxing wealth more and income less. It's absurd the extent to which, I mean, okay, an intergenerational inequality is a problem which I don't think, I don't think our generation fully understands because we, at the very least, caught the end of a property wave which has carried us through life. Your generation, we're slightly young. Forgive us. No, no, no, that's true. We never caught the end of anything. There are people, most people our age, and we are in our early 40s now, never had a chance to get on the property. light in the first place.

Yeah. I mean, we did catch the tail end of it, but it was far less closer across. One of the reasons Londoners are left wing is the person, you know, okay, Londoners are paying a lot of money to transport for London. They're paying a lot of money in tax, but they are at least getting something for that. The really extractive force for a young Londoner is your landlord. So as a Georgist, of course, I fully believe that we should tax property and we should tax the consumption of things that are effectively not creating. or renewable.

And so that would probably include energy, by the way, as well, or at least fossil energy. But the extent to which the economics doesn't distinguish between rent-seeking activity and creative economic activity,

labor tends to be on the creative side of the equation, whereas buying a house and renting it out, I think we can fairly say, sits, I'm not suggesting landlords all have it completely easy, by the way. But I'm also conscious of the fact that whoever owns the house where my daughter lives, which is split into three flats, never has to work again simply because they happen to buy a house

an opportune moment in 1983. Okay? I don't think that's an acceptable state of affairs. I think that's... And the weird thing about economics is all economists are conscious of the difference between rent-seeking and value creation. And yet no economist ever suggests that you should treat the two activities differently in terms of taxation.

And so, I mean, first of all, I think it's, I think the property market is simply ridiculous. I think it's a massive great sump. And there is no point in growing the economy if all future gains simply get parlayed into the property market. Okay. So I think you have this instance. My father always believed that he thought that property was too cheap in the 1970s. And he was kind of right. It was absurdly cheap. Okay. I mean, in London in 1988, I could have if I'd wanted to bought a, what was a two-bedroom, no, hold on, a four-bedroom mazinet in Notting Hill, admittedly overlooking some railway tracks for a hundred and something thousand. Okay. This is offensive to our generation. I don't know. I didn't buy it. So, I mean, so.

Look. The, and that seemed expensive to us then, by the way. We thought, ooh. You know, a friend of mine bought a flat for, bought a house for 220,000. We thought they were fucking bonkers. Okay? I thought they were insane. And then I'm living in Spain and the house has five people living in it, by the way.

Okay. Just a joke. So if, you know, I'm, to be able to be, I'm. honest, I think the only reason young Londoners aren't actually becoming murderous is they don't really realize how different it used to be. They don't have the chronological context to realize how different it used to be. But there's a fundamental problem here, which is that if you, this is a joke I tell to Indian friends, which is there's no point in growing the Indian economy because the surplus will just be spent on weddings. And my Indian friend said, look, I got married

three months ago, that's not even funny. But if you have this thing that will basically soak up the greater part of people's disposable ink. My father's belief was that one of the reasons of the 1970s property was cheap was that things like cars, televisions, washing machines, foreign holidays were really fucking expensive. Okay? And therefore, you didn't have all, you know, if you really wanted a washing machine and you wanted to go off to the Costa every year, you didn't have that much money left to actually spend on your house. And now my argument is, what's the point? You know, I would argue that this is totally self-serving and a load of bollocks, but I'll tell you anyway.

People like me in what you might call the creative, competitive economy are helping produce and market and distribute 65-inch televisions for, you know, 650 quid. Okay? Now, bear in mind, in 1998, such a thing wasn't even available. Didn't even exist. If you'd shown one of those things to Louis XIV. He would have given you half of Gascony in exchange for your Samsung telly, right? And your drone, right?

All of those things become miraculous, where there are a network effects and gains to scale, become miraculously, insanely stupidly cheap. You know, easy jet. I'm a huge hero. I'm a huge fan, by the way. I will sort of, I would not die on a hill, but I will passionately defend Starbucks, Costa Coffee,

Holiday Inn Express, Premier Inn. What I call the satisfacer, you know, pretty good quality, very good value brands. Because they've done actually a service, which they've killed off the shit part of the market.

Isn't that a bit unfair, though, Rory? Come on. Like, there's loads of, like, what the Americans call mom-and-pop businesses that have been driven to the wall by these... The good ones survive. I would argue, though, okay, you didn't try and stay in a hotel in Britain in the 1970s, trust me.

Absolent shit, okay? And so what Starbucks does, I'm not claiming that Starbucks will give you the best cup of coffee you've ever had in your life, but it means that if you want to compete as a coffee shop, you've got to be a bit better than that. You've got to ask the game. So in some ways what they do is they don't raise the ceiling,

but they raise the floor. Now, I had a cup of coffee in B&Q in Tumberidge Wells, your spiritual home, in a branch of B&Q, about a year ago. And I remember thinking, hold on, this is better than the coffee I would have got at the Ritz, had I been to the Ritz in 1984. Do you know, that's so funny you say that, because my grandfather who came to this country in the late 80s, I think, and he loved Britain, but when he first arrived, I think he went into a coffee shop and he got a coffee. And he, I think for the first several years of his life here, he would complain about coffee at every single place. Because he just, you know,

I just assumed something was wrong with it. No, no, no. Probably, France. France is still largely shed. France? Yeah, they place enormous sort of stature on food. Yeah. But until recently, you couldn't get fresh milk in France at all for some weird reason.

Everything was like super pasteurized. And I was talking about Italian, so don't take my word for it. The Italian was similarly bemused. They said, why, in Italy, you can't get a, you go to a motorway service station. The coffee's fantastic. You go to France, it's shit. everywhere. I have no idea what's going on. Rory, we've got to wrap up

and shitting on France is something we love to do on the show. So it's a perfect ending. Sorry. We're in South of Americans and Germans. Somebody has to take a call on taxing wealth more. The extent to which a bunch

of people have done incredibly well through asset price inflation and have ended up in many cases completely untaxed on a gain which was utterly unearned. Whereas the people who are actually doing the work are taxed at a marginal rate of 40% in taxation, plus then, if you add for a Londoner, the cost of accommodation and transportation, you end up effectively, I worked it out once, effectively,

one of my colleagues, one of my younger colleagues, if I give them 100 quid, they just about end up with about 15. In terms of discretionary disposable income. This is just bullshit. Now, how do you get re-elected after you tank the housing market? I don't entirely know. The other thing we need to do is there are areas of economic activity which are highly promising, which we need to explore and where I think we're too risk averse.

I think that one of the cultural changes that's happened over my lifetime is an incredible sort of aversion to harm. Yes. Extraordinary aversion to harm. to the extent of people being, you know, you don't even need someone to be offended, you just need to be able to hypothesise that someone might be offended, okay?

And I met a guy called Bobby Healy in Ireland who runs drone delivery. Now, I'll be candid with you, I get a lot of things wrong. And I talk about those things. There are things I've been totally fucking wrong about. I mean, in terms of predictions as to technology and other things of that kind.

But I always thought drone delivery was led of old bollocks, okay? I just thought it was technology, in search for an application. And then I looked at the economics of what he does, which is you take over a few parking spaces on the top of a shopping mall. Anybody wants anything from the shop in the Dublin suburbs,

you take it upstairs, pop it in the drone, you deliver it at 60 miles an hour over a distance of two miles. It lowers the thing onto someone's, typically their trampoline in their garden, okay? And the cost of that delivery is about 10p. It's insanely cheap for last mile delivery. Now, what's going to happen here

is that someone's going to try starting that, and someone's dog is going to be mildly hurt by a falling tin of baked beans. And that will be the news story, okay, you know, for the next five days. You know, this terrible threat from, you know, drone delivery. Despite the fact that information asymmetry here, moped accidents aren't newsworthy, okay? Every drone is five miles of moped taken off the road, okay? the Chinese actually have a name for it. They call it the low altitude economy.

It's potentially a really, really interesting thing. And just to give you the contrast about that, about how someone being injured by a falling tin of beans would be a new story in 2025. My grandfather, the doctor I mentioned earlier, he had a guy who sort of drove him and repaired his car who'd been in the trenches and world war one. And the story told my grandfather was they had an officer didn't particularly hate him.

They thought he was a bit fresh, new and over-eager, okay? And so he was slightly annoying as an officer, but, you know, nobody they particularly despised, okay? And one day, he decides to lead a charge out of the trenches, goes up the ladder with his Webbly 45, and gestures forward and goes, come on men, forward, okay? At that point, his shoulder is hit by some shrap. which means his arm completely detaches from his body, flies forward about five feet still holding the revolver where his arm lands in the mud.

Okay? They all burst out laughing. I don't want to return to that, okay? I don't want to return. I don't want to grow up in a world. Now, admittedly, I suppose, blighty wound, he gets home, he survives the war, worse things were happening every day. So it wasn't totally callous, in a sense.

I don't want to live in that kind of world. But equally, I can't live in a world where effectively you have an approach to information which is like saying that a restaurant, it's very, very good that restaurants cater to food intolerances and allergies. It's very good that they offer vegetarian and vegan options, okay? But we're now trying to create a world where you're not allowed to serve food

to which anybody might hypothetically be alerted. Okay, and you can't you can't have conversation where effectively you have that level of minority rule now Just to be clear I'm not a nutter okay. I don't understand why they serve peanuts on airplanes, okay nuts, right? I accept the fact that some people have very bad nut allergies now I really like nuts. I don't have a nut allergy But I'm not so fucking keen on nuts okay that I go oh god the prospect of six hours without eating nuts is intolerable to be right? Not like banning vaping, right? Okay, I don't understand whether they're like nuts on planes. I mean, I don't need the fucking things.

I don't want someone to have an anaphylactic shock at 35,000 feet. And for that matter, I don't want the plane to have to land in Reykjavik for two hours while someone's medevacked off, okay? Just don't have the nuts on the plane. It's fine, okay? But equally, you can't have a world where no one's allowed to eat nuts under any circumstances because someone somewhere may actually be, you know, may have a bad reaction to them.

You can't calibrate the world that way. It's just not realistic. Well, you've preempted and answered our last question, which is what's one thing we're not talking about, that we should be. I feel like you kind of covered that. So, join us on Substack where we ask Rory your questions. Who will be the winners and losers from the age of AI in marketing and advertising?

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