Within Reason - #78 Rory Sutherland - Why Logical Thinking is Illogical

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

Rory Sutherland is a British advertising executive, and vice chairman of the Ogilvy & Mather group of companies. His book, Alchemy, is available here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

people talking is an art form or medium which is probably quarter a million years old or half a million years old in evolutionary terms okay whereas everything else is five thousand years or less yeah i mean i don't even know if the egyptians had drama i'm guessing they might have done yeah okay but you know and i don't know what their plays would have been about but um uh but writing's what four thousand five thousand six thousand years old max isn't they The only two things that are really, really old, conversation and dogs are the two things that are really old, yeah. My theory is about podcasting that, well, famously, I think Socrates never wanted to write anything down. And part of the reason for that, it might be apocryphal, is that if you write something down, you don't have to remember it.

It's like you don't, you sort of, you should be practicing this oral tradition. That was my university policy for not taking notes, but it didn't really work in my case. Well, also, there's a sense in which the way philosophy is supposed to be done is through conversation. Yes. And so when you write down philosophy, what you're actually creating is this simulacrum of the ideal way of doing philosophy, which is through conversation. So, you know, Socrates or Plato. Writing a book about philosophy is the wrong way to do it, isn't it? Yes.

Because you know where you're going when you start, which is missing old bloody points. I think that's why so many philosophies are done in the style of dialogues. That is like, you know, you have. same thing. Dialectic is similar, isn't it? Well, you have, I mean, literal dialogues between characters. So like the Platonic dialogues, Galileo writes dialogues, Hume writes dialogues, and he invents these characters in order to make a philosophical point, because instead of just saying, here's my viewpoint, here's my philosophical worldview, they say, we're going to do this through conversation, because the best way to do philosophy is one person says something, another person asks

a question and clarifies, and they debate. And so Plato's probably thinking to himself, you know, as is Hume, as is Galileo, thinking to them. gosh, if only there are a way, you know, to capture the actual conversation. You know? Fantastic. Yes, yes, yes. And so when people... I've got to write it down like a script.

Exactly. And so... And Plato made that shit up, didn't he? I think I'm right to saying. Those conversations... A lot of it was... Yeah, those conversations probably didn't happen. But the funny thing is that like a lot of people say, you know, oh, you know, I used to read

so much philosophy. But now I never read because I'm too busy listening to podcasts and stuff. And I'm like, well, hold on. what you're doing is you're trading the simulacrum for the thing that's, for, like, how it's supposed to be, you know? This is fascinating. Fun enough, it's arisen as an interesting question. We are rolling, right?

Are we rolling? Oh, see you later, Georgie. Thanks for the help today. So, fascinatingly, this is arisen as a question in terms of the AI use in market research, which is, do you write down a load of questions and ask? the respondent, which is what tends to happen in market research now, where effectively the questions reflect a preconception of what you think is important. But with AI market researchers, you will take it as a conversation where it goes wherever it goes. And so there's this whole

sort of area which basically says the great advantage of this is we can actually start an inquiry without preconceptions as to the end point. Yeah. But that in many ways, is what philosophy is supposed to be. And so, of course. When you read these dialogues, I think what people are trying to do is recreate that element of discovery and trial and error in terms of your ideas, which is necessary to the philosophical process. And given that, when somebody does say to me, well, I don't read anymore, you know, I wish I was

smart and I read books, but instead I just spend all of my time listening to podcasts, I'm thinking, well, if you're doing philosophy, if what you're listening to, and trying to do is going to be a podcast. That's effectively what Playtot was doing. You're sort of doing the, like imagine if somebody like took a conversation that somebody had on their podcast, an episode of Joe Rogan, and they transcribed it. But maybe they had to do it from memory. And maybe they slightly adapted. Yeah. To make it a little bit more streamlined, but also maybe to sort of make their point a bit more strongly. Even if the person who wrote this, even if it was Joe Rogan himself, remembering the conversation, riding down roughly what happened. you'd probably still rather listen to the original conversation, right? You'd probably rather listen to that. If that were available, yeah, definitely, yeah. Actually, you'd rather watch it because there are more, you know, there are questions like, you know, I mean, what I tend to do when I watch podcasts on YouTube, and it's partly because my TV is connected to the best sound system I've got, but what's quite good about it is you can kind of get on with something else. In other words, it doesn't demand your full attention, okay?

It's rather my joke about, you know, in fairness to tea coffee and tobacco, there are three drugs you can consume while performing other useful functions, okay, which isn't generally true of like acid or something. And the radio is the medium of the industrious because you can listen to the radio while getting on with something else. Quite right. You see what I mean. Yeah. And actually, video podcasting generally, you like the scene setting and you also glance up every now and then. But it doesn't demand your undivided attention in the way that a television program would. That's probably right.

I do take it as a compliment when somebody says, you know, Alex, this is one of those episodes where I actually had to sort of sit and listen. I couldn't be like doing the washing up because you sort of have to go back. And I suppose that probably hurts our watch time a little bit because a lot of these things are deep dives that really do require that focus. I was kind of ahead of the curve on the, you know, the TikTok, YouTube shorts, Instagram thing where they'll have the video and then underneath they'll have the video game footage of subway surface or whatever to like keep people's attention. I was ahead of the curve on

this because I used to listen to podcasts and debates. Because, you know, I'm just watching people debate on a screen, I would play some mindless video game, Skate 3, Grand Theft Auto where I could just sort of like mindlessly keep my eyes in a flow state. Keep your eyes on. Exactly. Yeah. And so I when I started seeing this trend of these TikToks. My kids do this thing and more and more people actually do this thing of watching TV with the subtitles on. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's got a lot to do with the fact that I've seen a few people make this. There's a video I say on YouTube about this about how as microphone technology gets better, performances get worse or like less clear. That is like there was a time when if you were on television, you had to talk like this to the

camera, make sure that it's a bit like theater. You face the audience. You're very clear. But when microphone got good enough to pick up everything you're saying, suddenly you can, well, you can, you can make a, make a point like this. And it actually makes it more difficult to hear. And so people now have to use some type. So just as you had this change in music where the crooner, people like Albole or Sinatra, were made possible by microphone technology, you basically couldn't sing like, I mean, you know, in opera, obviously, okay, it's very much the opposite of crooning, which is highly intimate. Yes. And you now have this unfortunate thing where there's a kind of veritable. just in cinema, in both lighting design and in sound recording, where, to be absolutely honest,

you can't hear what the fuckers are saying half the time. You know, I mean, you do notice when you watch Kerry Grudge that clearly, you know, whatever else you think, there's no problem understanding what he's saying. Yeah, yeah. And you do, Tom Hardy is famously a mumbler, isn't he? There are various actors who... Yeah, but this is the strange paradoxes as the technology gets better. The delivery gets worse.

The delivery gets worse because it doesn't need to be good anymore. And I mean, that's great because those performances of time gone by were much clearer. And, you know, my grandparents can hear them on the TV without having to turn it up too loud. But at the same time, it's not as a sort of realistic a performance. You don't really like believe you're in that world with the characters. I suppose if you're a newsreader, how realistic is that anyway? So there is an argument for the sort of Alvar Liddell absolute clarity of speech for things like newsre reading because that is the natural, that's not, you know, that's effectively a sort of proclamation

of thing. Yeah. But you'll write about conversation that picking up the nuances and the, you know, and actually keeping in the ums isn't necessarily. I mean, there's a whole interesting question about what, because I'm not sure about this. If you have an AI agent, do you actually want it to mimic a full-screen human being? Or at least all the time. and there are a lot of people now talking about

what you might call multimodal interfaces where you go, I'm interested in staying in a hotel in Fuerta Ventura, can you show me a few that you think I might like? And so, because, I mean, the mistake that Alexa made, I mean, Amazon spent effectively, you know, several billion dollars developing Alexa with the idea that it would become a channel for the ordering of goods and services

in the absence of a video component. Now, in the event, if that's all it becomes, it would have been cheaper for them to give everybody an egg timer and a barometer, because 90% of the questions are, what time is it, set an alarm, and what's the weather like today? Yeah. And there's an interesting question which is, you know, effectively what interface is optimal for performing various tasks. My hunch is that Google must be bricking it because the threat to Google is really an interface shift, isn't it? Yes. The big threat to Google to kill the sort of habituation of use and so forth

is that people decide they'd rather talk than type. Yeah. I mean, that's a kind of, you know, that's a kind of potentially existential threat. Yeah, and how these AI chatbots are kind of like a new kind of search engine because instead of searching this index of websites, they're searching through their training data and then searching through the websites as well at the same time. I've got a really weird idea for a new business using AI, which is actually where you pay, if you think about it okay, let's say you're really into kite surfing and you want to go

live somewhere windy, okay? Now, if you've got a hundred people paying you £100 a month, okay, that's a stack of a lot of money. I mean, particularly if you can live anywhere you like. Oh, yeah. Right. Now, if you have a PA on the end of a phone or the end of a Zoom call, okay, even better, who is just very, very good at using the various different AI opportunities out there, you could hire that person as your info butler, and it might make more sense to employ a human who's particularly adept at that,

okay, than it is to actually use the technology yourself, however good that technology may be. Sure. So the question is, you know, do I really want to spend the last sort of few decades of my life as a typist or talking to machines? Or could you argue that you could create an Uberjeeves out of a human being who had no requirement to be physically present, but with whom you'd interact for, you know, 20 minutes a few times a week? and you'd effectively say, okay, I needed to sort out this thing with my bank account,

I needed to talk to so and so, so and so. You could text them, you could use any medium of exchange you liked, you'd have an occasional Zoom call, they'd come up with suggestions for your hotel in Fuerte Ventura, okay? I mean, wouldn't it make more sense? Because this is Centaur theory in chess, isn't it, that the best chess player is a human plus a machine? Well, if this is really that powerful, why do we want to skimp on the human component? If it's really that potent, because I don't need this guy 100% of the time.

All woman indeed, right, me, okay? Not presupposing. You probably need that person for, you know, I don't know, 20 minutes a day. Right. Okay. Now, with 20 minutes a day, you know, they could get on with their life a lot of time. They could service a hell of a lot of people that way. They'd also learn from the other people they looked after who might be people like me.

So what I'm saying is, do we actually use this to bring back domestic service as a really lucrative form of employment? Sorry, I've got it. Because in a sense, is it the best use of my time when I could be sitting on podcasts or whatever to actually be there endlessly having to master improvements to that technology? Or do we borrow a bit from Adam Smith and go, look, there's a bit of division of labour here that might be quite helpful. and that being an AI expert on behalf of 100 human beings. It's like an AI middleman. Yeah. Someone who's just very good at using the technology.

And infamidiary, I think, was once the phrase they kind of used. Yeah. You could also then, as an AI company, start developing AI tools, which are designed to not be sort of this really great public-facing. Anyone can use this and get... No, no, no, no. They could be hardcore police specialists. You've got to know the keywords.

You've got to know the commands. But once you do, once you learn that language, this AI tool is like in the 1970s for whatever reason. I mean, this is, I'm old enough to remember this. It was slightly demeaning to be seen typing. Right, right. You have a typist to do that. Okay.

Now, just as Simon Cowell does not have a mobile phone, okay? He has people to do it. My argument is that we have a weird tech fetish around the optimization of efficiency, which basically means the elimination of human. humanity from every process, because the biggest cost is the wage cost. Yes. But just as a hydraulic, okay, let's say a JCB made a Navi a hundred times more productive, but you still had the navvy, okay?

The assumption of the tech world is that you always eliminate the human and the wage cost from everything and you disintermediate everything. Of course, there's a huge assumption in economics that disintermediation is a wonderful thing. I would argue we will still have estate agents in 100 years' time because ultimately I want a transaction of that scale to be mediated by a human being. Now, I'll give you an example of that. I was a campaigner for maintaining manned ticket offices at railway stations because my argument is there are certain functions I want performed by a machine, which is I know exactly the ticket

I want and I simply want to buy it with a contactless credit card. But there are people and there are occasions who don't want that. Either there are elderly people who want a human being to say, no, no, dear, you need the off-peak return. And there are also unusual journeys where I need a human being whom I can trust to say, actually, mate, what I'll do, and the machine will never do this, okay? Look, I'll sell you the peak single to Dover, and then you can get an off-peak return back from Dover because it's nine quid cheaper.

and that gives me the confidence to know that the ticket I'm buying is not stupid. The machines are getting better at doing this. Well, there's no incentive to make them better. Well, that's the thing. There's only the decency of the human being. Well, yeah, but then I wonder if, like, for example, you know, like split ticketing, you can get them on trains.

Yeah, that's true. Those are done not by the railway companies, unsurprisingly, they're done by train line. Train line, who will, who will promote a split ticket. Yeah, and I guess that's sort of an intermediary machine. But I mean, you talked in your book in alchemy about the maps problem, like Google Maps. And I resonate with this so much, the idea that like, and the way you talk about it is say you want to get from A to B, you can look at how long it takes to drive, you can change it to the public

transport mode and it will show you how to get there in public transport. The problem is that you don't always not want to drive because you don't have a car. Sometimes... I see what you mean. Sometimes the reason that you don't want to drive is just because, you know, it's a more convoluted journey or a less reliable journey. So maybe you want to drive to the train station and then get the train. But if I look on Google map...

Oh, no, no, Google's very bad at that because they don't understand. The assumption that Google, and now, funny enough, let me get this right. I think it may be... Is it Nicholas Christakis' sister? It's somebody like that. It might be Nick Christakis' sister, who's involved in a campaign to make Google Maps much more public transport-friendly.

Because the American assumption is if you're using public transportation, it's because you don't have a car. So they then assume you're taking a bus to the station and you're walking to the bus. The very British practice of driving to a railway station, actually New Yorkers would do this. Connecticut residents would do it more accurately to get to New York.

But in Los Angeles, the only reason you're taking public transport is because you don't have a car. And Google is very Californian in that assumption, I think. That's absolutely true. And it's repeatedly annoyed me because it gives ludicrously pessimistic assumptions of how long the journey would take on public transport, because it assumes I'm making no use of a car to get to the station and no use of a taxi at the other end. So it basically assumes this bifurcated idea of you're either. basically a car owner, in which case you go everywhere by car, or you're effectively at the mercy of public transportation for the entire length of your journey. It is really annoying.

Like if the two of us wanted to go to Cambridge right now, Cambridge City Center, and we looked on Google Maps, it would either tell us it's whatever, how long it takes to drive to, you know, St. John's College, or if we say, well, I want to take the train, we click public transport, and what does it tell us? It tells us, well, you have to walk to this station, get a bus here, get to the train station. Then once you get to Cambridge, you have to get out, and you have to have to get this bus, which is going to take you up, and then you walk 15 minutes across it. Which is, of course, completely. Both of those options are total bollocks. Exactly. Because in the first option, you'll get stuck in traffic in London for ages.

And when you leave the station at Cambridge, you're going to get an taxi. By the way, I give all your listeners a great tip here, which is that rail algorithms, when they recommend trains, sometimes overweight the importance of journey time. So if ever you're going down to the West Country, if you're going to Plymouth or Cornwall, okay, what you have to do is you go and search for a journey starting at Waterloo, not Paddington, and you have to add via Salisbury. Now, Southwestern trains have these trains that go from Waterloo all the way to Exodus and David, so at which point you can then change onto a train going further west.

Because they're a bit slow, they never feature on the website. Because they never feature on the website, they're absurdly cheap. You can actually get a kind of first-class single to Exodus and Day. David's from Waterloo. And it's highly scenic because you go through some pretty lovely English countries and pack a hamper. I'm not sure what the onboard catering was like. But I've literally, I think my daughters had to come back from a music festival in, is it boardmasters? You young people understand that. Don't ask me. No, no, okay. Boardmasters, okay. Camera people know. Excellent. Okay. And the trains were

absolutely rammed. And I think I got, she and her four friends came back first class with Exeter, for like 35 quid each. It's absolutely bonkers. And of course, living in Sevenoaks as I do, Waterloo and Waterloo East, is a lot easier than getting to Paddington. So there's a double win. But that's one of those cases where I think it's called the alignment problem, isn't it? The algorithm doesn't really know what you're trying to do.

This is why I'm questioning whether we need human intermediaries, because a really good human backed with an AI is going to be such a potent aid to your life, okay? that actually the money you spend on the human, which is perfectly enough to support that human in employment, is worth it simply for the fact that you don't have to master all these goddamn interfaces. Now, you'd have to, the second thing is, your specialism is the value of religion. You're a bit of a fan of the Quakers.

My view is what the country needs is a Quaker revival. The trouble with the Quakers, they're not really good at marketing, to be absolutely honest. Okay, they've never managed to really break through. Sure. But the thing that always fascinates me about Quakerism is their extraordinary success in business in that, you know, it's a tiny population which gave rise to Cadbury, to Roundtree, to Barclay's Bank, to Lloyd's Bank. One of the founders of Sonny was a Quaker. Ironically, the Quaker Oates Company are not Quakers. They chose the Quaker as an image because of its associations of complete trustworthiness. And they have this principle in Quakerism that your word is your bond. There's no need to swear oath. or, I think there's actually an exception for Quakers if you have to testify in court because you object to testifying on the Bible because you say everything I say has the force of truth. Now, what it meant was that Quaker business didn't really require any lawyers or any of these tedious

trust-creating intermediaries because you'd basically go and say, I'd like to buy your chocolate factory, how much are you willing to pay 20,000 guineas, done, and that was it. The whole thing was done. So it was an extraordinarily efficient form of capitalism. And I would also help that they weren't allowed to go to university for a time, so they actually had to go and do something useful instead. Because you had to be an Anglican, I think, to go to Oxford or Cambridge, which were the only two universities.

Right. So they were kind of forced into business, however intelligent they were, because they were, you know, they couldn't get sidetracked into a university. But it struck me that actually, you know, If you have a very trustworthy human being with whom you have a repeated relationship, okay, so that they're actually optimizing for long-term value, not short-term transactional value, that person has a huge value in helping you navigate the digital world, which is, after all, optimized for, well, essentially, it's calibrated for very low levels of trust.

So do you still need humans and concepts like shame or even fear of divisive? divine retribution as part of this system. Well, we could potentially build in fear of divine retribution to an AI system. You know, once it develops so much that we start questioning whether it might be conscious, why don't we just sort of build into its interface belief in the existence of God? And shame. And shame and eternal afterlife as possible. I mean, I get the feeling that the technology just isn't good enough yet.

And that what you're identifying as a, as well, this just isn't what machines do. Machines don't think in this way. I think that's a problem that can be solved. For example, the earliest chess computers were pretty good at chess. And people are impressed. They think, wow, you know, I can play a game of chess against a computer. And it puts, you know, it gives me a run for my money. But they say, but the reason why a chess computer is never going to beat a human is because

chess computers don't have the creativity that's necessary for you. Because you can tell a chess machine, you know, never lose your queen. The chess board doesn't understand is that there are some instances where sacrificing your queen is the right thing to do. But of course, saying that now seems silly because of course you can eventually teach

again, you don't teach it creativity per se but you treat it, you teach it a better approximation unless you define creativity as highly, unless you define creativity as highly refined pattern recognition. Yeah, fine. In which case, which a lot of creativity is.

Then I guess you are teaching it creativity. But whatever you call it, the computer learns to do the thing which previously it was thought computers just don't do that because they just become better at approximating what you really want and so I can imagine a machine

that can you know can can recognize when somebody is struggling to type and maybe switches it from ABC to QWER or vice versa and somebody you know who is obviously trying

I mean a computer could be clever enough to work out that when someone's clicked on live Liverpool Street Station, they were actually trying to go to Liverpool Lime Street and like put up a one. That kind of thing that usually would require the human to go, oh, well, actually, you should probably just get this one. And you know what? Technically, if you buy this ticket, they'll let you on that train. It's the kind of thing that as long as companies allow the technology to develop, there's no reason a computer can't do that. The only thing is the codification of everything in real life manifests itself as bureaucracy after the time.

Yeah, sure. And understanding things like the benefit of the doubt and wiggle room and defaulting to trust. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay. I'm just wondering whether, you know, actually it isn't more economically efficient to have an info Quaker who is entirely trustworthy and to whom I pay, you know, a reasonable monthly salary for performing. It might just be easier than me having to master yet another bastard interface. Yeah.

I was on a train once and there was a woman opposite me who spoke not a word of English and she just started, I mean, she was talking quite loudly into her phone and I was, God's saying, I'm trying to. And then she just started crying. She like burst into tears. And it's because she'd meant to get on this train that was supposed to be like a five, 10 minute journey to the next station. I was finding her way going somewhere into the north of England and she couldn't even speak English. So after a bunch of translations, just sort of, you know, I was like, oh, you use the phone So I use my phone to translate, so technology grade and all. You're an Android user then, are you?

No, no, I was on, you know, Google Translate on my phone. And it was very funny because she would speak into her phone and report back to me just to say sort of like, thank you or yes. And I think she was sort of trying to be nice to me, but there was something lost in translation. So she would sort of come back like, thank you, handsome man and stuff like this. It was very, it could have been. It could have been. It could have been. I just don't think you would quite put it in those terms.

Or maybe it's just the kind of woman. was, I don't know. But at any rate, this whole saga ends with, you know, the train worker coming over and me explaining what had happened, what I'd garnered. She'd got on the wrong train. She needs to get off. You can imagine trying to explain someone who doesn't speak English. You need to get off at this train, you need to transfer to this platform, whatever. But it ended with the train operator, because she didn't have the ticket, right? She'd had the ticket for this train journey and she was supposed to go all this convoluted route. And the train operator took, like, you know, her ticket or whatever and just wrote on the back of it with a pen. You know, this woman's trying to get here, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, great. Please help her and don't find her and arrest her. Yeah, exactly, and sort of wrote out. And, like, that does make me think, even if a computer could do that, it's not the kind of thing you could formalize, institutionalize. No, no, no. But if we programmed not to do it, because the benefit of the doubt would show up as a loss financially.

Yes. And secondly, it would be vulnerable to fraud. So the first thing to be closed down is the benefit of the doubt. I mean, look, and it's, it's possible. possible that this woman was actually defrauding us all the whole time, but I imagine that she wasn't. And the reason that I know that is because I'm a human being who is looking at another human being, right? And I do wonder if a computer will ever be capable of capturing that kind of interaction, you know, it's kind of hard to say, because what computers don't, what

what computers do is just, well, the thing that you condemn so much in a lot of human interactions, which is this sort of hyper-rationality. Yes. Now, you're on a podcast right now called Within Reason. That's the name of this podcast. We like to celebrate the... I'll leave right now. I'll get my coach.

Well, it would be the first time that's happened on this podcast, believe you, me. Although usually a bit less politely that's happened in the past. Oh, does that happen with... What's his name? You know, it's slipping my mind. Yeah. A certain Mr. Hitchens. I won't tell you which one.

I remember this. Yeah, he did decide to stand up and leave. So, as I say, you wouldn't be the first. But I'd like to see if you could match the entertainment of 17 minutes on the way out. Hitch's his he fit was about entirely. To be honest, neither am I. I think it might have something to do with being obsessed with drugs. Well, I was talking to him for like 40 minutes, interviewing him about his drug decriminalization policy.

You know the one that he wrote a book about, to which he told me that I'd been banging on about it for too long and that he was sick to death of the subject. which he's written the death of those who promote it and got up to leave, but not before spending 17 minutes at the door. Perating you about... Telling me how much he personally disliked me. Yeah, I did actually see him again last night. It was the first time we've been in a room together. I didn't speak to him, but he was doing this event.

It was like an election debate. So he was representing the Conservative Party, and there were a few other people. And there was a Q&A. It was quite an intimate audience. There was a Q&A after his people... I'm surprised Hitchens believes the Conservative Party. Party is a conservative. Well, he doesn't. He thinks that the Conservative Party deserves to be destroyed, but he's so fearful of Labor that he was selling people to vote conservative anyway.

So he was doing this sort of... Intriguingly, of course, our first past the post system allows you to correct against over large majorities. So my argument would be, if you're in a safe conservative or Lib Dem seat, regardless of your proclivities, it is actually in the interest of the Labor Party for you to vote conservative. The argument being that if you had a huge... labor majority, it would implode, serve only one term. And then you'd be effectively back to where you were when you started. Yes. That there is actually a serious problem about that because of the facieperous nature of left-wing politics. People would get it preoccupied with a lot of

sort of single-issue obsessions. Yeah. And the whole thing would go do lally, which tends to happen. Well, there are ways to sort of think about in principle how you might hack the system when it comes of voting. I'm actually interested in your philosophy of voting, because as somebody who thinks outside of the box about unintuitive solutions to problems and how to solve this problem, you might not realize that, you know, the way to sell more products might be to put the price up rather than taking it down, this kind of thing. When it comes to voting, a lot of people have these ideas about how, well, you know, unintuitively if you, you know, don't like the Conservative Party, if you're some left winger who wants to see the Conservative Party destroyed,

you might best vote Reform UK in this election because that's going to take votes that's going to sort of make it more difficult for the Conservative Party if Labour are going to win anyway. There is a substantial

right-wing body of opinion in the UK which has always found an outlet through the Conservative Party which has for the most part been comparatively reasonable by continental standards. I think that might be

be careful what you wish for. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I'm sort of seeing a way to sort of destroy the conservative party, not by voting for labor, the sort of weird ways of thinking about voting. I mean, like when you see people going to the polls and voting, what do you think they should be having in mind? There's an advantage to a first-past-the-post electoral system, which is that you get a fairly reliable purge every now and then, also true in the United States. So you do undoubtedly get the problem. Interestingly, the Greeks have a system, which is quite clever, which is the largest party, it's proportional representation, but the largest party gets this

kind of bonus of seats, which increases the chance of a majority. They didn't invent democracy, so I think we ought to give them some credit. And it gives them a kind of bonus, which makes a majority more likely. So you have a function in government, but at the same time, you still have this power effectively to reboot, you know, do a hard reset on your politics. When any particular party's been in power for too long, it's probably pretty good to have a purgative function. There's also the question of direct representation, which is there is a person who represents me. You know, there's proper accountability which you don't have if you have party lists.

You know, you have no particular control over getting an individual scoundrel out of the system. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, there are chest and fences, I think, in the first past the post system. Whether it works well or badly, of course, depends on the particular breakdown of opinion, you know, at any given time. I would also argue that I think voting for reality TV programs and Goal and Eurovision and everything else has slightly changed the nature of how people exercise a vote in that they're more likely to do it. for symbolic reasons, you know, or for reasons of identity or statement for performative reasons, than for actually instrumental reasons. Yes.

Yeah, well, that's, you know, I think we have seen an element of that. But that's what I'm interested in your views on when it comes to voting. We've got an election in this country next week. Yeah. And when you go to the polls, if you go to the polls, I don't know if you're a voter. You know, are you thinking, like, I'm going to vote, as somebody who, like, knows how. how crowds work and operate how public opinion and purchasing decisions can affect company outcomes. When it comes of voting, are you thinking, I'm just going to vote for the party I want to win?

Are you voting against the party you don't want to lose? Are you tactical voting? You could tactically vote to say, I live in Seven Oaks, which is a fairly safe conservative seat. And I could, I'm not sure whether I will, make the not unreasonable decision that if Seven Oaks is not a conservative constituency, that means that you would have a conservative party of kind of 38 or 47 people or something of that kind. There's not much chance. There's not much liberal democracy in Kent. The Lib Dems have never actually made much headway in most of Kent.

In local government they have, but in parliamentary constituencies, not much. And I could make a perfectly reasonable decision to say there needs to be some sort of competent opposition and vote conservative while pinching my nose. I haven't ruled that out as a perfectly – and that is, of course, using the electoral system to some extent. That's one thing you don't have in proportional representation to quite the same extent, which is the freedom to say, I wouldn't particularly mind a Labour majority, but a very large one.

Bear in mind, of course, you also get the problem that you then get a huge number of members of the parliamentary party who have no ministerial role. And probably a huge number of them have no prospect of it. Yeah. Which is, it's very good to have a reasonable number of those people, but a huge number of those people might make the whole thing unruly. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

I can imagine. It's interesting what you're saying about representation. I had a friend recently who was wondering, and this person is a right-winger who wanted to vote for a right-wing party, but lives in a place where the Green Party actually has a pretty good shot of getting a seat. And he was like, well, I don't know what to do because I think that all of their policies are like total bunk. But because we live in a system where they can get lots of votes but not get any seats, I feel a slight duty to vote for the Greens, even though I hate them,

just because I value democracy so much that I think they deserve to be represented in Parliament. But is it, is it really? No, that's perfectly reasonable. I might do the same thing. Yeah. In that there should be some green representation in Parliament. And so even if you totally dislike the party, even if you think it's like the worst thing in the world or whatever, you know, there was still this incentive to potentially vote for them just for the sake of democracy. There should be some reform representation in Parliament, by the way, because, I mean, it's, you know, anything that has the support of 10 to 15% of the population.

Deserves a few seats. Deserves a voice, undoubtedly. And I think there should be some mechanism where that can work. And I'm very interested on the green question. I'm kind of conflicted because I think that climate change is probably real, okay, and potentially catastrophic. But I also say that most of the actions that have been taken in pursuit of combating it may have been counterproductive or misdirected. What are your views on just up oil? Well, that will be an interesting question, which is a wider question.

on the possible, how would I say this? I think a large part of demonstration culture is counterproductive. It's a bit like, you know, in other words, it makes you feel great, okay? But everybody else hates it. So the classic example of that was Neil Kinnock's all right

on the eve of the election against John, major, 92, I guess it was, wasn't it? Okay. If you're in the hall, surrounded by labor supporters, going all right, makes you feel fantastic. Unfortunately, it's also broadcast on television, okay? And so there's a well-known phenomenon where it's sometimes called a purity spiral, where people in groups adopt more and more extreme positions and behaviors to signal their adherence to the group. In other words, it's not enough to be averagely concerned. You have to go to more and more extreme behaviours to signal the extent to your compadres that you really, really care about this stuff. And that leads to kind of, you know,

what you might call runaway signalling. And the problem is that when those behaviours are observed by other people, they tend to actually be effectively more likely to set the cause back than to promote it. I mean, if you look at very successful movements, and there are a lot of them, by the way, we tend to forget the unsuccessful movements. I would make that point. So there's massive survivorship bias in our belief in protest. There would have been huge anti-Catholic protests in Britain in the early 19th century or something, the late 18th century. for example, there are lots of protests. I mean, CND went nowhere if we were going to be out.

You know, that took up a lot of attention in my, maybe it should have gone somewhere, by the way. I mean, I think they had much better arguments than they had PR advisors. There's a wonderful thing in John O'Farrell's book, Things Can Only Get Bitter, where he made the point that, you know, what you would tend to have is you tend to have a CND demonstration and someone would be dressed, you know, dressed up in a sort of cloverlough suit, appearing to fillate a nuclear missile as some act of performative art.

And John O'Farrell said, when Winston Churchill said that, you know, if nauseaism should triumph, it would mean the end of Western civilization as we know it. It was not necessary for him to also dress up in a skeleton suit and fall to the ground at the end of the speech. Okay. And so some of that stuff is actually deeply, by the way, there's a huge, the extent to which we give coverage to demonstrations, okay, is an extraordinary form of media bias, because about, I would say, 70% of the population, for various reasons, are incapable of participating in

them. Either they don't live anywhere near London, okay? I mean, the people of Liverpool would have to burn the city to the ground to get the same media attention as, you know, 50,000 Londoners breaking a few windows with, you know, five Sky News cameramen on convenient hand, okay? So it's massively biased towards London opinion, the whole business of giving coverage to demonstrations. It's much less meaningful than it used to be. Now the police can't beat them up, okay? So when the police could actually beat up demonstrators before the age of the mobile phone

cam, you could at least reasonably assume some degree of conviction on the part of people presenting. Whereas for all we know now, it's just effectively, it's Tinder for lefties. Right. You know, okay, it's a way to meet a load of like-minded people and hang out. Okay. But also, I mean, also, if you're right of centre like me, if we're angry about something, we only have two modes of response, one of which is right to the Daily Telegraph, and the other one is buy an assault rifle. We don't have any middle ground, okay? Now, I'm really half-cham. But there are a lot of people who find

massively unfair to introverts the whole idea of a demonstration. Okay, right? I mean, okay, I would find, would you go to Glastonbury? I would find Glasdenbury. There is no limit to how much I would pay not to go to the Gastonbury Festival.

And I had to learn this that there are people who actually enjoy being in crowd situations, which I find totally incomprehensible, okay? Any kind of crowd. Now, I always make that point that yes, it means I miss out a lot of music festivals.

On the upside, I wouldn't have gone to the Nuremberg rallies either. I would even worry about the toilet facilities, regardless of any political connotations. There's no way. But also, to me, genuinely, having someone shout at me with a megaphone and I shout the same thing back, okay,

would literally make me physically sick, I think, okay? Just that action, that particular action of just having someone shout something, I shout the same thing back, just runs completely counter to every instinct I have. I would just find it a repellent activity. I couldn't do it. For any cause, okay? It's just not in my DNA to do that.

Now, I don't think, you know, I don't know if you're the same, whether you enjoy shouting things that someone has shouted at you. It depends on the day, I think. Okay, you have those moments to you. It depends on the time of day as well, depends on my energy levels. Interestingly, Jordan Peterson said once, I'm not sure how true this is, but he said, you know, he gets protested at his talks all the time. So he was sort of touring universities, giving talks, and he would get people sit outside, left-wing protesters, just screaming, trying to block entrances, all of this kind of stuff. And he made one change to the way that he conducted his talks, and the protest disappeared overnight.

go on he started holding them in the morning that is unbelievably perfect and people couldn't be bothered to get out of bed um so that i mean that that was his that is proof of my theory that since the police are unable to actually practice indiscriminate violence yeah the the protest has lost some of its meaning yeah yeah become actually a form of entertainment for a particular kind of person that's it's yeah i see what you're saying that it's unrepresented I mean, okay, the fact that, now, okay, let's be absolutely honest about this. There isn't a counterfactual because there was no Palestinian entry to Eurovish. But the fact that Israel headed the popular vote on the telephone, okay, with a not particularly brilliant song, okay, in the UK, France, Germany, etc.

Okay, right? Now, as I said, I'm being very honest here, there wasn't a Palestinian entry. I'm sure if there were, that would have done very well too. But nonetheless, what I'm saying is our fetishization of protests and our fetishization of certain types of opinion, if you like, strikes me as a slightly weird facet of the modern world. It's not as if you don't have social media for these people to vent, after all. I mean, it's a, you know, it's a peculiarly weird thing. But when Jordan Peterson shifted his talks to the morning, basically the trouble dissipated. Nobody can be bothered.

That's what he said anyway. I mean, it might have been exaggerating, and it might have, I mean, there's sort of a joke in there somewhere, too. I've never protest against anybody, least of all at a university. But the one thing I do worry about is that, you know, I'm basically on the far left of the alt-right in my politics, okay? And one of the reasons I stay there is that I notice that people who become invested in right-wing opinion are driven slightly insane by the extent to which their whole. identity of necessity because of the hostility they face. So you could argue I'm simply ducking, you know, I'm actually chickening out at this point. But if your whole identity gets defined by responding to criticism and attack, okay, I just, it may be highly principled act, but I don't think it's good for your quality of life. No, there are lots of things about life which are

absolutely not remotely political, okay? Dr. Johnson said, of all the things that human hearts endure, how small the part that kings and laws can cure. I think that was Dr. Johnson, who's pretty much my kind of sanity touchstone, on pretty much all matters, actually. And the point I'm making is that one of the things I notice is there are certain people on Twitter. I'm totally happy to have people disagree with me on Twitter politically.

when someone disagrees with you, go and look at their Twitter feed. First of all, if there is an insane volume of activity, by which I mean they've been on the platform for five years and they've tweeted 97,000 times, okay, they're bonkers, okay? If you go back through their Twitter feed and it's all about politics, just block them and get rid of them, they're of no future interest, okay? In other words, they're in the grip of a kind of mental derangement, right? If in amongst the stuff about I hate Rishi Sunak, there are a few pictures of their kittens or their children or whatever, something that's actually not political. I mean, someone who ends up seeing life through an entirely political lens, which of course was always a disease of the left.

You literally had people who got up and said, you know, how can I possibly enjoy eggs Benedict when something bad is happening? Okay. And that used to be a little bit of a disease of the kind of hair-shirted left. But you can end up on this kind of what you might call. the equivalent on the right. And my argument is it's actually just as unhealthy. I want to hear what Jordan Peterson has to say about, like, maple syrup or something.

Yeah, right? I don't, you know, he's Canadian. He's probably highly expert. Apparently, the dark kind's much better than the light kinds just for the tourists. But, I mean, life is infinitely complex and interesting. Politics is, by the way, actually, if you strip out

the identity component, local politics is probably more important than national politics. I love the point that Jess Phillips made, which is that every time there are local elections, people just go, oh, well, of course, it's just the local elections. It's Jeff Phillips and what you mean solving the problems that people actually care about, okay? But secondly, I mean, politics has become infected by effectively the need to win arguments

rather than solve problems. And I would argue that the mental skills required to solve problems are actually very, very different than the mental problems required to win arguments. And dogma is an extraordinary kind of enemy of problem solving, I think. I think that the Conservative Party and the political right made a massive mistake, allowing, rather than using some neoliberal thought, which was probably pretty handy in 1979, instead they became entirely infected by economic neoliberalism, which, like all forms of economics, is utter bollocks, apart from the Austrians. But economics is an extraordinary ludicrous discipline.

I mean, attempt to kind of quantify and predict human behavior as though humans were kind of inert atom. As if they were chess pieces, as Adam Smith has it. Adam Smith warns against this precise thing. Yeah. And what are they doing? They're doing exactly the thing that Adam Smith warned them again. Yeah, because Smith reminds us that it would be as if you were trying to

organize chess pieces when each chess piece had its own individual will and so individual positions. And its own sort of attraction and repulsion from other chestmen. Yeah, it would just be impossible. In other words, it has principles and motivations all of its own. And this idea of the sort of being able to place pieces where you will, you know, as if there were no forces acting in between them is a kind of nonsense. And he warned against that.

Now, you know, the right probably quite rightly took that as a completely useful warning against central command and control economies. quite rightly. That's possibly what he partly meant. But it's also, in a sense, a warning to economics, that, you know, in other words, the man of system is the person he criticises, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. That's right. And I mean, this stuff is very interesting, but I mean, I think that I've got some Hindu friends who rather brilliantly always criticise Westerners, I think rightly, for what they call monotheism. And he said, Just because, just as we only have, we have to have one God, we also have to have one theory

to explain everything. Okay. And one of them, a fantastic chap called Jagbalah, he points out that his mother goes to a temple in India. And on the altar at the temple, there is an elephant, I'm obviously not a real one, a model a mother, a monkey, and Jesus. Yeah. And she sees absolutely no problem with having all three.

Whereas in the West, we're undoubtedly given to this idea that you have to have one entirely explanatory kind of Newtonian explanation of everything. And I think he's right. I think he's got a point there that actually I think what's interesting is there's an awful lot to learn from some slightly odd political movements like Georgism, Austrian School economics. The fringes of economics are more interesting than the mainstream, actually. An Italian socialist, I think this is a brilliant idea. I genuinely think, actually, it's fantastic. He believed that money should basically have an expiration date. So you should issue money, but to encourage people to spend it rather than hoarding it up,

it would effectively run out. Yeah. So you'd encourage the rapid velocity and circulation of money. Now, what's interesting about that, of course, is marketers have already invented that with the voucher that you get at Sainsbury's that expires in two weeks time. You know, in other words, get £15 off if you spend £60 at Sainsbury's expires, probably yesterday, knowing my luck, but you know what I mean, okay? And the whole point of that is to encourage the velocity of expenditure and regular air miles.

You know, some airline loyalty programmes are exactly what Hayek talked about when he talked about. talked about multiple currencies. And you can have different rules for the different currency. But why is it good, why is it good to encourage people to, to spend money quickly? Well, hold on a second. I'm not really a capitalist. I'm a consumerist. And I would argue that one of the strangest things we do in politics, this is, this comes from an assumption of neoliberal economics, okay, which is that everybody is a perfect utility optimizer. And there are lots of assumptions in economics which strike me as absolutely heinous. The other one is the single representative agent.

In other words, you construct this kind of imaginary being who is a kind of average of everybody in the model. You optimise for them and you assume that what's optimal for the average is optimal for everybody. So you have a model which, for example, can't really clot inequality, for instance. So I'm weirdly, although, as I said, I'm on the political right, I'm very exercised by intergenerational inequality and the absurd distortions in wealth

that have been created by the property market where actually how wealthy you are is more a product of when you happen to buy a house and where you happen to live than your contribution to any wider society. And so by putting an... It's a completely arbitrary.

It's like making the national lottery. The property market is like making the national lottery 50% of the economy. It's whack. I don't understand. And, by the way, you young people, okay, you're very weird because you're passionate about the NHS, despite the fact that you get almost no value from it in proportion to what you pay. There should be awaiting that older people pay more tax and younger people because their healthcare costs are higher and they have more money, okay?

Is that unreasonable? I mean, you know, you'll probably fall off your fixy once or twice and need out quick visit to you. You young people with your bloody photograph of your genitals, you know. Sorry, I don't know. Okay, right. But, I mean, you'll probably fall off your fixy once in aries, but actually the value you get to the NHS. I mean, about 80% of it is probably within six weeks of your death. Right, right.

All right. So you're basically happy to pay huge amounts of tax at a young age. That's true. Okay. This is the kind of idea that interests me. Roger L. Martin, very good Canadian business guy, believe that instead of having a tax-free allowance every year, it should be weighted to the front of your life. So the first $100,000 Canadian dollars, or the first $200,000 Canadian dollars you earn in your life is tax-free, after which you start paying tax on everything.

Not per year. Not per year. It's just the first. So if you got a job at Goldman Sachs, you'd have one bonanza year where you earn 200,000 tax-free, and then you start paying tax. If you're earning $40,000 Canadian dollars a year, you get five years of tax-free earnings to effectively allow you to accumulate wealth early, which is when you needed. I don't understand. The entire tax system seems to be garontophile. I'm 58, and I get my financial advisor going, well, if you move this thing,

if you basically you can put some money into your pension, get the tax back, and then you can take it out again. That sounds great. But I said, where were all these tax breaks when I was 35, had two kids, and I kind of needed the money? It is absurd. So the fetish, I think it's simply a product of the fact that it can't. Mr. Stingy by temperament, and they fetishize, why is saving better than spending? It's just consumerism needlessly postponed. Now, just to be clear about this, what we have done, I'm not getting saving, I'm being mischievous, okay? But if you have a lot of wealth,

it basically means you either don't need the money or lack the imagination to spend it. Okay, so taxing wealth seems healthier to me than taxing income. And Adam Smith, broadly speaking, believe the same thing. He was in favor of high inheritance taxes because he thought just inheriting a huge sum of money effectively made people lazy. And it was actually quite a good idea. He was also in favor of taxing ground rent. So he was effectively a georgist. Okay. The point, one of the reasons this government, this whole election is so boring, okay, is the Overton window of discussion is now so small that none of the parties appears to be advancing anything that you might regard as surprising or interesting. They're tinkering with the

same usual five levers, okay, when what's needed is a bit of radical intervention in a few ways. I mean, taxing of wealth, which, after all, since quantitative easing, a huge amount of this wealth has been earned in a way that's completely kind of undeserved. It's just asset value inflation, okay? You know, I mean, it was absurd. I mean, what you know, what you should have done with quantity of easing, has followed that Italian socialists and given people a load of money which they had to spend really fast. All right? But then presumably a load of money that you spend really fast, you buy a house.

That house is still going to increase in value. You're still going to have wealth tied up in assets. It's a terrible way in which people acquire assets, though, because logically speaking, what they should do when they retire is sell their house, cash in and downsize. if people did that the problem wouldn't really be there they don't i don't understand i mean literally okay i know of people where you have a single person a widow living in a house worth 2.2 million whose own children are having trouble replacing the shop of absorbers of their car before the woman's husband died the two of them went down to the harvester at the end of the road

discovered that the special offer at the cheap dinner before 6pm didn't apply on Fridays and walked all the way home again. Now, I don't know what your idea of millionaire is, but probably your definition of millionaire is not someone who goes to Liddle because they're worried about the price of lemons.

But I know people who have literally, so you have this absurd discrepancy where you have people who are asset rich in a form of an asset which is completely illiquid where for whatever reasons, and some of them are good reasons, I'm not disputing this, but older people seem absurdly reluctant to downsize. I don't quite know what's going on there, okay? But I mean, my brother lives in a house somewhere in Buckinghamshire where effectively the

entire road, not quite the entire road, I think the entire road bar three houses, consists of a house worth a million quid in which one or two retired people live with four or five bedrooms. Now, they're effectively bed blockers for the property market. They're preventing people from forming families, those people. They don't need the space. It's kind of wacko, okay? I don't quite get what's going on.

Now, one thing that could solve the problem quite quickly is to engineer a pretty decent property crash just temporarily, so people no longer had this absurd overconfidence of the fact that their house would continue to go up. I think there are people who don't move out of London who would be happy. living out of London, but they're terrified that once you move out, you'll never be able to move back in, and they're terrified of missing out. It's basically a massive collective phomo. Okay. Now, I mentioned the fact that, you know, neoliberal economics assumes optimal utility maximizing expenditure. Just to be clear on this, okay, housing is the worst

where you can spend your money in terms of the externalities, okay? If I go and go to the pub, right? Okay, I'll give you an example of, if you look at the effect my expenditure has, my spending money has, on other people, right? There's a huge amount of variety in that, in that if I go to the pub, I'm not just buying myself a pint,

I'm also securing the survival of a pub for the benefit of lots of other people, okay? Spending money in pubs, cafes and restaurants, I would argue, is kind of positive. It's positive for the wider community. Yeah. Okay? You might even argue, and I would,

that buying a car from new is an extraordinary act of philanthropy because I buy a car, I take a massive hit in terms of depreciation so that someone significantly poorer than me can have a car that is nearly as good as my car was when I bought it new for half the price.

Okay, go out, seriously, go out and buy a six-year-old jag, okay? You're basically driving around at a luxury vehicle at somebody else's expense. I mean, people who buy cars from you should be celebrated. We should have, you know, we should have a statue to anybody who buys a car from you. It's an amazing act of philanthropy, okay? My brother's an academic, and I always teased him by saying that I, he basically, in most material goods, he ends up buying exactly the same shit I do just three years later, okay? whether it's computers or mobile phones or whatever.

A second-hand iPhone, utter extraordinary act of generosity. Someone has a phone which effectively the richest person in the world probably would have owned, not the very same phone, but an identical phone three years before and they get it three years later for a third of the price. There are lots of ways in which consumption is actually extreme. Even if I'm going by a hot tub, okay, which is getting onto the more selfish phase of things, if lots of people buy hot tubs, hot tubs will become a lot cheaper

and more people will be able to afford hot tubs. Okay, so this is my problem. I feel that I've worked in advertising for 30 years and I've entirely wasted my time because what I've done is help people buy better and better and cheaper and cheaper consumer goods for the most part. There are problems in customer service

in service-led brands, which I'll part in for the second. I think customer service has got worse, by the way, through a kind of cult of automation. But basically, the manufactured goods you buy, the meals, the food you buy, the meals you eat out, okay, are better than they were. I mean, you're not even old enough to fully appreciate it, but trust me, compared to the 1970s, okay, pizza Express is the Manuel Cautsizant. Compared to, you know, a standard place you go and eat in 1973. Everything's got better.

It's mostly got cheaper and more affordable, okay? And the subtotal of that effect has been to allow people to spend more of their discretionary income on property. And therefore, most of what should have been the extraordinary gains in living standards in terms of the holidays, people enjoy, the cars, people drive and everything else, has been soaked up effectively by the property market. Okay? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I think we should tax that because I think it's an entirely worthless form of wealth accumulation. and I think that land value not if you improve your house you get to keep that because that's your

work but the actual basic value of the land and the appreciation of the value of the land should be heavily taxed because it's an atrocious thing for people to do with their money it's not an investment okay it's totally inert in terms of its effect it's purely rivalrous it's it's much worse than the Dutch tulip thing the property market because I don't have to buy a tulip right okay the Dutch tulip boom was an insane kind of Ponzi scheme, nutter boom, but, you know, there are substitutions for tulips. I know these tulips are getting expensive. What is the Dutch tulips?

Oh, right. It was a thing that it's part true, part mythical, I think, if you dig into it. It was effectively the tulip prices, and particularly for rare tulips, basically spiraled out of control at some point in 17th century Holland. And so it was one of these cases where effectively... rising prices brought in ever more demand, and so you had this thing where, effectively, it was a crazy boom, which spiral out of control. But that's not a problem, because I don't need a tulip.

I can get by without them. I could decide to substitute with gladioli, okay? But you need housing. You need a place to live. And actually, you need a place to live with a reasonable degree of certainty in which you can bring up a family. the fact that housing has become the predominant form of wealth storage is, so Adam Smith, okay, Adam Smith distinguished between three things. Labor, capital, land. Subsequent economists,

because it made the math easier, conflated labor and land, sorry, conflated capital and land and treated them as the same thing. Adam Smith quite rightly spotted that they are not the same thing, capital and land are not the same thing. Land is something that is in short supply, and in many cases, the value of it is determined by the actions of others. You know, someone builds a road. Suddenly your house is worth either less or more, depending on the road is whether the road is framed as a good thing or a bad thing.

The Singaporean government basically is Georgist. In other words, they own a lot of the land. They fund a large part of the government by their effectively property developers with the side gig in governance. I think that's the third or four time he said George's now. Can you? Oh, oh, Craig. Well, I'm, so Henry George, I'm not, by the way, you could apply the same principle

to any non-renewable resource, whether it be land or fossil fuels. But George's idea was that, I mean, taken to its purest extreme, was that there should only be a single tax in the United States, and the tax should be on the value of land. because the idea being that the value of land is basically, land ownership is basically extractive. It's rent-seeking. Now, here's the greatest mystery in economics. All economists agree that rent-seeking is a bad thing.

In other words, patent, you know, patent trolling will be another example, okay? You're not actually contributing to anything. What you're seeking to do is to own a bottleneck, all right? And then effectively own something that is essential to somebody else. and basically milk your ownership of it. You're not actually doing any useful work. You're not investing and creating anything new. You're simply exploiting an asset that other people require access to.

So what tends to happen, okay? What George would say is that when you get people, let's say, forming a community, and the community becomes more and more desirable and more and more wealthier, more people want to move there and so forth, the gains which should go to the people who did the work or indeed provided the upfront investment to build the buildings or whatever instead go to the owner of the land

who contributed nothing and what tends to happen is whenever you have any source of whenever you have any form of useful activity which depends for its performance on its location the gains from that activity do not primarily go to the person who's performing the useful activity, okay, they go to the person who owns the land on which that activity takes place.

Yes. Okay? So, you know, an example would be airport retail, which is effectively, you know, various brands have to be there. The people who get rich out of airport retail are not retailers, their airports. And what they happen to do

is simply own a kind of, you know, they've got a location, the ownership of which confers an income on them without requiring any commensurate investment or risk. And so the idea is that effectively, since this thing is extractive, some people have described Georgism as basically socialism in relation to land, free market capitalism in relation to everything else. Yeah. Okay, that's probably quite a good, that's quite a good shorthand. You could, interestingly, I'm sure some people do. I haven't researched this enough, extend exactly the same thing to, for example, non-renewable energy. You could say oil, the ethical justification for this is kind of, look, land, okay, the fruits of your labours rightly belong to you because you

created that thing, okay? However, land shouldn't necessarily belong to anybody because it was effectively an endowment from the creator, you might have said, and the gains from that endowment deserve to be apportioned fairly and reasonably, whereas the gains from individual labour enterprise or risk deserve to be disproportionately apportioned to rewarding the person who underwent those efforts or those risks. I think that makes sense, does it? Yeah. So it's basically saying that land is a different category of thing.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, and you might argue of fossil fuels. I would say it's not a huge leap to say that you should basically tax the use of non-renewable resources. Yeah. Because the idea being that they aren't actually the fruit of man, if you want to get religious about it, they're actually a kind of, you know, that they're a fixed endowment. And that, you know, whereas people don't deserve the fair share of other people's labors, there's an argument that you should reapportion the wealth that can.

comes from effectively extractive rent-seeking through land ownership. Yeah, see, I'm thinking about... Won't endear me to the world's property developers. Maybe not. And more ironically, still, one of my daughters is planning to work in commercial property. But my point about this is that it certainly... Okay, it was given that Adam Smith believed it. Actually, it was surprisingly large number of people.

I think Winston Churchill was a Georgist. I think to a large extent, I think Milton Friedman was, by the other. way. There have been large numbers of economists and fairly eminent people. Who's that fashion designer who was married to Malcolm McLaren? You know, the one who fell. Oh, you're asking the wrong person. Someone must say. Famous fashion designer who died fairly recently. Vivian Westwood. Vivian Westwood was a geologist, I'm delighted to say. There are quite interesting people who you know, weirdly, who are like ex-Goldman Sacks, who believe this stuff. Now, it's worthy of exploration, it's worthy of experimentation, that's all I can say.

I mean, you could experiment fairly easily by creating a Georgia's community somewhere, as indeed happened in the United States in a couple of places. Right. And you establish a place effectively on Georgia's principles where the, you know, the public services are paid for in proportion to land ownership. But unfortunately, we've fetishized home ownership. And the argument is, if you tax wealth or you tax home ownership, you're taxing people twice. Well, that's

bollocks, okay? Okay. I mean, okay, yes, they earn the money to buy the house out of income, probably. That's not, even that's not. But the vast increase in the value of that house has been created by government monetary policy. Okay. And it's a completely unwholesome. What I'm saying is that if you... Or hasn't been prevented by it. If that old lady, it's unlike did happen, The old lady who didn't want to go down to harvester to get the non-bargain meal. It would be better for the economy if she sold the house and went on a massive orgy of crack smoking and jet skiing. It would actually be better for the economy if she moved out of that house and actually spent the money in some shape or form in a way in which it would actually circulate. because we literally have

trillions of pounds of wealth in the UK tied up in the most inert, non-liquid okay, if she bought IBM shares and she had 2 million, you know, in 1950 something, she had 2 million pounds worth of IBM shares. When her children needed their shock absorbers

fixed on the, her daughter and her son-in-law, needed the shock absorbers fixed on their car, I think it fair to say she probably would have sold a bit of it. A house is appalling because the only way you can realize the gain is by dying or by moving house. Yeah.

Okay? I mean, for that alone, we should hate money, you know, that's actually tied up in property. So this tax... Property ownership makes people stupid in a weird kind of way. How do you mean stupid? Well, I mean, you get these people. Okay. People don't want to move.

I get it. But you literally have this whole generation of people. Yeah. I respect. As an advertising person. and I respect irrational attachment to things. My only point is that I would argue that people in their 70s and 80s

probably are pretty irrational, okay, by the standards of anybody else, in terms of what they're attached to. I'd also argue that we fetishize the old, okay, in that all you need is one newspaper sob story about an old person who's got to move out of their home, okay, because they can't afford the new land value tax. And that's Georgeism killed.

Now, old people now, they didn't fight in World War II. They were at the bloody island white festival pensioners now, right? You know, I understand where we're extremely deferential towards the generation of old people who I knew as I grew up. Because they, you know, fought in the trenches. Yeah. Or in the case of my great uncle, being, you know, being a rear gunner and a Lancaster bomber in 50 missions over occupied Europe. Yeah. And I don't want to move that guy out of his home.

The current old people, they're crap. There's the people who- They're rubbish. They're totally rubbish. The people for whom those were old people. They had final salary pensions, okay? You know, they're not proper old people. People get older. I think people have this deep respect for elders because they've bought in the trenches,

as you say, and then they themselves get older, and they've sort of internalized this, well, you've really got to respect your eldest thing, realizing that maybe the reasons why we had that particular respect that don't continue to apply. I don't think the conditions apply to the extent they've done. I don't think our veneration of the old and our deference to all the old, okay? They're not Captain Tom, these people, right? They did some cushy job. They grew up in the 60s.

They had really good music, okay? They had pretty good drugs. And then they got a job, you know, in some public sector position with a final salary pension. Sorry. I'm not, you know, I don't think we should actually screw over young people to, you know, respect people who, you know, had some crappy public sector job with a cushy pension. I don't think that deserves the same level. of veneration and death.

I thought we're giving them. I think that's fair enough. Also, they're old. They've lucked out, right? I've had friends who died in their 40s and 50. They're already lucky in terms of the health endowment they've enjoyed, okay? Right. And now we're actually giving them money as well.

It's ridiculous. Yeah, but I mean, do you think you'll still feel that way when you're 80? If I make it. The point I would make is that I hope when I was 80, regardless of the state of my financial affairs, I'd have some intelligent apportionment of my wealth where 100% of my available, you know, of my wealth was not tied up in the place where I lived.

I would have at least made mental preparation to move somewhere smaller. By the way, it's a bit like getting a stair lift. Most people who get a stair lift wish they'd done it five years earlier, okay? Most people who downsize wish they'd done it five years earlier. Yeah. My father was forced to downsize

because he had a, a property business, which kind of crashed badly and was forced to move from a bigger house and to a smaller house. One year later, he actually said this was the best thing that happened. Because otherwise, I would have been an 87-year-old struggling to maintain a huge house. All right. It's not a great way to, it's, you know, there are only two of you or one of you, right? You don't need, you know, you don't need five bedrooms, okay?

My wife said this. She said, oh, I'd want a bigger place so the children can come and stay. Fuck that. The little shits can go and stay on the trouble lodge. have them hanging around the place. I'm not going to spend $250,000 on bloody spare bedrooms, just so the little shits can come and visit for sort of three days every month. They can go down to travel lodge like everybody else.

And so, no, no, I find it weird that we regard this as normal. And there are lots of aspects of the property market where economists have conflated land ownership with capital, okay? Lots of aspects of the property market, for example, the first, fact that for 30 years, property price rises were presented in the news as a good news story. Right. Okay. Now, nobody says, hey, good news if you've got a full tank of petrol, the cost of petrol's

gone out, okay? Because it's something that people need to use over time, okay? But for some reason, now, just to be clear, if you look at it sequentially, longitudinally, okay, a property price rise is very good news if you've got parents who are planning to die soon. And it's very good news if you're planning to downsize. For everybody else, either people who don't own property or who are planning to move to a larger property because they've just had kids, a property price rise is bad news. It is good news for an extraordinarily small group of people in a particularly select point of their life. Other than that,

it's bad news for everybody else. And yet the news coverage of it for more or less the entire duration of my adult life was great news. Property has gone up. Why? Collective insanity is the only thing I can think of. You know, hey, great news if you've already got a loaf of bread, bread prices have gone up. Nobody says that, okay? But for some reason, property was treated as wealth. It's not. It's consumption. You consume property. Okay? People need to consume property. They need a place to live. There is an answer, by the way, which is to, and nobody's going to like this, what we actually need is trailer parks.

Now, the point about a trailer park is you own the thing in which you live, but you don't own the land on which it stands. And if the trailer park person gets a bit greedy, you can move it somewhere else. Now, if you go to the Caribbean, there's this extraordinary thing called the chattel house, which is a little two-room house made of wood, they're very, very beautiful.

Obviously, the product is really talented carpenters. And they arose when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean in, I suppose it's the 1820s or something, is it? My dates are, sometime in the early 19th century. And what happened was that the slave owners were obliged to pay a wage to the freed slaves, but they got it back by basically claiming rent for living in their current housing on the plantation. So it was kind of meaningless, which is, by the way, a metaphor for, I think, our current state of affairs, which is that all economic gains, okay? All economic gains, all improvements in consumer products, all improvements in wealth, even, I would argue, the double-income household, okay?

This is getting really controversial, have largely been soaked up in the shape of higher property prices. So the double-income household, okay, it starts as an option, lovely. My wife can go out to work, too, and we can earn two salaries. Early days, absolutely lovely. Okay. Suddenly, okay, who benefits? The government, because they're getting twice as much tax, right? Homeowners benefit because now you need two salaries to buy a house and therefore houses are worth commensurately, you know, 50% more. Most of the gains over the long term, not immediately. If you're an early two-income household, you were rolling in it, okay? But over time, people copened onto the fact that people were earning two incomes and therefore demanded more money for a house, as a consequence of which the government got more tax revenue, homeowners got rich from it, the, I would argue, the typical double-income household enjoyed a fairly modest increase in their quality of life, all right, and lost 35 hours of discretionary time every week per household.

So when I was a kid, a working-class person could bring up kids on one salary. It wasn't a particularly nice life, but it was actually possible. without resorting to total penury. I now know of hospital consultants who are single who basically can't afford to buy anything. Okay, they can barely afford. They're, you know, their consultant surgeon,

whatever it may be, they cannot afford to buy, you know, a tolerable place to live with only one income if they're single. So, you know, the double income thing starts as an option, it becomes an obligation. Yeah.

Huge to unfair to single people, huge to unfair to people who want to take time off to bring up children. it's now okay before I get looked at as if I'm some sort of weirdo sexist I would have made the point that the two people who raise this this is not okay Elizabeth Warren the senator for Massachusetts of whom I'm a weird fan I think she's really really interesting and Fay Weldon who I knew quite well because she used to be an

oglevy copywriter and Fay Weldon said that effectively you know the two income idea was great news for certain people at a certain time but the long-term effects might have been net negative unless you're either a government or a property owner. So what I see is that there's no point in getting... I mean, look at these cameras here, okay?

They're a miracle, okay? You know, if you go and look at a... This is weird... This guy doesn't seem to have a telly. He's got a lot of art. Where's his telly? That's a good question, actually. Does that painting actually slide back

and reveal a 95-inch Samsung 48K tele. Anyway, well, like, we can just tell them there's a tele-over there. There, there is in the corner, yeah, yeah. Okay, you know, okay, your television is a miracle compared to a television 20 years ago. I mean, literally, you know, people would have paid millions for a frat-screen TV if it had existed in the 1970s, okay?

Computer games, everything of that kind has been massively improved without any commensurate increase in price, by the way. And actually, an extraordinary degree of egalitarianism, which is that if you're a multimillion, millionaire, you can't really get a better phone than someone on median income. Sure. You can, okay, you can get a fancier TV, I grant that, but only at the point of being ridiculous. Yeah, not to the point that it's actually, I mean, you know. And actually, your Netflix is the same as my Netflix.

Exactly, yeah. An awful lot of, and actually, the Netflix in Aberystwyth is as good as the Netflix in London. Yes. Now, that's one thing which nobody ever talks about, which is the extraordinary geographical leveling up in terms of access to information and goods. You know, I grew up in the Welsh borders, if you were. wanted to buy a bit of fancy high-fire equipment, you might have gone to London. You might have gone to Bristol or Cardiff, you know, Comet for people who remember that. Now, you know,

if I wanted to go and see a Korean film, all right, living in Monmouth, the odds were pretty slim. I'd have a really, really long weight, put it that way. Yeah. Probably indefinite weight. If you want to see a Korean film in Aberystwyth, well, good luck, right? Now, anybody anywhere. one of the reasons I don't quite understand the fixation with people have with living in London, because the actual material gains you get from a metropolitan existence in terms of your consumption

aren't nearly as dramatic as they were when I was again, sure, okay? I mean, genuinely, and that applies not only to things you can buy online, I, digital goods or goods that are delivered by Amazon or Akado or whoever, and that also applies to things like food and drink and so on. I mean, the quality of eating out is actually,

I'd rather eat out in East Kent than I would in London, to be honest, partly because you get these creative people who move down there because they can't afford to open a restaurant in London. But I do find this interesting in that I sometimes feel that all the lifestyle gains that should have come from those extraordinary technological improvements have just been mopped up in rivalrous chasing of property assets. Now, what I was talking about in the Caribbean

in was these things were built called chattel houses, which were portable. And so to prevent your plantation owner saying, look, mate, I'm afraid you've got to pay rent that's not unadjacent to your current salary, they'd build these little houses. And if the chap demanded too much land rent, two men could pick them up and move them onto the adjacent plantation, where the plantation owner would go, no problem, mate, you can you can stay here for a third of the price. Yeah. And so what it did was it disentangled the ownership of housing from land ownership.

Yes. And the trailer park does that in the US. There are actually really blingy trailer parks. There's one in Malibu where I've got a vague idea. Pamor Anderson lives in a trailer park, okay? Really? In Malibu. And it's somewhere near the beach.

I mean, they're actually, the trailers are quite, they've been pimped up quite dramatically. And it's a pretty nice community. but notionally, I think legally, I think it may actually exist as a trailer park. Now, if you got, if the government got Johnny Ive and this guy called Mark Newsent, who's an Australian designer, I think he's a mate of his, and just said, okay, your job is you've got to produce the coolest mobile form of housing you possibly can, okay? And you create some sort of legislation where people, I'd be well on for living in a pub car park. I mean, there are a lot of country pubs that have a bit of spare space in the car park, okay?

If you could plonk my little two-bedroom job in the pub car park, well on for that. So if people that actually buy for 50, 60, in America you can buy a trailer. I mean, a really nice brand-new trailer. It's about $80,000. And they're pretty nice. And they're fully kitted out with all sorts of shit, okay? And, you know, okay, they've got a better climate. I mean, we've got to accept some things about that.

But you could join two of these things together. And if you are free to own a form of accommodation without owning the rights to build on the land on which it sits, you could fundamentally disrupt the property market. Maybe what you need is planning permission for three years only. Do you see what I mean? Yes. So that when people gave planning permission for people to live in the neighbouring field, it was for three years and they got a bit of money from it rather than indefinitely. I had this same idea, which is I think we should build lots of nuclear power stations on ships. and the reason is that

if someone wants to build a nuclear power station next to my house even me, I'm pretty pro nuclear power but I'm going to be a bit iffy about it but I've got a little flat in deal and I'm a bit of an amateur rackman I do own two small flats

it's partly a product of my you know the time in which I was born but if if a nuclear power station sails in close to the coast okay, plugs into a big wire, and then for three months it provides a lot of power to East Kent, and then it sails off somewhere else. I'm not remotely bothered, am I?

Okay, I'm not going to protest that to the same degree I would protest the permanent fixture. So I've got this theory that you just put nuclear power stations on ships and people be pretty chill. They thought, okay, the thing's going to be in harbour for eight months, and then it's going to go somewhere else. Yeah. Completely different level of objection. Maybe there could be some sort of like tax benefit for the people who live near.

Oh, that's fascinating. If we didn't have this huge explosion in property prices, which unjustly enriches people without any real measure of the contribution they've made to society, without any proportionality. First of all, you know, one of the things you do is you discredit capitalism. Because you can say what you like about Henry Ford being rich, but he gave a lot of people a cult, right? Okay. Whereas, you know, nowadays the rich person is likely to be some weird Russian who's honey trapped the local nomenclature into selling them an aluminium smelting works for, you know, 20,000 roubles. It doesn't have the same degree of meritocracy or earned merit, okay, than it used to. So you discredit the whole nature of wealth and capitalism by

making it so much to do with your asset class ownership rather than your effort. That's my first projection. Second thing is, if we hadn't had property, if we'd had an artificial means, e.g. Taxation of keeping and a commensurate reduction in income tax, right? If we'd had some means of taxing land value, could people now actually work a four-day week and maintain their basic quality of life? I think that's entirely possible. Could you have a guaranteed basic income on the basis of this? It might be possible. Now, my point about this is, by the way, not saying that I'm right and I'm definitely right, I'm simply utterly baffled by the extent to which the incredibly limited number of variables that are considered by neoliberal economic models

completely limit the possibility for experimentation. I mean, interest rates become this like weird tool, you know, or keeping inflation down. Okay, you know, and there are loads and loads of experiments with the reapportionment of the rewards, not the reapportionment of wealth necessary, but just the reapportionment of the rewards to effort that should be at least intelligently tried and experimented with. I've got a vague idea, I think, that, for example, someone at Kent County Council went to the government and said, we'd like to do an experiment where we basically sell planning permission. Because when you give someone planning permission. Well, let me explain how I would have paid for high speed too. All right? I would have

bought 20,000 acres, actually two lots of 20,000 acres between London and Birmingham, and two lots of 20,000 acres, again, of agricultural land between Birmingham and Manchester. And I would have built the railway. I would have awarded myself planning permission for those 20,000 acres to build housing or communities or whatever you needed. And then I would have built a station in the center of each of those communities. The value of agricultural land, I'm probably a bit outdated here, is about three to four thousand pounds an acre. The value of land with planning permission for residential building within 20 minutes of

Houston Station is probably something like, that's actually interesting, possibly a million pounds an acre, as it? Might be more. Right. It's going to be a few million, I would have thought. So literally you're multiplying your money by a few orders of magnitude. Now, if you've done that three times, you would have paid for the whole railway, okay? Simply by awarding yourself planning permission.

What do we do at the moment? We award planning permission to people. We effectively give them a gift of a million quid. Their neighbours, meanwhile, have to put up with all the shit and disruption. They get absolutely nothing. The state gets nothing. The local council gets more or less nothing. This is an absurd system.

It's absolutely batshit crazy. So you have government conferring millions of pounds of wealth on people through the planning system without recouping any of it to the benefit of the wider community. What a weird thing to do. That is quite strange. And unfortunately, rather pessimistic note on which we're going to have to wrap up. I mean, because unfortunately, I do not own this wonderful place. But my only argument is these things are testable.

They're two-way doors. Yeah. Okay. You can, this is Jeff Bezos phrase. A true-way door is something where, to be honest, it's actually easier to try it out in reality than it is to argue it in theory. Sure. And the complete dearth of experimentation in areas like this where I think Kent tried to do this and the Treasury just had a complete like coneption about it. Okay, so we'd like to experiment with a system where we fund local government by basically selling planning permission to people and effectively

what you might call nationalising the gains from effectively what is a government action which is issuing permission to build. Yeah, and it's an empirical question. You can try it out and see if it... Try it out and see if it well?

Isn't the motto of your company something like try the unintuitive things because nobody is... No, that's actually, I think that's me. I would like it to be the motto. But no, test counterintuitive things because all the logical things have been tried already.

If there were a logical answer to your problem, already solved it. There's no shortage of logical people kicking around, okay? So by a kind of logic Darwinism, you can say that the problems that are actually, that submit to logic, have mostly gone away, and we're left for the ones that require something counterintuitive, oblique, tangential, weird. Yeah.

There's a great book by John Kaye called Obliquity, which I really recommend that everybody reads, which is precisely about this. I'll make sure it's down in the description. Boris Sutherland, thank you for... It's been a huge pleasure, absolute delight. Thank you very much to be. For a wonderful tour of some interesting areas that we don't usually get to touch on this channel. I mean, it strikes me as utterly weird that all you need to do is a fairly easy reframing

where you see property ownership is not wealth, it's consumption. You're consuming the property in which you live by depriving someone else of the right to live there. Now, if interestingly, consumer electronics are not really consumption, because if I buy an iPhone, I make iPhones cheaper for other people. So there's an odd thing. How do you define consumption? Well, you could argue that the best form of consumption is when I go to a pub and I make a pub available for lots of other people at lots of different times.

Okay, there's a wider benefit to that. Okay, when I buy a new car, you might argue I'm engaging in an active philanthropy where I'm effectively giving someone poorer than me a really good car. Imagine if property worked like the car market. Yeah, yeah, I bought this place for $2 million in Fulham. But I've used it for three years, so you can have it for 900,000. That's how the property market would work. Apparently, it does a bit in Florida where there was so much new build that actually

property did actually decline in value with use. Really? You got that peculiarity. But it feels like property is different because it feel, I know you say property is something that you consume. It feels like something you don't consume. It feels like something that you own. That is just there that you inhabit.

No, no, no. It's undoubtedly a form of rivalrous consumption because. that old lady living in that house is depriving a family of a family home okay the people on my brother's street are depriving families of places where they can live by insisting on living there

as just two people I don't know quite what drives the terror of downsizing actually I mean some of it's loss of status probably okay that you know some of it is you know fear of running out of money but I mean literally I know of cases

of people who are paper millionaires, but who are, like, canceling their spectator's subscription. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's not the, that's, when you set a, okay, put it, here's another phrase I, I used in the spectator, which chime with a lot of people, okay, let's imagine you get a job as a sort of corporate lawyer. I'm not saying that's good, okay, I hope you don't become a corporate lawyer, but if you did, and you suddenly ended up earning 150,000 pounds a year, okay?

And you decided you're going to buy half of a terrorist house in full. for like 950,000. What that means is that for the next 20 years, a very large swath of your discretionary income is going to be eaten up in order to own something that a poor person would have owned in 1917. Now, that is not progress, right? You impoverishing yourself as an immensely wealthy lawyer

in 2024 and that the sum total of your ambition is to own something that a poor person owned in 1917. Nobody aspires to cars from 1917, okay? Go and buy a fucking jet ski. You know, go and buy something that people in 1917 couldn't have owned, all right? You know, go and buy something that would have made, you know,

Louis the 14th go, fucking hell, I want one of those. Yeah. All right? Don't go and buy, because Louis the 14th would go, Louis XIV would look at you as your corporate law and go,

your television, you know, your dental care, your analgesics, all the things brought to you consumer capitalism, okay, defy, apart from maybe the food and the clothing,

I reckon, I think Louis the 14th they go, a bit dowdy, you go, wouldn't he? Yeah. Tiny bit of,

where's the silk? Come on, babe. Can we have a bit of silk? Yeah. And also, your car, even, do you have a car?

I don't know. I don't have a car. Fucking young people. I can't even drive. Well, you can't drive. Fucking hell, what's wrong with you?

I grew up with the Welsh borders. I would have chosen to actually sever my own genitals rather than not have a car, okay? And actually, to be honest, not having a car would have had a worse effect on my social and sex life than severing my genitals, okay? You young people, you're also fucking

natural and, oh, no, no, I'll just get an Uber. Now, learn to fucking drive, grow up, crying out loud. The other problem is, I'm going to tell you something here, which is interesting, because I think it's a problem for the motor industry. If you drive frequently, driving become a system one, and it's really enjoyable, I'm not talking about London traffic, but I'm talking about driving in the country is one of life's great joys. You young people, you just like hire a car when you're in Lanzarotti for seven days. If you only drive for seven days or 14 days a year, driving's terrifying so you don't enjoy it. So you're missing out on this massive pleasure, you know, but I don't understand this.

I mean, you young people, you don't really want a car. Where am I going to put a car? Of course you want a fucking car. Where am I going to put a car, you know? Where do you live? What do you live in London for? In London? I mean, have you tried driving in London? No, no, driving in London is much fun.

Now, I go out, how old are you now? You've been living in a suburbia. How old do you think I am? My guess is about 32. I'm 25. You're 25? 25. Okay, fair enough, you can stay in London.

You don't need to have a car. Okay, I'll back down. When you're 32, you're going to start looking at a lot to go to do to homes. You get a decent car and a lawnmower, you know, ridiculous. Yeah. The protracted childhood is a product of the property market. I think I'm going to save up my money. and buy Jetsky instead.

Yeah, by the Jetsky, yeah, absolutely, yeah. But, no, I mean, what fascinates me about that is how much of our disposable income and therefore how much of our labour. Now, in fairness to me, okay, I only own a flat, the flat I live in is probably worth less than half, I don't know, maybe half a million, okay?

I bought it for 400,000 quite a long time ago. I haven't gone up at all. But it isn't a Robert Adam house. You know, Louis the 14th ago, well, you're living in the attic, mate. That's a bit dismal, but fuck me, it's a great one house. I've got a friend all credit to him He lives in the barbican

And there's a bit of me which goes Yeah I kind of get that You go into this flat in the barbican And you go well it's worth 1.8 million But you do walk into the apartment and go Shit me this is amazing He's on the 23rd floor Right

But I don't understand I don't understand these people Who are spending like you know Two point for this house actually Is pretty damn cool Isn't it okay You know Okay if I have 5 million

This house we're in now Which is yours isn't it I'm going to ruin it from your proceeds from podcast. Yeah, that's right. But what I'm saying is I do at least get this place where you come and you go, it's got a swimming pool, and it's in central London. It is lovely, yeah. This is extraordinary.

What amazes me is the amount of money that's soaked up in property that can. I don't actually live here. I do not actually live here just for it. I'm going to ruin. My supporters on Subsack would probably immediately cancel if they thought that this was my house. But it's a very weird use of our money to spend that much money in something so unremarkable, which could be devoted to either things that are amazing, like EasyJet. I realize I'm not doing myself any favors with the environmental community by recommending,

but the electric jet ski, that's going to be a real thing. Oh, yeah. That's going to be a shit me. That's going to be great. But the ultimate solution, and I think this is Elon's plan, okay, is to destroy the whole property market. Right. What has you got? Starlink, okay? Yeah.

He's got massive batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. Okay? Oh, boy. Now, put them all together. What have you got? You got the potential to be nomadic. Mm. All right.

So, effectively, when you have the Tesla Winnebago, which I think is waiting in the wings, which is a fucking massive American motor. Do you ever watch, there's a brilliant, brilliant YouTube channel where there's an RV salesman. who basically takes you through the latest American motorhomes. The ingenuity with which they use the space is absolutely beautiful. They have the other thing,

even a fairly base level American motorhome. This explains how bad the value is we get from our property, which is we spend a fortune on a thing. It's just a pile of bricks, okay? It could have been built it. Well, you know, I mean, there's very little about the technology of house building that's moved on since, well, frankly, the Romans.

Okay. I mean, the Romans would look at builders and basically know, what they were doing, okay? I mean, that's appalling. I mean, why don't we mass-produce housing and the way we mass-produce cars? It's obviously stupid, okay?

I have no idea what's going on here. But Mr. Fuller tried. But the real American motorhome, at the base level, you pay $80,000 for this American motorhome. It's got, you know, it's got a nice bedroom. It's got a fucking TV on the outside. I'm not making that up, okay, because to the American motorhome owner,

you might want to sit outside, watch television. So there's actually a panel that lifts up on the outside of the motorhome and there's a flat screen TV underneath so you can watch television outside. Now, that's living. Now, I wonder if Elon's plan is effectively to destroy the property market by encouraging us to become nomadic. Because for your generation, it's quite logical if you think about it, okay? You can buy, you know, you can afford to buy a really nice motorhome. You're paying only for accommodation. You're not, because this is what's weird about property, okay?

in order to buy a place to live, you also have to buy the land on which it sits and you have to buy the rights to that land. In most cases now, that is by far the greater part of the value of that house. If you go around, if you look at this house now, the cost of rebuilding this house, even though it's pretty magnificent house, would I guess be 200, 250,000. The value of the house is probably 2.5 million. So it's the land that actually maintains the value, okay, not the actual bricks, mortar and all the other stuff. Yeah. So what we're forcing people to do is say, yeah, yeah, you can buy a place to live,

but you have to spend nine times as much again on owning the rights to that land. Now, imagine if you, okay, imagine a world where if you bought a car, okay, let's say you wanted to buy a Ford Monday, I know you're young and therefore you've probably got a fixy bicycle or some weird, or you can scooter, right? Sorry, you know, while you're not photographing your food and shit. shaving your genitals. Okay, so I'm just a stereotypical old man there. Right, okay.

But if you bought a Ford Bondair, they say, yeah, you can buy the Ford Mendeau, but you have to buy 200,000 pounds worth of Ford shares in order to own a Ford Mondeau. This is ridiculous. I just want a car, right? I don't want an investment. I just want a thing to drive around in. But in a house, we've conflated those two things. It's completely bonkers.

And the people who solved it, the Irish Traveller community, were people. people who found themselves in the UK and couldn't afford to buy or rent a house. So they borrowed Romani lifestyle in order. So that's nomadism. And then you have the trailer park in the US or you have the chattel house in the Caribbean, which is effectively ownership of a house without ownership of the land on which it's said. We do really have to get out of here now. Okay.

I've got to go and... You probably have to photograph some avatados. Yeah. Yeah. The car thing among the young, to someone who grew up on the Welsh borders is, oh, no, do I want to own a car? Are you fucking kidding you? I'm not young, so I own a car.

There's no going back, is that? Once you've owned a car. Yeah, I've got a car as soon as I could. Yeah, exactly. Do you have a car and a fixie bike? You've got both, did you? No, just a fixie bike. Just a fixie bike?

No, I've got a car. You got a car? Okay, no. I don't even have a bike. I use those lime. You live in London in? Yeah, I live in London, and I sort of use those lime bikes. to get around.

That's interesting, isn't it? They're pretty extraordinary. The electric bike actually is really important because the really important thing with electric cars isn't just making cars that look like modern cars that are electric.

It's the potential for miniaturization. So actually, one thing I'm really sympathetic to is the electric cargo bike. Because the problem with the bike is that there are too many things that can kill it. If you've got to go uphill, this is a physical bike.

If it's raining, it's killed. If you've got to go uphill, it's killed. If you've got to go uphill, it's killed. It's killed. If you want to go shopping, it's no good. Okay. Now, the cargo bike is like this, because the electric thing basically takes care of the hills for you,

and it's got a bit of storage. It's quite a happy compromise between a car and a bicycle. Yeah. So there's something there that really appeals to me. And then, of course, there's this whole micro mobility thing. There's a Swiss company that makes little two-seater cars. I mean, has anybody been to France recently? The Citron Ami, did you see those?

They're actually kicking around. They're like... Tiny. Apparently you can get them here. You just rent them. Is it like 200 a month? Yeah. And you just plug it into the main?

Yes, it's tiny. Yeah. 16 year olds can hang out of the price. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, we need to change. That's the sort of thing the government should be doing, saying, okay, if you're 16, you can, yeah, you can have a little mini electric car.

Yeah, I think the max speed is like 20 miles an hour or something. That's it. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. Of course. But we don't say that. We don't say that.

As we see it whizzing past at 60 miles an hour. But actually, they're a hell of a lot of my journey to the station this morning. I could have happily done in one of those, you know. And actually, those are, I mean, that's the interesting thing, which is that in evolutionary terms for electric cars, the adjacent possible is much bigger. You can't really miniaturize petrolade. You can't really have driverlessness with internal combustion engines

to the same extent either, can you? You can't deal with it. Do you want electric in your car? No, I'm about to buy electric. Oh, what are you going for? Sorry. We should be recorded this. This would be really brilliant.

You take a 25-year-old philosopher and theologian, and you just hijack it and turn it into a car podcast. This would be actually brilliant. Yeah. Do you have to do your sign-on. What are you going for? It's going to be, well, you guys. There's a much more important than philosophy.

We're talking about cars here. We're wrap up. Look, we're going to wrap this up. And you should carry this conversation off in the corridor so I can do my fancy goodbyes to the camera before we get kicked out of this place. Kate, you better do your fancy. I'll be kicking quiet. That's all right. Well, we'll... Do you know, is he going to be a shot?

Do you have to turn around? Yeah, let's funny. Oh, you want to be sitting about that. No, no, so it's all right. I mean, we can, we can, I'm going to do, I'm going to do all that stuff separately. So I'm not, okay. I don't know, we haven't taken by.

I'll just, yeah, we'll record that in a moment. We'll go take goodbye in a moment. We'll find the rest while there. Oh, we'll just end it like that. That's fine. That's fine. Thank you.