TRIGGERnometry - Why Has Advertising Become Political？ - Rory Sutherland

00:00:00.960 The Democrats in the United States are the biggest sort of marketing f*** up you can possibly imagine. 0.99

00:00:06.080 Why do you say that? 0.99

00:00:07.080 I think I know what you mean. 0.95

00:00:08.240 Remember, Americans are very weird. 1.00

00:00:11.140 Americans are very absoluter. 1.00

00:00:12.960 But they don't even know too many Germans. 1.00

00:00:16.580 If they want to walk around with their sh*** out, it's, you know, and there were children on the beach, no one would give them a sh***. 0.99

00:00:22.020 Basically, what you do to construct a farmer's market is you take a Tesco metro and you make it really sh***. 0.98

00:00:27.300 People love the f***ing things. 0.97

00:00:28.640 The country's gone to the dogs and look at it. 0.96

00:00:32.160 Let's say you were an advisor to the Conservative Party. 1.00

00:00:35.520 You f***ing hell. 0.99

00:00:39.180 Look at that. 0.99

00:00:40.320 In Italy, you go to a motorway service station and the coffee's fantastic. 0.97

00:00:44.580 You go to France, it's f*** everywhere. 0.55

00:00:46.600 I have no idea what's going on. 0.99

00:00:47.780 Rory, we've got to wrap up.

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00:01:21.140 So Rory, thank you for coming back on the show.

00:01:24.220 It's a pleasure.

00:01:25.080 We have seen adverts becoming more and more politicised as we've gone on through time.

00:01:31.080 We're thinking of Jaguar, the latest NFL advert, Gillette and so on and so on and so forth.

00:01:37.220 What's going on, Rory?

00:01:38.320 Um, various things.

00:01:40.940 It's not all bad, by the way.

00:01:43.000 It is rather ridiculous when it all happens simultaneously.

00:01:46.960 OK, so it's perfectly reasonable that, you know, advertising should reflect the population.

00:01:53.520 However, if you end up, it's one of those things that makes perfect sense on an individual level,

00:01:58.740 um, but fails collectively if everybody simultaneously decides that, uh, it's impossible to have

00:02:06.180 any white people in a commercial. 0.99

00:02:07.680 That becomes ridiculous. 0.94

00:02:08.820 It's also interesting in that the ethnic mix in commercials tends to reflect London rather

00:02:13.440 than the UK as a whole, by the way, in that London's actually, if you like, unusual in

00:02:19.520 having, uh, what you might call a black population that's roughly commensurate with the Indian population

00:02:24.740 and the country as a whole, whatever it would be, two or three to one.

00:02:28.740 Uh, ratio would be more normal.

00:02:30.560 So it doesn't necessarily reflect an accurate view of a diverse British population.

00:02:36.460 I think there's a second facet, which was there was a very big trend in advertising towards

00:02:41.700 what was sometimes called brand purpose, that you adopted, if you like, uh, a social mission.

00:02:48.160 Um, and that, uh, effectively advertising became weirdly ideological.

00:02:56.040 Now, there's always been an element of that.

00:02:58.520 If you look at Coke Hilltop, I'd like to teach the world to sing, which was, of course,

00:03:03.760 a completely diverse group of ethnicities and backgrounds representing the whole world

00:03:08.560 on a hilltop.

00:03:10.060 When you think about it, at the time of the Vietnam War, okay, um, Coke has traditionally been,

00:03:17.340 by the way, I mean, historically Coke was Democrat and Pepsi was Republican.

00:03:23.300 And going back to the sixties and seventies, when you had a Republican president, they'd basically

00:03:27.660 order in Pepsi.

00:03:29.240 And that was simply because Pepsi was from the north and Coke was from the south, largely.

00:03:34.580 Um, but you had this weird divide in the United States, which obviously Trump has broken with

00:03:40.520 completely because I think he's a fairly, uh, regular diet Coke drinker.

00:03:44.620 Yes.

00:03:45.220 Yeah.

00:03:45.760 In fact, does he have a Coke button on the desk?

00:03:48.340 I've got a vague idea.

00:03:49.700 They installed a button, which basically when he presses it, someone brings him an iced Coke.

00:03:55.140 Um, but there's always been a component of this in advertising.

00:03:59.120 And I would argue that some brands, some of the time are big enough to carry it off.

00:04:04.760 And, you know, one of the cases which I would cite because it's one of ours would be Dove,

00:04:11.580 which was described as internally the campaign for real beauty, which was about beauty without

00:04:17.260 artifice.

00:04:17.980 In other words, it was a cosmetic brand, which wasn't about makeup and, uh, what you might call

00:04:24.760 rivalrous displays, but was something else.

00:04:28.840 And it, you know, uh, it was a very necessary space in which that brand sat perfectly comfortably.

00:04:35.440 It was entirely consistent with, uh, what that brand did.

00:04:39.260 But then you've got weirder stuff like Gillette, which was almost to the point of insulting your

00:04:46.520 own target audience.

00:04:47.860 I mean, I found that an extraordinary, weird advertisement.

00:04:51.520 Uh, by the way, I'm going to, I'm going to be very, um, the sort of even handed here.

00:04:58.580 The case with, um, uh, Dylan Mulvaney was really a scandal, which was to some extent synthesized

00:05:11.100 by people on the right.

00:05:12.600 So for people who know.

00:05:13.740 Okay.

00:05:14.580 So this was, if I'm right, it was, um, I'm trying to remember.

00:05:19.740 Uh, I think it was 2023.

00:05:22.120 It was 2023.

00:05:23.960 Effectively, they sent Dylan Mulvaney some personalized cans of, um, Bud Light.

00:05:29.300 Bud Light.

00:05:31.200 Okay.

00:05:32.540 And effectively, this was just something done by, you know, a young person in the marketing

00:05:40.360 department.

00:05:40.920 It would have been a social media influencer campaign where they sent personalized cans

00:05:45.920 of beer to lots and lots of celebrities and people who had a social following.

00:05:51.280 Perfectly reasonable thing to do.

00:05:53.180 Um, and for some reason, this was taken by the press for its own convenience, as though

00:05:59.140 Dylan Mulvaney had become the new face of Bud Light.

00:06:02.860 Okay.

00:06:03.860 Now, it was simply one part of an enormous campaign of sending, uh, you know, free personalized

00:06:10.000 beer cans to, you know, a whole swathe of people.

00:06:14.000 It didn't really, in itself, I don't know what was going on in the, in the marketing department

00:06:19.060 in and around it, but in itself, it was not intended.

00:06:22.260 Well, this is the interesting thing, Rory, because, and I think that's one of the reasons

00:06:25.840 the story did get big, is that there was a marketing executive.

00:06:29.840 You're absolutely right.

00:06:30.600 Do you remember the woman?

00:06:31.720 Mm-hmm.

00:06:32.160 Where she was talking, I think, to a reporter or something, and she was asked to explain

00:06:36.820 the thinking behind their new strategy.

00:06:39.100 And she basically said, well, you know, uh, the customer base that we have.

00:06:43.380 I know.

00:06:43.820 Yeah, we don't really like those people.

00:06:45.560 You know, their sense of humor is out of day and this and that.

00:06:48.320 Yeah, I don't, I don't think she's, uh, any longer with the company, if I'm right.

00:06:51.340 No, no, no.

00:06:51.680 I'm a businesswoman.

00:06:52.900 I had a really good job to do when I took over Bud Light.

00:06:55.840 And it was, this brand is in decline.

00:06:59.300 It's been in decline for a really long time.

00:07:01.560 And if we do not attract young drinkers to come and drink this brand, there will be no

00:07:07.020 future for Bud Light.

00:07:08.060 So I had this super clear mandate.

00:07:09.760 It's like, we need to evolve and elevate this incredibly iconic brand.

00:07:14.640 And my, what I brought to that was a belief in, okay, what does, what does, what does evolve

00:07:21.280 and elevate mean?

00:07:22.240 It means inclusivity.

00:07:23.520 It means shifting the tone.

00:07:25.160 It means having a campaign that's truly inclusive and feels lighter and brighter and different

00:07:32.440 and appeals to women and to men.

00:07:34.840 And representation is at sort of the heart of evolution.

00:07:37.800 You've got to see people who reflect you in the work.

00:07:41.140 And we had this hangover.

00:07:42.540 I mean, Bud Light had been kind of a brand of fratty, kind of out-of-touch humor.

00:07:51.560 And it was really important that we had another approach.

00:07:55.980 But that was unconnected, really, with the Dill Mulvaney thing.

00:07:59.140 I'd also make the point that I was telephoned by The Telegraph about it.

00:08:04.260 And neither of us, neither The Telegraph journalist nor I could see anything to get angry about.

00:08:10.220 We went and researched Dill Mulvaney.

00:08:12.540 We found her pretty amusing.

00:08:13.980 There are people who object on both sides of the spectrum.

00:08:19.460 But we couldn't find anything to get angry about, fundamentally.

00:08:23.220 And by the way, I think there is a point here, which is that Britain is not the United States,

00:08:28.700 but it speaks the same language.

00:08:30.400 And you will suddenly find yourself either bemused by things that upset Americans.

00:08:35.220 I mean, apart from anything else, you've got to remember, I grew up in the 1970s with people like Danny LaRue, okay?

00:08:45.820 There were a lot of people who were never out gay, but who...

00:08:53.040 Well, let's see, Larry Grayson apparently never...

00:08:57.840 But, okay, are you being served, okay?

00:09:00.280 Mm-hmm.

00:09:00.500 Right?

00:09:00.840 And you grew up with this as part of your...

00:09:05.640 It was just part of the panoply of, you know, human life, you know, rather like Shakespeare.

00:09:11.300 There are lots of different people in Shakespeare, to whom, almost all of whom, he has some degree of affection.

00:09:18.780 Okay?

00:09:19.120 The very British thing, which is, you know, this is a, you know, this is a, you know,

00:09:24.140 the fabric of society is made up from, you know, very, very many different fibres.

00:09:29.300 And we're pretty okay with that.

00:09:31.720 I mean, we're not very conformist as a culture.

00:09:34.600 And therefore, the idea that we'd be desperately concerned or threatened by Dylan Mulvaney, I think, would be alien to most Brits.

00:09:40.460 I mean, I...

00:09:41.380 Yes, because I think we're also...

00:09:44.860 I know what you mean, because...

00:09:46.300 It just doesn't bother me.

00:09:46.820 I think I know what you mean. 0.91

00:09:48.060 Remember, Americans are very weird. 1.00

00:09:49.440 I mean, the problem in the US, I think... 0.90

00:09:54.120 Dylan Mulvaney's fine. 0.97

00:09:55.340 Americans are very weird. 1.00

00:09:56.380 No, no, no, no, but there is something quite absolutist about them. 0.96

00:10:00.860 I mean, I remember...

00:10:01.820 That's true.

00:10:02.140 I've just come back from Fuerteventura, and there were Germans walking around naked on the beach, okay? 1.00

00:10:07.820 Germans do that kind of thing, you know, health and efficiency, all that sort of stuff.

00:10:11.560 They're probably into a bit of the, what's it called, perineal sunning.

00:10:14.440 Have you come across this?

00:10:15.360 No.

00:10:15.640 So it's a sort of Taoist belief that you should expose your perineum to a lot of sunlight.

00:10:21.660 But as Brits, we just go, well, it's probably not me, but it doesn't really bother me.

00:10:26.940 If they want to walk around with their schlongs out, it's, you know... 1.00

00:10:29.880 And there were children on the beach, and no one was giving a shit, to be honest, okay? 0.97

00:10:33.060 Now, in the United States, that would have been a police matter, okay? 0.97

00:10:38.220 Americans are very absolutatory, but I... 1.00

00:10:40.280 But they don't know too many Germans.

00:10:41.280 I mean, this is absolutely true.

00:10:45.980 It's the problem of the United States.

00:10:48.080 And Benjamin Franklin warned about this.

00:10:50.600 Benjamin Franklin was violently opposed to German immigration.

00:10:54.080 And you do have this very, very weird...

00:10:56.700 You see it in, obviously, the person who, in a sense, plays with it a lot, is Larry David,

00:11:04.340 which is a very, very weird rule-based culture in some ways,

00:11:08.540 which is there has to be a rule for everything.

00:11:11.280 Yes.

00:11:11.820 And if you notice, have you driven in the United States?

00:11:14.080 Yes.

00:11:15.000 It's very, very strange, because if you make a mistake, okay, in the UK,

00:11:20.220 there's a sort of 20-second period of bargaining where you put up your hand...

00:11:25.380 What happened to me?

00:11:26.320 I'd driven into a...

00:11:27.380 It was a sort of strip mall thing.

00:11:29.080 And I'd driven into what was actually the exits to the car park, unwittingly.

00:11:34.060 And I came face-to-face with a car that was trying to leave.

00:11:37.540 My sister-in-law, who lived in Los Angeles at the time, said, this is going to take two minutes.

00:11:43.200 Because all I could do was reverse onto a really busy high-speed highway.

00:11:47.240 I wasn't prepared to do that.

00:11:48.480 It was simply too risky.

00:11:49.820 So all he needed to do was reverse 10 feet.

00:11:53.140 I would then pull over to the left.

00:11:54.980 He could exit.

00:11:56.120 In the UK, we would have done this by a process of kind of bartering,

00:12:00.240 where I would have put up my hands to say, sorry, my bad.

00:12:03.820 And he would have gone, yeah, we all make mistakes.

00:12:06.620 Slightly grudgingly, it would have reversed.

00:12:08.620 I would have then pulled away.

00:12:10.080 All sold. 0.99

00:12:11.180 He would have called you a prick as he was driving off in his head. 0.98

00:12:14.200 My sister, he might have done that. 0.97

00:12:16.040 But my sister-in-law said, this is going to take about a minute and a half.

00:12:19.480 I said, what on earth do you mean?

00:12:20.560 She said, because they're not meeting this with, oh, I see something unusual has happened.

00:12:26.120 Therefore, I have to adapt.

00:12:27.980 Okay.

00:12:29.040 I had broken the rules.

00:12:30.480 And therefore, there was something fundamentally wrong about the situation.

00:12:36.860 And consequently, sure enough, that's exactly what happened.

00:12:40.560 About a minute later, the guy got sort of pretty irate, but just accepted that he had to reverse.

00:12:46.280 But what would have taken like 15 minutes of mutual understanding here was kind of like,

00:12:51.680 was literally a case of total incomprehension.

00:12:54.300 Yeah.

00:12:55.240 No, I agree with you about Americans.

00:12:57.260 And this is all very interesting.

00:12:58.600 But I think the dilemma of any case is different because, as I'm sure you're aware,

00:13:04.180 there's been a raging debate about the trans issue and how it relates to specific things.

00:13:10.380 And there are a lot of people that feel that we are all very happy to tolerate people being different.

00:13:18.100 But when companies feels like, to some people, deliberately thrust this agenda,

00:13:24.540 you know, there's a rainbow land yard everywhere.

00:13:26.540 Everyone's gender fluid and all of this. 0.95

00:13:28.120 Because that's when people feel like, why is a mainstream product?

00:13:32.220 And this, you're the advertising guy, so you push back on this if you want.

00:13:34.880 But why is a brand that's a very common household beer, Bud Light in America, inexplicably for us?

00:13:41.920 Why is it lecturing me on something where it doesn't really have any particular...

00:13:46.380 Why is it...

00:13:46.880 Forget about lecturing.

00:13:48.340 Why is it wading into very contentious social issues that are very divisive and polarizing?

00:13:53.820 And then maybe you're telling me this is what you're supposed to accept.

00:13:58.360 It's worth noting that if you take the big five personality values,

00:14:04.440 variously called canoe or oceans, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extroversion, etc.,

00:14:12.600 the people who work in marketing are all disproportionately, wackily high on openness.

00:14:20.220 Yes.

00:14:20.580 Right.

00:14:20.980 They're creatives, yeah.

00:14:21.920 You'd kind of expect it.

00:14:24.000 You know, they're people who like to expose themselves to other stimuli,

00:14:27.200 who are generally, you know, quite experimental.

00:14:29.500 They tend also to be young.

00:14:30.860 And I think I'm fair and right in saying that whereas most of those values are fairly stable,

00:14:36.780 I think openness does decline slightly with age, which makes perfect evolutionary sense, by the way.

00:14:42.560 Which is, if you think about it, if I'm young, I go to different holiday destinations every time.

00:14:48.460 And now I'm 59, I tend to like to go back to the same place.

00:14:52.040 And the logic is twofold.

00:14:54.780 I have both more experience to draw on, so I know what I like, okay?

00:14:59.100 The likelihood that I'll make a fantastic discovery that suddenly I want to take up kite surfing, okay,

00:15:05.280 is at the age of 59 fairly remote as a contingency.

00:15:08.900 But also I have less remaining life to benefit from any discovery.

00:15:13.860 Ah.

00:15:14.280 So it pays you to be, so there's a double whammy there where it pays you to be experimental in youth and slightly conservative with old age.

00:15:22.040 And that's why having teenage children when you're about 50, which is kind of the age at which people tend to have teenage children nowadays,

00:15:30.820 is particularly maddening because just as you're getting to, let's go back to Madeira for the fourth time,

00:15:37.640 your kids are going, I want to go to the Rio Carnival, okay, which sounds to me like a living nightmare.

00:15:42.960 But so marketing people, Madison Avenue doesn't understand Main Street brilliantly well in some ways.

00:15:50.360 It doesn't matter with certain brands, which are also targeting those people.

00:15:54.900 But advertising has probably served mainstream brands less magnificently than it has kind of what you might call prestige brands.

00:16:04.220 Or in other words, there are those two human motivations, which is the urge to stand out and the urge to fit in.

00:16:09.620 And I think people in marketing understand, Kevin Chester's a planner in advertising who's written about this a little bit,

00:16:17.820 which is advertising people tend to understand the urge to stand out, to do something different, you know, to be the first in your street too, okay?

00:16:27.440 They're not so good at understanding the concomitant human urge, which is I just want to fit in.

00:16:33.360 Well, this is something that actually I was going to talk to you about that you've perfectly segued us into because I was driving through London the other day and I saw Jaguar.

00:16:41.900 Now, Jaguar obviously had this ad that everybody thought, I don't know what everybody thought, but many people thought was terrible.

00:16:47.220 And then they had the slogan on one of the advertising hoardings, which I thought was very interesting and very telling in a political context, which was copy nothing.

00:16:55.140 By the way, by the way, that phrase...

00:16:59.020 Tell me you didn't come up with that.

00:17:00.180 No, no, no, no, I'll tell you who did come up with it, which is Sir William Lyons, who is the effective founder of Jaguar.

00:17:08.200 So it's actually...

00:17:09.080 Very on brand.

00:17:09.660 His whole mission for Jaguar was to be a copy of absolutely nothing.

00:17:13.340 Yes.

00:17:13.640 And you might argue that Jaguar at its absolute height with the XK120 or the E-Type was a staggeringly original, you know, extraordinarily revolutionary car brand.

00:17:30.540 I'm much more sympathetic to that campaign than many people.

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00:18:57.080 I'm much more sympathetic to that campaign than many people.

00:19:02.040 And the reason is that what they're doing is not good brand management by the standards of someone who has a great brand in a growing category which they want to maintain.

00:19:13.840 So it breaks all the rules of what you might call brand consistency if you were tied to detergents.

00:19:22.140 OK, it breaks all those rules.

00:19:24.220 However, and this is important, I think there are cases where you do break those rules, one of which is challenger brands.

00:19:32.100 OK, in other words, if you're Octopus Energy, for example, you don't behave in the same way that you would if you're British Gas or BDF.

00:19:41.300 OK, and secondly, brands where their category is undergoing enormous kind of cataclysmic disruption.

00:19:52.320 And in this case, first of all, I think it's quite important, by the way, that one element of Jaguar, the Jaguar brand, which should be important, is a large part of the cars should be manufactured in the UK.

00:20:02.300 OK, consequently, they're going to be expensive.

00:20:07.400 Consequently, you are not going to be a volume carmaker.

00:20:10.940 You're going to be much closer to Range Rover, if you like, or even more expensive still.

00:20:16.520 If you want to maintain that kind of element of where your cars are made.

00:20:22.200 OK, but it's fair to say that the coming of electrification is a little bit like the coming of the iPod in the music industry.

00:20:31.020 OK, the usual assumptions and therefore the usual brand hierarchies no longer really apply.

00:20:39.180 So we are seeing people who migrate from an Audi to a Skoda.

00:20:43.320 In other words, they migrate from a petrol Audi to an electric Skoda.

00:20:47.380 Quite a common pattern of behaviour, by the way.

00:20:50.460 OK, both of them by the same company, actually.

00:20:52.500 I know. Yeah. So it doesn't actually make any difference.

00:20:55.000 But it's something that no one envisaged would happen.

00:20:57.160 Yes. OK, let's take it.

00:20:58.540 Yeah. OK. And so consequently, you have, you know, for example, German brands which have built an enormous amount of heritage around their competence in manufacturing, in particular, the internal combustion engine.

00:21:12.000 And suddenly cars are about software.

00:21:15.080 You know, suddenly cars are basically software.

00:21:18.900 I mean, there are very, very few moving parts.

00:21:20.820 I think the drivetrain of an internal combustion engine has something like 230 moving parts, electric cars, about six or seven.

00:21:28.960 I mean, I took my car in for a service and they said, yeah, the brakes are fine.

00:21:32.940 And the what did they say?

00:21:34.840 The brakes are fine and the tyres are fine.

00:21:37.120 I said, what about all the other stuff?

00:21:38.460 I said, there isn't any other stuff.

00:21:40.140 OK, so in the end, I got to replace the cabin HEPA air filter because I felt sorry for them and wanted to give them something to do.

00:21:48.000 Because I suddenly realised these poor garages who once made a, you know, a fairly pleasant living replacing your air filter and tweaking various, you know, parts of your car.

00:21:57.860 Now, effectively, you know, I mean, I'm sorry, but Faraday kind of wins this one just on the basis of simplicity.

00:22:04.800 Once you have reasonable battery energy density, you can't compete.

00:22:12.360 And so you have this very interesting position where what is the standard hierarchy in, you know, the automotive world, which has been pretty, you know, it's pretty stable.

00:22:25.340 Suddenly everything changes.

00:22:26.740 And it's one of those it is one of those cases like the music industry where, therefore, doing something completely radical because you're going to need a completely different target audience.

00:22:36.600 You cannot survive an electric car maker, particularly selling low volume, super premium cars, selling to people who are highly nostalgic about, you know, driving gloves.

00:22:48.860 OK, so to some extent, you have to acknowledge that the the market is going to move very dramatically.

00:22:58.720 And therefore, you have to do something which seems, you know, in some ways, it seems slightly counterintuitive.

00:23:04.820 You have this amazing heritage. Why would you turn your back on it?

00:23:08.360 But it's a little like the problem of red telephone boxes.

00:23:12.580 OK, everybody loves them, but nobody uses them.

00:23:15.600 And it's no good as a brand being widely loved if people aren't prepared to pay for the thing you offer.

00:23:22.620 But surely there is a market, Rory, for the nostalgic experience in which you have the battery powered car, but you have it with the Jaguar wood paneling where the moment you get in, it evokes George Best, the 1960s, the type, blah, blah.

00:23:41.160 And it feels like heritage, which is completely different to sitting in a Prius, for example, which is utterly functional, does the job.

00:23:50.980 But let's be fair.

00:23:52.120 This car hasn't been launched yet.

00:23:53.940 And certainly the early prototype had really interesting use of things like stone within the car.

00:24:00.220 It's going to be a craft built car, given the price point they're envisaging. 0.97

00:24:04.320 OK, but you've got to remember that the Jaguar XK120 was a supercar at a bargain price, 120, because it could go 120 miles an hour, which at the time was serious shit.

00:24:18.080 OK, and the E-Type was they were modern cars.

00:24:23.160 OK, I mean, I don't think, you know, you can you can argue.

00:24:26.080 Yeah, OK.

00:24:27.620 Both of those cars, when they came out, were futuristic.

00:24:30.420 Mm hmm.

00:24:31.640 It's completely wrong to say, you know, I mean, undoubtedly, by the way, there is a very, very interesting business which takes old classics and electrifies them.

00:24:40.980 Fascinating business, because in some ways it's a gorgeous car because you have all the reliability, quietness and everything else and performance of an electric car.

00:24:50.780 I mean, there's someone who makes electric classic Range Rovers.

00:24:54.200 I mean, literally from the 70s, they take Range Rovers from the 1970s and electrify them.

00:24:58.720 I think it's a fantastic business, but I don't think I don't think it's where where JLR should be.

00:25:04.720 So I'm defending it.

00:25:05.460 By the way, I'll also defend it on basis that.

00:25:08.120 OK, this is not a rich company.

00:25:10.660 I think in the in the United States.

00:25:12.660 OK, I've got a vague idea.

00:25:15.120 In the last year they were selling Jaguars, they sold 7000 cars.

00:25:19.280 And that's not a business.

00:25:20.340 OK, and they haven't got a huge advertising budget.

00:25:27.720 And yet this and it wasn't an ad.

00:25:31.720 OK, just to be clear about this, just as Dylan Mulvaney was not an ad.

00:25:36.800 It was a piece of what you might call other communication.

00:25:40.300 I think it was probably a brand film.

00:25:42.160 OK, which people watched and assumed was an ad because it was being shown on television or on YouTube repeatedly.

00:25:49.280 I think the media budget of that ad was probably zero.

00:25:52.300 I don't think they actually paid for that ad to run anywhere.

00:25:54.820 I think it was shown at the launch or or it was shown actually as a kind of, I think, precursor to the launch.

00:26:01.480 Now, about five days later, I was on a call with Rick Rubin, who's who's in Hawaii.

00:26:09.080 And I said, I don't suppose you've heard of that.

00:26:10.940 Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard of that.

00:26:13.320 So, yeah, no, I see.

00:26:14.640 Yeah.

00:26:14.940 Achieving.

00:26:16.280 Yes.

00:26:16.780 You have to.

00:26:17.480 But do you think with advertising, no such thing as bad publicity is true?

00:26:21.880 No, it's not.

00:26:22.620 It's not.

00:26:22.940 I don't think it is.

00:26:23.640 No, no, no. 0.89

00:26:24.260 I mean, that would be ridiculous. 0.57

00:26:26.080 However.

00:26:29.300 Being ignored is a problem.

00:26:32.160 No, I agree.

00:26:32.940 But but so I take your point, which is this is a brand that's in a very difficult situation.

00:26:38.720 They have to shake things up.

00:26:40.180 I also accept the fact that, you know, people like, you know, I respect greatly Byron Sharp, Mark Ritson, sort of marketers get very cross about it because their whole point is how you effectively stay true.

00:26:52.380 To to long established brand values that have been bought at great expense over time.

00:26:57.460 But you have to acknowledge the fact that those values were making a lot of people love Jaguars, but not many people were buying them.

00:27:04.980 Yes.

00:27:05.260 But what I'm asking, Rory, is something else, which is you talked about how people in advertising and marketing are disproportionately young, disproportionately open to experience on the trades, etc.

00:27:14.700 And it just I think what a lot of people sense is that they're really talking to themselves.

00:27:19.780 And the problem is, I don't know how many 28 year old marketing advisors or consultants are buying Jaguars.

00:27:28.780 Well, OK.

00:27:29.520 For 80 grand.

00:27:30.720 The only argument I'd make is that you could say that there are two ways in which you can be perceived in the electric car market.

00:27:39.320 OK, which is a willing and enthusiastic early adopter of the technology or as a heel dragger.

00:27:46.720 In other words, we're going to hold on to this petrol stuff for as long as we possibly can.

00:27:50.780 Now, Jaguars has done a very remarkable thing by basically closing down production of all ICE cars.

00:27:58.840 I don't think I think for about a year and a half, it will not make a car.

00:28:02.620 OK, and then it will start to launch.

00:28:06.160 I think this is the double zero, isn't it?

00:28:08.320 It will start to launch two or three electric performance, pretty high priced vehicles for which what we have to do is say, OK, well, before we start agonizing about who the market is, we've got to say how big is the market for this?

00:28:24.380 My hunch will be worldwide.

00:28:28.060 Is there a market for a super premium luxury electric car from a brand that's known, you know, for a brand that actually has probably lost relevance?

00:28:36.960 I mean, my sister-in-law wouldn't buy a Jaguar because she saw them as an old man's car.

00:28:43.220 Hmm.

00:28:43.820 OK.

00:28:44.140 OK, you know, you can't if you can have loads of people loving a brand, but if they ain't buying it, OK, it's the you know, it's the red telephone box from we all love.

00:28:55.520 OK.

00:28:56.720 And so consequently.

00:29:00.060 Are there enough very rich people who want to be very cool in Los Angeles, Miami, you can imagine the kind of places, London included.

00:29:07.800 OK.

00:29:08.320 Yeah.

00:29:09.440 Because they're probably not planning to make very many of them.

00:29:11.840 OK, so it's it's not.

00:29:16.820 I don't think it's a.

00:29:18.420 Now, bear in mind, I'm partly defending them just to be a little bit perverse because I thought the degree of the degree of a program didn't take account of the business situation in which they found it.

00:29:28.580 I think it speaks to the political dimension.

00:29:30.580 And this is this is what I was trying to pick up on with the slogan, because it's interesting that it's the original slogan.

00:29:35.620 But I just thought the slogan copy nothing is the most progressive slogan that you could ever possibly conceive of.

00:29:41.600 Well, it's from 1928 or something.

00:29:44.220 Well, quite.

00:29:45.020 Exactly.

00:29:45.640 Right.

00:29:45.940 So so this is because copy nothing essentially is, you know, it's year zero.

00:29:52.160 That that's kind of the the mindset behind it.

00:29:54.860 And in fact, it's not possible to make a car while copying nothing because it's still got the the wealth of human history built into it.

00:30:03.060 OK, the world, the world, the world would be a much happier place, I think, if it understood that there is a kind of universal law to things, which I would include evolution, animal foraging, algorithm design, business behavior.

00:30:19.940 OK, and that thing is occasionally is usually called the explore exploits tradeoff, which is what part of your resources do you spend exploiting what you already know?

00:30:31.320 And what part of your available resources do you spend exploring what you don't yet know or what's changed or what, you know, in other words.

00:30:40.000 In an incredibly stable environment, you could be where you had perfect information, you could be 100 percent exploit, not percent explore.

00:30:49.780 OK, there is a the two actually, I think it's wrong to call it a tradeoff.

00:30:56.260 I think they're actually a yin and yang thing.

00:30:58.160 I think they're deeply complementary.

00:31:00.020 You can't afford to explore if you don't exploit what you discover.

00:31:03.620 OK, right.

00:31:05.060 But equally, you become decreasingly good at exploiting because you exploit less and less and less if you don't refresh your knowledge by exploring.

00:31:16.560 OK, and that's why, by the way, I would argue that marketing and innovation are the two parts of an organization which are not exclusively by any means, but are the epicenter for exploration.

00:31:31.720 And I think they're the same thing.

00:31:33.320 I mean, I take a very extreme view.

00:31:34.900 I think I think marketing and innovation are the same thing.

00:31:37.640 One of them is effectively, OK, there are two ways you can make money.

00:31:40.960 You can either work out what people want and find a really clever way to make it, or you can work out what you can make and find a really clever way to make people want it.

00:31:49.940 OK, now, most successful businesses are a combination of both in some way and some extent there.

00:31:56.060 But that is effectively an exploratory activity to some degree.

00:32:00.740 What I think has happened in business is business has been taken over by the finance function, for example, which is obsessed with deterministic gains to what you might call efficiency, because they're and effectively it becomes an exploit business which no longer explores adequately.

00:32:21.720 And in the short term, it's perfectly reasonable thing to do.

00:32:24.960 In the long term, you actually go out of business.

00:32:28.020 And an example of this, by the way, which never occurred to me, despite the fact that I worked in marketing for bloody years, it's in John Kay's book, The Corporation in the 21st Century.

00:32:38.460 The companies that have been around for 150 years in the Fortune 500 or the FTSE, OK, if you look at the really long-lived companies, they're Unilever, they're Nestle, they're Procter & Gamble.

00:32:49.880 They're marketing-led businesses that are constantly having to effectively rethink what they do on the basis of changing tastes, perceptions, needs, etc.

00:33:02.760 OK.

00:33:05.400 And it's the focus on the consumer that effectively keeps them dynamic.

00:33:10.260 If you focus on your internal efficiency metrics, which I think a large part of businesses actually do now, you gain short-term, very predictable gains, which finance people love and which arguably the stock market loves, at the price of long-term fragility or irrelevance.

00:33:27.980 OK.

00:33:28.800 And so we'd be a lot happier.

00:33:31.020 So I made this point for ages about bees, which is that, you know, a large proportion of bees follow the waggle dance.

00:33:38.940 They take information on where there is a source of nectar or pollen or something else they collect, and they follow instructions based on existing knowledge, and they go and collect it.

00:33:49.540 Very easy accounting procedure.

00:33:51.520 You know, energy expended has to be less than energy recovered.

00:33:55.240 OK.

00:33:55.420 You know, that's double-entry bookkeeping.

00:33:57.520 It's easy.

00:33:58.180 OK.

00:33:58.240 But to their surprise, bee experts discover that a proportion of bees ignore the waggle dance and go off at random, which in the short term is inefficient.

00:34:09.600 However, if you think about it, OK, what happens if you don't have those random bees?

00:34:14.600 One, you can never get lucky because you never discover anything new.

00:34:17.080 So consequently, you can't actually grow because you're limited by the extent of your own knowledge.

00:34:22.220 Secondly, you're highly vulnerable to a change in circumstances, because if cows break into your favourite field and eat all the bloody flowers, you've suddenly got nowhere to go.

00:34:31.680 OK.

00:34:32.380 So bees have built in this apparent inefficiency, which isn't an efficiency at all.

00:34:36.920 I think it's actually a benign loop.

00:34:39.300 The explore exploits trade off.

00:34:41.920 And I think the two are complementary activities.

00:34:44.060 But we see them wrongly as being in opposition.

00:34:47.820 And so I would argue that I'm totally sympathetic to that conservative point of it already works.

00:34:55.440 Don't mess with it.

00:34:57.360 In fact, Hayek kind of wrote a piece to me, Why I'm Not a Conservative.

00:35:00.720 Yes.

00:35:00.860 And this whole argument was, well, it's because actually things have to change.

00:35:05.200 I don't think intelligent conservatives think things shouldn't change.

00:35:08.140 Agreed.

00:35:08.580 OK, right.

00:35:09.740 But you're absolutely right in things like respect for Chestertonian fences, that your exploratory activity should be, to some extent, ring-fenced and constrained.

00:35:23.780 And not only in extent, but also in speed.

00:35:27.380 You don't want people, bees, jumping on every passing fashion. 0.90

00:35:31.060 OK.

00:35:31.200 You know, they will actually, effectively, it will take time for a discovery made by a scout bee to filter back into the waggle dance.

00:35:41.380 But, I mean, I actually met a scientist who's an expert in neurodiversity, who makes the same point, which is she believes that neurodiversity in humans is actually a manifestation of the same thing.

00:35:53.620 Which is, you don't want everybody to think alike.

00:35:55.860 OK.

00:35:56.300 It's very, very valuable in any group of people to have people who see things differently.

00:36:01.200 One group of which would include, by the way, comedians in my view.

00:36:05.460 OK.

00:36:06.340 I mean, you know, I would argue that comedy and humor, which is a human universal, would probably get suppressed in some adults, I would argue.

00:36:16.020 That was the weirdest thing about having young children, is how early the sense of humor develops.

00:36:19.820 I mean, you can actually play jokes with, you know, with infants who have no faculty of speech.

00:36:27.100 You know, you can actually do silly little, OK, it's a bit slapstick.

00:36:31.180 You know, it's not verbally sophisticated, but you can make them laugh.

00:36:36.640 That astonished me.

00:36:38.500 Well, my son is two and a half and he's discovered toilet humor.

00:36:41.800 So he's worked out that if in the middle of a conversation he answers a question with the word poo, then this is...

00:36:47.820 It was fantastically funny.

00:36:49.000 Exactly.

00:36:50.040 Yeah, I had these two imaginary places with my children called Poo Town and Wee Town.

00:36:54.340 And I had to tell these incredibly long, convoluted bedtime stories about basically a place that was absolutely obsessed with faeces and another place.

00:37:02.720 I remember my friend at university rang the professor of Hungarian at the University of Cambridge.

00:37:09.560 And his son answered the phone.

00:37:11.280 He said, could I speak to your father, please?

00:37:13.540 No, he's on the toilet.

00:37:15.220 And of course, the professor of Hungarian that appears takes the phone.

00:37:19.800 He says, I'm terribly sorry.

00:37:20.980 That was my son.

00:37:21.780 I was, of course, not on the toilet.

00:37:24.200 But Rory, let's go back to something, because I think this is a very important point, which is the thing that gets my goat personally.

00:37:31.420 And as someone who doesn't identify as conservative, despite what everybody else says, is the moralistic aspect of this, where I look at these companies...

00:37:40.420 Oh, yes, I completely agree.

00:37:41.020 I completely agree.

00:37:41.820 And particularly Ben and Jerry's, and they start lecturing me about Palestine or whatever it is.

00:37:47.080 And I go, hang on a second.

00:37:48.780 What, you're owned by Procter & Gamble?

00:37:50.880 Unilever, I think it is.

00:37:51.640 Oh, Unilever.

00:37:52.680 Yeah.

00:37:53.480 Unilever.

00:37:54.160 Who are you to be lecturing me about zilch? 1.00

00:37:58.180 And it angers me.

00:37:59.500 In that case, the founders of that brand are...

00:38:02.700 I can't remember where it is.

00:38:03.420 It's Vermont or somewhere, isn't it?

00:38:04.600 Yes, I think it is.

00:38:05.400 You can argue, OK, it's not a very good idea.

00:38:09.520 It's not a...

00:38:10.240 Generally, it's not a good idea to align your brand along political lines, because for the

00:38:17.660 obvious reason that it's not a good idea for a brand to alienate 50% of its target audience.

00:38:21.740 In the words of Michael Jordan, Republicans buy sneakers, too.

00:38:25.260 That was absolutely right.

00:38:26.480 He was asked to endorse, I think, a Democratic candidate, wasn't he, in his home state?

00:38:31.540 And his argument was Republicans buy sneakers, too, which they do.

00:38:35.400 And it's not a good idea to do that.

00:38:39.740 I mean, it doesn't seem to have hurt Taylor Swift, having said that.

00:38:42.780 But nonetheless, it's probably hurt Elon, by the way.

00:38:49.840 If you look at Tesla sales in Europe, there seems to be some sort of...

00:38:54.840 Cars are a very visible part of yourself.

00:38:58.260 The other thing, by the way, which is really important, OK, and for crying out loud, the

00:39:04.640 ad industry should be better at this than it is, OK, which is there is the intention and

00:39:10.540 there is the outcome, OK?

00:39:12.120 Quite a lot of wokeism is perfectly well-intentioned, OK?

00:39:17.320 You know, I wouldn't wish any harm on any of the groups which they intend to support, OK?

00:39:22.380 And some of it, by the way, has been actually pretty healthy.

00:39:28.960 I mean, I'll give an example.

00:39:31.020 John Cleese and I both agreed on this, which is, I mean, there are creative artists who don't agree on it.

00:39:37.200 But I don't think the trigger warnings at the beginning of films are an altogether bad idea.

00:39:41.280 If you've had some traumatic experience in your childhood...

00:39:43.380 I mean, I had a friend who went out of a film when I was much younger in tears because, as it happened, he'd shot a friend in the eye with an air rifle in his early childhood.

00:39:54.480 And the film showed someone being injured in the eye and the whole thing, you know.

00:39:59.120 I don't think that's...

00:40:00.880 You can argue that it sometimes ruins the dramatic aspect of surprise.

00:40:04.560 And I'll listen to scriptwriters on that question.

00:40:06.900 I don't think that's a bad thing to do.

00:40:08.940 And the intentionality is good, OK?

00:40:10.960 And the intentionality not to upset people is, after all, behind things like politeness and gentlemanly behaviour and very, very traditional conservative values, OK?

00:40:22.940 However, what you don't understand if you live in a bubble is reactance, which is there are behaviours that people are actually perfectly willing to adopt.

00:40:35.360 But if you tell them to do it in the wrong tone of voice, they will actually develop a counter...

00:40:41.120 In other words, this is literally a case where the activity is well-intentioned but counterproductive.

00:40:47.160 And I think there's been a lot of that.

00:40:48.920 I mean, you know, I think that when things become patronising, moralising, when, for example, I mean, this was particularly true.

00:41:02.300 I voted Remain, OK?

00:41:04.520 And I actually became a lever because I was so horrified at the fact that the people who were Romaniacs... 1.00

00:41:12.160 It wasn't just a question of they disagreed.

00:41:14.280 They were incapable of acknowledging that there might have been a contrary opinion.

00:41:21.300 And apart from anything else, OK, the quality of that decision was unknowable for 10 or 15 years, OK?

00:41:27.440 The idea that you could be that certain of the rightness of your cause just struck me as fundamentally alarming.

00:41:33.680 I mean, life's deeply ambiguous.

00:41:37.020 You know, I think in order to survive and maintain our sanity, we actually have to believe contradictory things.

00:41:44.360 And you find that all through...

00:41:46.680 I mean, OK, what worries me, OK, is that our education system is all about winning an argument.

00:41:55.140 And there's something deeply hubristic about the whole idea of human rationality, which is rationality...

00:42:00.640 In rationality, it's not enough to be right.

00:42:02.440 You have to prove that everybody else is completely wrong.

00:42:06.120 You see what I mean?

00:42:07.320 That when you win an argument, if you use a...

00:42:10.620 It's James O'Brienism, OK?

00:42:12.740 Just because I can string together a logical sequential argument about something, OK, does not mean that I'm right. 1.00

00:42:20.900 And that everybody else is an idiot, OK? 0.98

00:42:23.060 There are different starting points. 1.00

00:42:24.480 There are different contexts.

00:42:25.620 There are different viewpoints.

00:42:28.300 There are different framings of the thing.

00:42:29.880 And what's lovely about working in advertising is I keep making the points that the opposite of a good idea is another good idea.

00:42:40.360 OK, this is the most gloriously bonkers thing.

00:42:42.940 You've probably done this.

00:42:43.720 You live in Canada.

00:42:44.980 You've probably been to a farmer's market.

00:42:48.200 To construct a farmer's market, first of all, it has the completely bizarre thing, which is that you buy direct from the manufacturer, but you pay more.

00:42:55.880 Secondly, it's an unbelievably inefficient way of buying anything. 0.98

00:43:01.900 Basically, what you do to construct a farmer's market is you take a Tesco metro and you make it really shit, OK? 0.91

00:43:07.760 You've got to pay in six different places to buy five different things. 0.92

00:43:12.000 There's a cheese guy.

00:43:13.180 There's the guy who sells the olives.

00:43:15.020 There's the guy who sells the humus.

00:43:16.100 You're going back a few centuries in human history.

00:43:18.220 And it's effectively, exactly, it's a reversion to some medieval concept of what a market's like. 0.99

00:43:25.120 People love the fucking things, right? 0.97

00:43:27.820 I don't, you know, and it's partly it must be human exchange. 0.99

00:43:31.200 It must be, you know, the relational nature of the exchange.

00:43:33.780 I think a large part of markets are street theatre.

00:43:37.400 I think it's kind of performative.

00:43:39.120 Yes.

00:43:39.520 That we like being seen there.

00:43:41.140 We like exercising discernment.

00:43:43.240 And we also, in a sense, there's probably an element of the jack-of-all-trades heuristic, which is, well, if you only sell dips, they're going to be pretty fucking good, because otherwise you wouldn't be around in six months' time.

00:43:56.960 You know, it's why we buy.

00:43:57.780 I mean, very interesting question.

00:43:59.000 Why are fishmongers and butchers always totally different shops?

00:44:03.540 You know, say it's a similar mystery to why do the people who do heel repair also do key cutting?

00:44:09.920 I like to think of myself as a kind of market Darwinist, you know, going around the Galapagos Islands.

00:44:16.040 But you have to be comfortable in this business with the idea that, you know, large parts of life are inherently contradictory.

00:44:25.360 That sometimes the right answer is not B.

00:44:29.020 It's a mixture of A plus C.

00:44:31.660 Simple as that.

00:44:32.780 Okay.

00:44:32.900 And consequently, it's not safe to say that just because my motive for producing this Gillette ad is well-intentioned, that therefore it will have the consequences that I wished for.

00:44:48.180 And by the way, I think a large part of DEI in the workplace has had the unintended consequence of really, really pissing off a large proportion of your own workforce through the implication that they don't deserve to be there.

00:45:04.440 Okay.

00:45:05.000 I mean, if you're really cynical, okay, you'd say that it suited the interests of employers to reduce the sense of legitimacy of its own workforce.

00:45:20.680 Because, you know, in other words, I can't really ask for a pay rise anymore because, you know, I probably shouldn't be here in the first place.

00:45:27.400 Okay.

00:45:27.840 Have you ever met Dan Davis, who wrote the book The Unaccountability Machine?

00:45:35.360 Fantastic book.

00:45:36.660 But this comes from Cybernetics.

00:45:38.240 Cybernetics, by the way, brilliant idea, branding disaster.

00:45:42.600 It's a very, very interesting idea which studies the flow of information within organizations and the biases and constrictions and bottlenecks that affect information.

00:45:55.020 Whereas what we tend to do is look at businesses through the lens of the flow of money.

00:45:59.180 This is looking at things through the lens of information.

00:46:02.680 And the problem with cybernetics was about six years after it was invented, Doctor Who came up with the Cyberman, which, broadly speaking, ruined the chances of this discipline through a completely unpredictable nexicographical misfortune.

00:46:18.680 But one of the great phrases of Stafford Beard, I think, is the purpose of the system is what it does, which is you can have this system which is intended to do this wonderful thing, and it can actually end up having not only unintended consequences, it can end up being massively counterproductive.

00:46:36.680 And I think that happens all the time, because when we intervene in a complex system, this isn't a simple Newtonian relationship between input and output.

00:46:48.040 Completely weird and strange things happen.

00:46:50.760 And by the way, I mean, I'm going to go off on a slight tangent here, which I have to do.

00:46:55.680 There's a problem with the NHS.

00:46:58.080 There's an informational problem with the NHS, which nobody's talked about nearly enough.

00:47:03.160 There's also a problem with journalism to the same effect, OK?

00:47:07.140 Now, in the United States, the customer, if you like, of a hospital, for example, is to some extent the patient.

00:47:17.540 He's also insurance companies and everybody else, but ultimately it's the patient. 0.71

00:47:22.400 If you're a doctor at the Mayo Clinic and you go on the record saying, actually, the Mayo Clinic's a bit shit and we haven't got enough equipment and there are patients in all the corridors, 0.97

00:47:30.640 none of the other doctors will ever speak to you ever again, because you've basically shat on their turf, OK? 0.97

00:47:36.000 Because it might discourage customers from coming to the hospital.

00:47:38.880 So it's in the interests of American hospitals to pretend they're better than they really are, although, to be fair, the Mayo Clinic is incredibly good.

00:47:45.280 So I don't want to make enemies there.

00:47:48.860 In the NHS, your source of funding is the government.

00:47:51.360 So the collectively healthy thing to do is to say we're really beleaguered.

00:47:56.120 There are patients lining up in the corridors. 0.97

00:47:58.460 Now, let's say you're an NHS consultant dermatologist and you appeared on Sky News and said, frankly, it's a bit of a piece of piss. 0.88

00:48:05.820 I knock off early on Fridays.

00:48:08.020 I've got a nice house in Spain.

00:48:10.420 And, frankly, you know, frankly, you know, I've got a nice office with a swivel chair and I've got all the funding I could possibly want.

00:48:18.180 None of the other doctors will ever speak to you ever again, because you've broken the rule, which is you have to say how bad things are.

00:48:23.560 Now, I'm not saying the NHS isn't in a bad state, although many of my experiences with it are actually much better than I expected.

00:48:32.460 It's got a particularly bad user interface and it's not very good at presentation.

00:48:37.080 OK, but actually the fundamentals of what it does, for the most part, I personally, I found pretty impressive.

00:48:43.600 Oh, usually when you get the treatment, it's pretty good.

00:48:45.620 I think the reason people are very concerned about the state of it is the fact that you have to wait a long time to be treated, which you do for many, many things.

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00:50:26.860 Yes, I mean, personally, I think there are technological and psychological ways we can probably solve that problem to an extent.

00:50:33.900 OK, I don't think the waiting list is the correct unit of proxy metric for effectiveness.

00:50:39.020 There are many conditions, after all, where actually are back conditions.

00:50:43.140 A lot of people get better off their own bat, you know, over intervening.

00:50:48.320 It's worth noting that the U.S. system is probably biased towards intervention.

00:50:52.160 Oh, definitely.

00:50:53.140 It's one of the reasons that the trans issue was much more prominent, particularly when it comes to surgery and puberty blockers, etc.

00:50:59.180 Because it's like there's money to be made from this, you know, over there.

00:51:03.080 So you have this fundamental problem.

00:51:04.700 You also have a problem in journalism.

00:51:06.320 And I'm interested because you're from Venezuela and you're from Moscow originally.

00:51:11.480 Is that right?

00:51:12.020 And you quite like the U.K.?

00:51:14.660 Yes.

00:51:15.640 OK.

00:51:16.160 Yeah.

00:51:16.500 Now, in journalism, if you write anything that's positive about anything, OK, you are regarded to be basically in the pocket of the PR industry.

00:51:26.760 And you're not a serious journalist.

00:51:28.860 The only everybody's trying to be Woodward and Bernstein, basically, in journalism, aren't they? 1.00

00:51:33.180 Everything's really shit. 0.99

00:51:34.800 I mean, I think Paxman actually said it. 1.00

00:51:36.480 Who is this liar and why is he lying to me is effectively his default position.

00:51:42.140 I mean, I was surprised when I first had vague experience of practical politics that there are quite a few cross-party bodies where people perfectly,

00:51:50.240 amicably, get on with people across the political divide to try and solve a problem to mutual advantage, OK?

00:51:57.200 I didn't really realize this was going on.

00:51:59.280 I assumed the whole thing was just about inter-Nissan conflict.

00:52:02.900 Now, you have this problem in journalism, particularly in the U.K.

00:52:05.800 In the U.S., they will hero a company.

00:52:09.120 In fact, they'll show an unhealthy degree of deference and respect towards just very rich people in the U.S.

00:52:16.900 In the U.K., we do have an opposite problem.

00:52:19.120 I think there are really, really interesting businesses in the U.K., you know, extraordinary businesses like Octopus Energy, for example,

00:52:27.160 or Wise or Monzo, FinTech, Ocado, OK?

00:52:32.620 Actually, the fact that, you know, what you can get delivered, which, by the way, is of huge benefit, by the way, to the elderly.

00:52:38.820 No one ever mentions this fact.

00:52:40.500 But my dad, the last three years of my dad's life were undoubtedly, and he won't up there, he won't mind me saying this,

00:52:49.320 were absolutely heightened by the fact that he could get, you know, the entire, well, not quite the entire range,

00:52:55.260 a large part of the range of M&S food delivered to his door when he was no longer able to travel into the local town

00:53:02.100 where the M&S wasn't that big anyway.

00:53:03.920 And that, you know, those things are, you know, material benefits, OK?

00:53:08.760 If they were run by a charity, we'd think those people were heroes, OK?

00:53:13.200 And the complete negativity about Britain in the press I find unbelievably depressing. 0.94

00:53:20.100 I think it's ridiculous.

00:53:22.200 But isn't that just a reflection of the culture?

00:53:25.260 Because just as we get the politicians that we deserve, Rory, we also get the media that we deserve.

00:53:31.060 Because if you're putting out content and articles or whatever it may be,

00:53:35.140 and it's getting no engagement because it's very positive,

00:53:38.220 then why are you going to continue to do that if the negative articles that you put out get far more engagement?

00:53:44.000 This is a bit complicated because there's a very, very bright marketer at the Financial Times

00:53:49.060 who argues, I think very convincingly,

00:53:53.620 that what sells papers in a newsstand, which is what journalists are trained on, OK,

00:54:01.560 is undoubtedly Daily Mail stuff.

00:54:04.780 You know, this is awful.

00:54:06.060 My God, it's terrible.

00:54:07.160 The country's gone to the dogs and looking at it.

00:54:10.480 The Daily Mail, the Daily Mail, I really, I was in the Canary Islands only yesterday.

00:54:17.840 I have to confess, I bought a copy of the mail on Sunday.

00:54:20.780 Paper, right? 1.00

00:54:22.440 Fucking trees. 0.99

00:54:23.600 I really rather enjoyed, I rather enjoyed reading it, OK. 0.99

00:54:28.740 But it does also worry me in the sense that it has this knee-jerk horror of any kind of new thing,

00:54:36.840 whether it's electric cars or drones or whatever, that may have a negative consequence.

00:54:41.220 I'll come on to that a little bit later.

00:54:43.380 And when you say that it's the culture, if you look at old Pathé newsreels,

00:54:47.440 they're insanely upbeat, you know, you know, plucky British troops, you know, fending off whatever.

00:54:54.700 They're very, very patriotic, first of all.

00:54:57.700 And they are actually very, very optimistic about the future, OK?

00:55:03.740 So, you know, the 1930s, which was probably the high point of innovation, to be honest,

00:55:07.800 in, you know, certainly outside the field of bits.

00:55:11.380 You know, my grandmother went from collecting rents in a horse pony and trap to effectively jet travel in her lifetime. 0.98

00:55:22.340 It was very, very, you know, positive.

00:55:26.320 And so something bothers me about this, that there are a lot of things where there are very heavy informational asymmetries.

00:55:35.260 And I think we just have to be conscious of those.

00:55:36.760 I mentioned the NHS, which is, it is in no one's interest in the NHS to spread a good news story,

00:55:42.760 unless it's about how brilliant the director of the local trust is, OK?

00:55:47.360 Because, effectively, you will lose social, you will be a social outcast for suggesting the problem is less than it is, OK?

00:55:58.900 There's undoubtedly a negativity bias.

00:56:01.520 Now, where this FT marketing person is very clever is she says that that's true of what gets someone to buy a newspaper or go to a website.

00:56:13.160 But most of our business is subscription.

00:56:16.180 And what people like to read is not the same as what makes people buy a publication.

00:56:22.800 Now, if you look at successes, I would say the spectator, I would say this, wouldn't I,

00:56:27.200 is actually reasonably balanced between optimism and pessimism and between, you know, positivity and negativity.

00:56:35.000 You know, it's not a doom-mongering publication.

00:56:37.680 You know, I can write positive articles.

00:56:39.300 I can write negative articles.

00:56:40.760 The Week, which is a fantastically successful, again, that's probably, what, 80% subscription-based, OK?

00:56:47.620 So, the FT, her argument is that, actually, once we're a subscriber to a publication, rather than, like, once we make friends with someone, OK,

00:56:58.640 we don't want them to be a massive, great doom-monger, OK?

00:57:02.340 That's an element of journalism which actually comes from the days of newsstand sales.

00:57:07.780 And that, actually, the negativity bias in journalism might be excessive.

00:57:14.740 It's simply an interesting thing to explore.

00:57:16.800 So, it's rather like sugar and salt in food.

00:57:19.460 Yeah, yeah.

00:57:19.940 And with nourishment.

00:57:21.120 So, you can put lots of sugar and salt into fast food, for instance, and that will initially make you crave it and want to buy it,

00:57:28.360 but it won't give you sustenance in the long term.

00:57:30.140 Absolutely, no, no, no.

00:57:31.020 But that's what we talk about on the internet, as clickbaits.

00:57:33.340 It's one of the reasons that, look, you always want to make sure that the way that your episode appears on YouTube is appealing to people.

00:57:40.720 But there are certain lines where you see people taking shortcuts, where they are putting the sugar and the salt all over it.

00:57:47.300 My trans dog attacked me. 1.00

00:57:48.720 I joke about this, which is, David Ogilvie very famously wrote that ad at 60 miles an hour,

00:57:52.780 the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce is the ticking of the electric clock.

00:57:56.640 I always joke that 2025, David Ogilvie would write, what are the 10 noisiest things in the new Rolls-Royce?

00:58:04.160 Number seven will astound you.

00:58:06.460 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:07.340 There are all those things like lists that the whole thing is.

00:58:10.540 Yes, exactly.

00:58:11.440 The whole thing is effectively, effectively reveals that the human brain is to some extent hackable.

00:58:17.460 The most extreme case of that being social media, of course, where there's the eternal paranoia that someone might be talking about you.

00:58:24.220 Yes.

00:58:25.600 Rory, let's take a detour from our side now.

00:58:29.840 One thing we wanted to talk about, because we're running out of time, is marketing and kind of PR when it comes to the political environment now.

00:58:41.560 Go on.

00:58:42.320 So with the political parties in the UK and also with Donald Trump, is there anything that stands out for you that you think is interesting to mention?

00:58:50.160 One thing that struck me as a bit weird is that Trump derangement syndrome seems to be much less this time around.

00:58:57.000 Oh, yeah.

00:58:57.760 Well, it's because he's won.

00:58:59.160 Well, he won decisively, I guess.

00:59:01.560 Exactly.

00:59:01.760 Okay.

00:59:02.180 Exactly.

00:59:02.640 So, but why does what is, after all, I mean, the difference between a decisive win and a narrow win is probably only, you know, 600,000 votes in the right place.

00:59:13.780 It was a very demoralizing defeat for the Democrats in America.

00:59:17.680 One also has to contend that the Democrats in the United States are the biggest sort of marketing fuck-up you can possibly imagine.

00:59:24.540 Why do you say that?

00:59:25.540 Well, I mean, first of all, the decision of Biden to run again should have been suppressed very, very early on.

00:59:34.880 This must be suppressed.

00:59:35.920 No, no, no, no, no.

00:59:36.900 But, I mean, if you've got some sort of party operation, there must, there has to be a mechanism where you go, look, you cannot win.

00:59:44.260 Or rather, you know, in other words, the chances are that in some debate or some other thing, you fall down a flight of stairs, whatever happens, that, you know, that renders the whole thing impossible.

00:59:55.100 They're incredibly bad.

00:59:57.740 I mean, you know, their candidate selection seems to be incredibly bad to some extent.

01:00:04.380 And it's, and I suppose their failure to understand Main Street.

01:00:09.600 I mean, it was always a mess, wasn't it, the US Democrats?

01:00:14.100 I mean, it was, it was, I mean, back in the 60s, it was a kind of coalition of sort of southern racists and non-liberals, you know.

01:00:22.200 And it was a weird, it was, it was always a kind of very bizarre hybrid sort of entity.

01:00:30.600 But one would hope now they've got four years to get their act together.

01:00:36.140 Because, by the way, I'm also baffled because I don't fully understand the United States.

01:00:40.400 And there are a few people who, now your regular listeners will probably go insane about this.

01:00:45.500 But I've always found Elizabeth Warren completely sane and fascinating.

01:00:49.340 And I'm really interested to read everything she says.

01:00:51.600 But apparently in the United States, she's viewed as completely barking mad. 1.00

01:00:55.340 Bernie, after all, I can't work out any animus towards Bernie either.

01:01:03.380 I don't think there's a huge amount of animus towards Bernie.

01:01:08.340 No.

01:01:09.300 What about UK politics?

01:01:10.860 Something I wanted to ask you.

01:01:12.200 Let's say you were an advisor to the Conservative Party. 0.78

01:01:15.360 Bloody hell.

01:01:18.920 Look at that. 0.80

01:01:20.460 You look like you've got a splitting migraine, Rory.

01:01:22.840 Well, you've got a brand that, much like Jaguar, has been around for a very long time, was very successful at one point.

01:01:29.520 The oldest party in human history, in democracies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

01:01:35.600 Utterly self-discredited by its own actions over a very long period of time.

01:01:42.380 Some of that was contrived.

01:01:44.320 Some of that was synthetic scandal. 1.00

01:01:46.780 Look, I'm not talking about cake and party getting all this moronic shit. 1.00

01:01:50.780 You've got to remember, you've got to remember, in this country, our scandals are really shit. 1.00

01:01:55.020 Oh, absolutely. 1.00

01:01:55.780 Our corruption scandals.

01:01:56.740 I think one of them involved a motor caravan.

01:01:59.760 Well, I remember there was some kind of sex scandal in the Lib Dems where somebody was accused of having touched someone's back inappropriately.

01:02:07.180 And the line at the time was, only the Lib Dems could have a sex scandal without any sex.

01:02:11.840 So I agree with you.

01:02:13.560 But what I'm saying to you is, I think the Tory party is widely discredited within its own electorate now.

01:02:19.820 Widely.

01:02:20.560 Very widely.

01:02:21.100 Because of failures of immigration.

01:02:22.760 Because of failures to, you know, we are all three Remainers or Remain voters who've then become, you know, very antagonized by the behavior of our fellow Remainers.

01:02:32.460 All of us three.

01:02:33.620 But nonetheless, on Brexit, you know, they didn't really do what I think people voted for.

01:02:38.220 There's a wide sense of disillusionment with the Tory party.

01:02:41.160 By the way.

01:02:41.540 How would you rebrand them is what I'm asking.

01:02:43.280 Well, there's a similar question here where I'm generally in favor of a reasonable degree of immigration.

01:02:55.080 But I don't think it's just, I think it has to be, it has to have a democratic mandate.

01:02:59.420 Of course.

01:02:59.860 Who your populace is.

01:03:02.460 And what's happening is decisions on that are being taken by two groups of people who are lawyers and economists.

01:03:08.540 Yes.

01:03:08.660 And the first thing you've got to do is you've got to break this appalling stranglehold that there's a combination of lawfare and economics.

01:03:17.500 It's also worth noting, by the way, that the economic interests of a government and the economic interests of an individual do not actually align that well in that government would like to grow GDP rather than GDP per head.

01:03:30.160 I keep making this point.

01:03:30.660 In terms of paying off debt.

01:03:31.880 Rory, give us the rebranding.

01:03:33.480 How would you rebrand the Conservative Party?

01:03:35.060 I think the first thing you've got to do is it, what are true of all political parties, are far too much enthralled to neoliberal economic theory, which is only has partial explanatory value, doesn't have that much predictive value.

01:03:49.900 And the extent to which, the first thing you've got to do is effectively, I would probably, well, first of all, I'd probably go heavy on localism.

01:04:02.640 I think there's a massive case for the devolution of power.

01:04:06.460 If I'm right, Kent is actually effectively devolving.

01:04:10.760 Is that right?

01:04:11.360 Yeah.

01:04:11.780 Well, we're going to have a mayor.

01:04:13.360 Is that right?

01:04:14.020 You're going to have a mayor of Kent?

01:04:15.220 Different parts of Kent are going to have mayors, actually.

01:04:17.600 I think there's three or four.

01:04:18.580 No, I thought Medway and the...

01:04:20.720 Anyway, because it's got a population of 1.8 million.

01:04:23.820 It's not a...

01:04:24.340 I mean, a lot of people don't fully...

01:04:26.140 Localism.

01:04:26.680 Okay.

01:04:27.220 Yeah.

01:04:28.940 I think the extent to which economics drives decision-making and drives the narrative is completely unwholesome.

01:04:39.600 Most people aren't narrow wealth maximizers, okay?

01:04:42.200 I always say in business, okay, there are people who behave as economics suggests is rational.

01:04:51.860 Those people do exist.

01:04:53.140 I mean, famously, John Kay always says that economics describes the behavior of his cat very well.

01:05:02.360 Entirely self-interested, totally solipsistic, you know, narrow short-term concerns for food and warmth and comfort.

01:05:10.180 No, zero empathy, broadly speaking, psychopathic.

01:05:14.540 By the way, I like cats.

01:05:15.940 That's the weird thing.

01:05:17.020 But charming.

01:05:18.300 And equally, I'd say there are people who behave exactly as economists think people should behave, but you don't want them as your customers, okay, as a business.

01:05:25.240 Yeah.

01:05:25.860 You know, they're the last people you want to do as customers.

01:05:27.740 They'll just go to someone who's 3% cheaper, you know, with no particular loyalty, affinity, or anything of the kind.

01:05:35.260 They're awful people to have as customers, e-cons. 1.00

01:05:37.680 And my great complaint was that I think a lot of people feel cheated having voted Labour because, as I said, having someone from the Bank of England who's an economist as Chancellor of the Exchequer, okay, in a Labour government, is a bit like going on a Club 1830 holiday and taking your parents along.

01:05:58.480 It kind of defeats the object of the whole exercise.

01:06:01.380 But if you're going to vote Labour and yet you're going to have exactly the same kind of, you know, financial paranoia that you had before, what was the point?

01:06:12.020 And this comes down to an interesting thing.

01:06:15.400 I don't think, actually, Liz Truss tanked the economy. 1.00

01:06:19.340 I think there was something entirely different going on, which was to do with interest rates and bonds and pension funds, which happened to coincide with that.

01:06:27.520 But the narrative that as soon as you do something fairly dramatic economically, you know, effectively you're at the mercy of the bond market, effectively means now that nobody will try anything economically interesting.

01:06:41.000 My problem is that I don't really fit comfortably with – the next thing we've got to do, and, of course, no one will get elected after they've done it, is we've got to start taxing wealth more and income less.

01:06:55.340 It's absurd the extent to which – I mean, okay, intergenerational inequality is a problem which I don't think – I don't think our generation fully understands because we, at the very least, caught the end of a property wave which has carried us through life.

01:07:12.820 Your generation, we're slightly younger.

01:07:14.940 Forgive us.

01:07:15.560 No, no, no, that's true.

01:07:16.200 We never caught the end of anything.

01:07:19.400 There are people – most people our age, and we are in our early 40s now, never had a chance to get on the property light in the first place.

01:07:26.580 Yeah.

01:07:27.000 I mean, we did catch the tail end of it, but it was far less –

01:07:29.400 One of the reasons Londoners are left-wing is the person – you know, okay, Londoners are paying a lot of money to transport for London.

01:07:35.480 They're paying a lot of money in tax, but they are at least getting something for that.

01:07:38.780 The really extractive force for a young Londoner is your landlord.

01:07:44.520 And so as a Georgist, of course, I fully believe that we should tax property, and we should tax the consumption of things that are effectively not creatable or renewable.

01:07:56.260 And so that would probably include energy, by the way, as well, or at least fossil energy.

01:08:03.940 But that's the extent to which the economics doesn't distinguish between rent-seeking activity and creative economic activity.

01:08:16.480 Labour tends to be on the creative side of the equation, whereas buying a house and renting it out, I think we can fairly say, sits –

01:08:24.760 I'm not suggesting that landlords all have it completely easy, by the way.

01:08:28.380 But I'm also conscious of the fact that whoever owns the house where my daughter lives, which is split into three flats, never has to work again simply because they happen to buy a house at an opportune moment in 1983, okay?

01:08:43.740 I don't think that's an acceptable state of affairs.

01:08:47.260 I think that's – and the weird thing about economics is all economists are conscious of the difference between rent-seeking and value creation.

01:08:55.720 And yet no economist ever suggests that you should treat the two activities differently in terms of taxation.

01:09:01.380 And so, I mean, first of all, I think it's – I think the property market is simply ridiculous.

01:09:14.820 I think it's a massive, great sump.

01:09:17.080 And there is no point in growing the economy if all future gains simply gets parlayed into the property market, okay?

01:09:26.100 So, I think you have this instance – my father always believed that he thought that property was too cheap in the 1970s.

01:09:32.600 And he was kind of right, okay?

01:09:33.900 It was absurdly cheap, okay?

01:09:36.280 I mean, in London in 1988, I could have, if I'd wanted to, bought a – what was a two-bedroom – no, hold on, a four-bedroom maisonette in Notting Hill,

01:09:47.560 admittedly overlooking some railway tracks, for a hundred and something thousand, okay?

01:09:52.040 This is offensive to our journalists. 1.00

01:09:53.340 I know, I know, I know, I didn't buy it, so I mean, it's just – fuck. 0.99

01:09:59.400 The – and that seemed expensive to us then, by the way. 0.99

01:10:03.360 We thought, ooh, you know, a friend of mine bought a flat – bought a house for 220,000. 0.98

01:10:08.580 We thought they were fucking bonkers, okay? 1.00

01:10:10.920 I thought they were insane. 0.99

01:10:14.280 And they're now living in Spain, and the house has five people living in it, by the way.

01:10:18.600 Okay, okay, just a – okay.

01:10:20.520 So, if, you know, I'm – to be honest, I think the only reason young Londoners aren't actually becoming murderous is they don't really realise how different it used to be.

01:10:30.700 They don't have the chronological context to realise how different it used to be.

01:10:34.380 And – but there's a fundamental problem here, which is that if you – this is, you know, a joke I tell to Indian friends, which is there's no point in growing the Indian economy because the surplus will just be spent on weddings.

01:10:47.520 And my Indian friend said, look, I got married three months ago.

01:10:51.240 That's not even funny.

01:10:52.900 Okay.

01:10:53.480 But if you have this thing that will basically soak up the greater part of people's disposable ink – my father's belief was that one of the reasons that the 1970s property was cheap was that things like cars, televisions, washing machines, foreign holidays were really fucking expensive.

01:11:10.060 Mm-hmm.

01:11:10.540 Okay?

01:11:11.760 And therefore, you didn't have all – you know, if you really wanted a washing machine and you wanted to go off to the Costa every year, you didn't have that much money left to actually spend on your house.

01:11:23.320 And now, my argument is, what's the point?

01:11:27.220 You know, I would argue that – this is totally self-serving and a load of bollocks, but I'll tell you anyway.

01:11:32.600 Anyway, people like me in what you might call the creative competitive economy are helping produce and market and distribute 65-inch televisions for, you know, 650 quid.

01:11:49.180 Okay?

01:11:50.060 Now, bear in mind, in 1998, such a thing wasn't even available, didn't even exist.

01:11:57.040 If you'd shown one of those things to Louis XIV, he would have given you half of Gascony in exchange for your Samsung telly, right, and your drone, right? 0.72

01:12:06.880 All of those things become miraculous – where there are network effects and gains to scale – become miraculously, insanely, stupidly cheap.

01:12:15.060 You know, easy jet.

01:12:17.040 I'm a huge hero.

01:12:18.440 I'm a huge fan, by the way.

01:12:19.720 I will sort of – I will not die on a hill, but I will passionately defend Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Holiday Inn Express, Premier Inn, what I call the satisficer, you know, pretty good quality, very good value brands. 0.83

01:12:36.640 Because they've done actually a service which they've killed off the shit part of the market.

01:12:42.000 Oh, isn't that a bit unfair, though, Rory? 0.87

01:12:43.460 Rory, come on, like, there's loads of, like, what the Americans call mom-and-pop businesses that have been driven to the wall by these –

01:12:50.220 The good ones survive.

01:12:51.480 I would argue, though, okay, you didn't try and stay in a hotel in Britain in the 1970s. 0.99

01:12:56.460 Trust me, they were absolute shit, okay? 0.98

01:12:59.480 And so what Starbucks does – I'm not claiming that Starbucks will give you the best cup of coffee you've ever had in your life, 0.99

01:13:04.200 but it means that if you want to compete as a coffee shop, you've got to be a bit better than that.

01:13:08.180 You've got to have to the game.

01:13:08.880 In some ways, what they do is they don't raise the ceiling, but they raise the floor.

01:13:13.460 Now, I had a cup of coffee in B&Q in Tunbridge Wells, in your spiritual home, in a big branch of B&Q about a year ago,

01:13:21.940 and I remember thinking, hold on, this is better than the coffee I would have got at the Ritz had I been to the Ritz in 1984.

01:13:28.720 Do you know, that's so funny you say that, because my grandfather, who came to this country in the late 80s, I think,

01:13:34.280 and he loved Britain, but when he first arrived, I think he went into a coffee shop and he got a coffee,

01:13:40.360 and he – I think for the first several years of his life here, he would complain about coffee at every single place,

01:13:46.700 because he just assumed something was wrong with it.

01:13:49.240 No, no, no, no. 1.00

01:13:50.560 France is still largely shit. 1.00

01:13:54.020 France? 1.00

01:13:54.340 Yeah, they place enormous sort of stature on food, but until recently, you couldn't get fresh milk in France at all for some weird reason.

01:14:02.920 Everything was, like, super pasteurised.

01:14:05.080 And I was talking to an Italian, so don't take my word for it. 1.00

01:14:08.580 The Italian was similarly bemused.

01:14:10.580 They said, why – in Italy, you can't get a – you go to a motorway service station, the coffee's fantastic. 0.99

01:14:15.780 You go to France, it's shit everywhere. 0.99

01:14:17.760 I have no idea what's going on. 0.99

01:14:18.940 Rory, we've got to wrap up, and shitting on France is something we love to do on the show, so it's a perfect ending. 0.97

01:14:26.520 Sorry. 0.99

01:14:29.200 We're talking Americans and Germans.

01:14:31.400 Somebody has to take a call on taxing wealth more, OK?

01:14:37.560 The extent to which a bunch of people have done incredibly well through asset price inflation and have ended up, in many cases, completely untaxed on a gain which was utterly unearned.

01:14:47.160 Yes.

01:14:47.780 Whereas the people who are actually doing the work are taxed at a marginal rate of 40% in taxation, plus then, if you add, for a Londoner, the cost of accommodation and transportation, you end up effectively –

01:15:03.560 I worked it out once that, effectively, one of my colleagues, one of my younger colleagues, if I give them 100 quid, they just about end up with about 15, in terms of discretionary disposable income. 0.98

01:15:15.700 This is just bullshit. 0.96

01:15:18.800 Now, how do you get re-elected after you've tanked the housing market? 1.00

01:15:22.080 I don't entirely know.

01:15:23.040 The other thing we need to do is there are areas of economic activity which are highly promising, which we need to explore, and where I think we're too risk-averse.

01:15:36.060 I think that one of the cultural changes that's happened over my lifetime is an incredible sort of aversion to harm, OK?

01:15:44.560 Yes.

01:15:44.880 It's an extraordinary aversion to harm to the extent of people being – you don't even need someone to be offended.

01:15:50.880 You just need to be able to hypothesise that someone might be offended, OK?

01:15:56.100 And I met a guy called Bobby Healy in Ireland who runs Drone Delivery.

01:16:00.100 Now, I'll be candid with you.

01:16:01.500 I get a lot of things wrong.

01:16:03.440 And I talk about those things.

01:16:04.860 They're things I've been totally fucking wrong about, I mean, in terms of predictions as to technology and other things of that kind. 0.93

01:16:11.480 But I always thought drone delivery was a load of old bollocks, OK? 0.73

01:16:15.100 I just thought it was technology in search of an application.

01:16:18.580 And then I looked at the economics of what he does, which is you take over a few parking spaces on the top of a shopping mall.

01:16:25.200 Anybody who wants anything from the shop in the Dublin suburbs, you take it upstairs, pop it in the drone.

01:16:29.800 You deliver it at 60 miles an hour over a distance of two miles.

01:16:33.020 It lowers the thing onto someone's – typically their trampoline in their garden, OK?

01:16:36.680 And the cost of that delivery is about 10p.

01:16:39.980 It's insanely cheap.

01:16:41.480 For last mile delivery.

01:16:43.440 Now, what's going to happen here is that someone's going to try starting that and someone's dog is going to be mildly hurt by a falling tin of baked beans.

01:16:52.860 And that will be the news story, OK?

01:16:56.840 You know, for the next five days.

01:16:58.760 You know, this terrible threat from, you know, drone delivery.

01:17:01.900 Despite the fact that information asymmetry here, moped accidents aren't newsworthy, OK?

01:17:08.960 Every drone is five miles of moped taken off the road, OK?

01:17:14.660 The Chinese actually have a name for it.

01:17:16.580 They call it the low-altitude economy.

01:17:18.420 It's potentially a really, really interesting thing.

01:17:20.840 And just to give you the contrast about that, about how someone being injured by a falling tin of beans, OK, would be a news story, OK?

01:17:33.440 In 2025.

01:17:35.520 My grandfather, the doctor I mentioned earlier, he had a guy who sort of drove for him and repaired his car, who'd been in the trenches in World War I.

01:17:44.160 And the story I told my grandfather was they had an officer, didn't particularly hate him.

01:17:49.720 They thought he was a bit fresh, new, and over-eager, OK?

01:17:53.860 And so he was slightly annoying as an officer, but, you know, nobody they particularly despised, OK?

01:17:59.600 And one day, he decides to lead a charge out of the trenches, goes up the ladder with his Webley .45,

01:18:06.380 and gestures forward and goes, come on, men, forward, OK?

01:18:10.700 At that point, his shoulder is hit by some shrapnel, which means his arm completely detaches from his body,

01:18:17.780 flies forward about five feet, still holding the revolver, where his arm lands in the mud, OK?

01:18:24.960 They all burst out laughing.

01:18:28.020 I don't want to return to that, OK?

01:18:30.480 I don't want to return.

01:18:31.480 I don't want to grow up in a world, now, admittedly, I suppose, blighty wound.

01:18:34.980 He gets home, he survives the war, worse things were happening every day.

01:18:38.920 So it wasn't totally callous, in a sense.

01:18:43.500 I don't want to live in that kind of world.

01:18:45.200 But equally, I can't live in a world where, effectively, you have an approach to information,

01:18:51.700 which is like saying that a restaurant...

01:18:54.420 It's very, very good that restaurants cater to food intolerances and allergies.

01:18:58.440 It's very good that they offer vegetarian and vegan options, OK?

01:19:01.620 But we're now trying to create a world where you're not allowed to serve food to which anybody might hypothetically be allergic, OK?

01:19:13.540 And you can't have conversation where, effectively, you have that level of minority rule. 0.51

01:19:21.360 Now, just to be clear, I'm not a nutter, OK?

01:19:23.960 I don't understand why they serve peanuts on airplanes, OK?

01:19:27.180 Nuts, right?

01:19:28.000 I accept the fact that some people have very bad nut allergies.

01:19:31.080 Now, I really like nuts.

01:19:32.080 I don't have a nut allergy. 0.92

01:19:33.420 But I'm not so fucking keen on nuts, OK, that I go, oh, God, the prospect of six hours without eating nuts is intolerable to me. 0.75

01:19:41.100 It's not like banning vaping, for some sake, right? 0.91

01:19:44.020 OK?

01:19:44.440 I don't understand why they allow nuts on planes. 1.00

01:19:46.180 I mean, I don't need the fucking things. 0.99

01:19:48.400 I don't want someone to have an anaphylactic shock at 35,000 feet. 0.98

01:19:52.100 And for that matter, I don't want the plane to have to land in Reykjavik for two hours while someone's medevaced off, OK?

01:19:58.780 Just don't have the nuts on the plane.

01:20:00.600 It's fine, OK?

01:20:01.700 But equally, you can't have a world where no one's allowed to eat nuts under any circumstances because someone somewhere may actually be, you know, may have a bad reaction to them.

01:20:13.040 You can't calibrate the world that way.

01:20:15.080 It's just not realistic.

01:20:15.920 Well, you've preempted and answered our last question, which is what's one thing we're not talking about that we should be.

01:20:21.160 I feel like you kind of covered that.

01:20:22.580 So join us on Substack where we ask Rory your questions.

01:20:28.540 Who will be the winners and losers from the age of AI in marketing and advertising?

01:20:37.900 Broadway's smash hit, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.

01:20:43.300 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love, including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.

01:20:52.820 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, the Neil Diamond musical, A Beautiful Noise.

01:20:59.700 April 28th through June 7th, 2026, the Princess of Wales Theatre.

01:21:04.640 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

01:21:13.300 Get tickets at mirvish.com.

TRIGGERnometry - March 12, 2025

Why Has Advertising Become Political？ - Rory Sutherland

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