So talking about lockdown, how effective do you think companies will be at dragging people back into the office?
It's interesting, actually, because in the UK, for whatever reason, there are exceptions.
If you go to tech companies, there's Tumbleweed.
Companies which are very strongly kind of tech engineering driven still seem to be very empty.
What I know best is the ad industry, and actually, they're generally a fairly gregarious bunch.
and I think it's returned to a pretty acceptable kind of equilibrium and by the way I don't I don't want well personally I don't want to see people in the office five days a week because everybody who's engaged in some sort of part of the knowledge economy 20 to 40 percent of your working week is going
to be stuff where you just need to chuckle down choose your own environment and get on with it and you're much more likely to be more productive if you have some degree of discretion over where and when you work for those tasks that you perform on your own.
But there is this value of what you might call serendipity, coaching, for example, co -creation, collaboration, which I think still requires some degree of co -location.
You know, it helps to have people in the same place at the same time for all kinds of reasons.
However, what's weird is that the level of absenteeism if you want i don't want to call it that but you know what i mean okay is much much higher in the us and canada than it is in the uk now i'd always say cleave i well some of it's probably geographical in the simple sense that there are people who've
moved in other words it's difficult in the uk to move so far away from the office that you can't come in for one or two days of the week you have to choose an island somewhere you know or or go to scotland i guess um in the u .s there does seem to have been a sort of widespread dispersion of people to a distance
away from their place of work where it's a flight away not a train ride away but uh it's not it's absolutely not what i would have predicted because if anything the um the u .s had a very strong culture of presenteeism of people effectively getting in early, staying late, being absolutely desperate to
show their face. And the office occupancy rates are much, much lower in the US and Canada than they are in Europe or the UK.
One of our mutual friends has a team that works remotely around the world.
So they speak to each other on Slack, but they don't see each other in the office.
And as part of a team building exercise, I think every so often they bring people together.
And he thought this would be brilliant.
Everyone's going to get to know each other.
They're going to become friends.
It's going to bond, a team together so much.
The week after they had this in -person meetup, separately, three people asked for a pay rise because they all got together and had a beer and were like, so what do you want?
Hang on a second. I was told such a, because you don't have that kind of non -critical conversation if you're just dealing with people on Slack, right?
First off, there's a digital record of it.
Maybe someone's able to check.
I don't know. Can the admin check slap maybe they can i don't know uh and secondly it's like we're just here to do the job this isn't sort of play around time outside of work and do you really text the other marketing guy or whatever after work about stuff to do with that probably not no uh so there
is from a totally machiavellian totalitarian state organization point of view there is an argument to be made divisive rule silo off yeah compartmentalize the staff and then they never know if one of them's managed to negotiate a pay rise and the rest of them haven't.
That reminds me of an agency back in the 1990s who sent their staff on assertiveness training, and they all came back and half of them resigned.
Oh, God. Be careful the skills that you give to the staff.
No, no, no, be careful what you wish for.
It is interesting, by the way, because one thing that's disappointed me is I expected to see much much greater levels of investment in really interesting remote working hardware and by which i mean you know really really good tech at home there is a project apparently in the works called google starline
which is a kind of 3d video conferencing which uh there's a team at google probably still working on i hope so um but you have i mean don't forget you have a problem now in that offices have mostly shrunk their footprint.
They still aren't kitted out for the frequency of video calls.
In other words, the number of private pods in an office is too few.
The number of meeting rooms is probably too many.
So there's a whole architectural problem to be addressed in terms of how, because if I had a day with mostly video calls, I'd want to do it at home because it's easier to do that, you know, than it is to try and find the right conditions in an office.
The other point I make is that there are a lot of things where it's very difficult to sell people on the new behavior, but once they've experienced the new behavior, the old behavior seems ridiculous.
An example I always gave of that is nobody minded buying CDs when it was the only way you could listen to music.
Okay? You just accept it.
Okay, I don't really want to buy a whole album i just want to buy a track but you know um it's just what you do if you buy music then you had downloads of course the music industry resisted this furiously the whole idea of downloading uh even even to the point of not making it possible for people to
download things legally and the problem there is once you'd experienced downloads the cd seemed suddenly ridiculous and to some extent we didn't mind commuting in the same way when we just thought this is just a necessary part of work is the place you go to it's just work is the place you go to it's
wednesday it's friday so i go into the office that's the deal um the time you spend on the train the time you spent cleaning your teeth and getting up early and doing your ablutions didn't feel like a waste of time okay because it was just what you had to do the second you've experienced the alternative
which is get out of bed put a cardigan over your pajamas and click join meeting all of that kind of palaver suddenly seems twice as painful and i've got one of those fantastic quicker taps that produces boiling water on demand and it was difficult to persuade my wife to get one um but once you have one
of those things waiting for a kettle to boil feels somehow weirdly victoria and so technology often works that way that actually um interesting with electric cars, for example, the latest data seems to suggest that although there's a huge amount of resistance to electric cars, the people who make the move
generally don't go back.
Once you've actually, once you've kind of gone over that first initial hurdle of adoption, you don't revert.
What does that suggest from a sort of consumer behavior standpoint, then, that there is a kind of price that needs to be paid up front?
It kind of makes me think that the first movers within that industry don't necessarily have the best advantage because they presumably need to pay the most money in terms of marketing to break not only somebody into their brand but break them into an entire new ecosystem of tap of vehicle quite often
early technology is probably driven by status seeking rather than utility so if you think about early adopters of cars which were unreliable and expensive the motivation was either novelty or showing off rather than utility apple vision pro as the 2024 example would be exactly the point i i would argue
that yeah um you want to be the one person in your street who has that thing um and actually those early adopters do in a weird way pay a price but i mean there's an argument by the way which is that this also happens in nature which is the argument that birds, dinosaurs conceivably, evolved plumage
and wings for sexual display purposes, not as a mode of transportation.
So in other words, they did this thing as it was a peacock's tail, but it was on the sides rather than on the back.
Okay. And you could display your feathers as a proof of your health and magnificence.
And then, so this effectively evolved as a status signaling mechanism and then was parlayed into a mode of transportation because the wings became big enough to enable them to be used oh it's a mass it's a massive phallic appendage in one form or another that they can then fly with so you might argue
that that's true of thing you know i mean i've always wondered about technologies like the typewriter where i can't really see okay there's an advantage in legibility over handwriting but for a period of about 40 or 50 years um people would write a note this is how it worked in business i'm not making
this up okay in the 70s in ogilvy there was a typing pool uh which was a lot of people who you would hand them a handwritten note and they'd type it up so that you could then send it on to your client and then typically there was always a mistake so you then had to send it back and have it type no word
processors then so the whole thing had to start all over again from scratch and the question you've got to ask there is was that simply because you weren't a serious business unless you sent typewritten communication signaling in other words if you're you know you couldn't as a solicitor's firm or as
a you know unilever or whatever you couldn't send handwritten notes because it simply looked unprofessional so everything had to be typed now there may have been something to do with carbon paper and copying which had some particular role which made typing desirable but it's an interesting question because there's
there's not a no one could really consider that typing added to productivity quite the opposite it meant that every communication producing anything was painful the only benefit it may have had is it kept the volume of communication low because it's so effortful because it was so effortful whereas email
the cost of actually sending an email to 100 people is far too low yes because then the burden of the burden of both filtering and prioritizing falls on the recipient, not on the sender.
It's a terrible – I mean, it does amuse me, this, which is there's this hostility to flexible working, which is partly driven by the suspicion that people might be enjoying it.
Now, okay. So, it's not really to do with productivity, but there are people – I mean, someone in my company I won't name was driven practically insane by the fact that the Netflix CEO revealed that there was a spike in Netflix viewing between 12 and 1 in many countries, lunchtime.
Now, first of all, it's lunchtime, okay?
It's accepted that people have a break.
If they want to chill out by having a sandwich in front of Netflix rather than wandering around to Pret, it doesn't bother me personally.
But also, I would argue that a lot of people would be much more productive in work if they started work early, took a three -hour break in the middle of the day, and then worked later.
Now, commuting makes that impossible to do.
But I would argue that your energy levels would be much better managed if you did take a break in the middle of the day with the additional bonus that you'd actually get a bit of sunlight.
Yeah, you can maybe pick the kids up at the end of that.
If you're a Scandi, okay, in the winter, you go to work in the dark, you come home in the dark.
So effectively, your exposure to natural light is Saturday and Sunday for three or four hours.
So, that doesn't bother me, the fact that people are actually choosing.
If you look at writers, you know, the people who are professional writers, journalists, novelists, they're very different, by the way, but all of them have sort of conditions under which they can and can't write.
And they vary. Some people demand complete silence.
Some people go to a cafe because they want some background noise.
But what these people clearly know is that they can optimize their productivity by controlling the conditions in which they write.
And it strikes me as pretty plausible.
That's true for other forms of knowledge work, where some people can't work if there's any background noise or chatter.
Other people can't work in complete silence because it spooks them out.
I've known writers who, you know, if there's someone operating an electric drill seven houses down, they're incapable of producing anything.
There are other people who a spectacularly disciplined.
Now, it does strike me that you will make people more productive if you allow them some degree of autonomy to control the environment in which they produce their work.
Now, I'm not suggesting that's five days a week, but I'm suggesting it seems to be implausible that giving people some degree of autonomy won't have benefits.
But the interesting thing is, if you look at business, we've imposed loads of things on people, open plan offices, email okay um slack teams etc without any real investigation of the effect it has on productivity but we don't really care because the staff don't really enjoy that so we don't have to
worry about it but the second you have an experiment where the workforce seem to welcome it suddenly met with a degree of suspicion oh my god they've gone to sainsbury's on thursday lunchtime well they're gonna have to go to sainsbury's at some time anyway okay um yes okay they're doing it during daylight
when the store's quiet well if they're working at nine till ten which they can do because they don't have to get up at seven o 'clock in the morning who cares okay what do you mean when you say that we're too impatient to be intelligent oh that's simply a question which is i i think it's a wider question so i
mean email which i mentioned earlier is an interesting case in point in that it was assumed that there could be no finer form of communication other than immediate and free.
And we automatically assume that faster is better.
And one of the questions I raised, which I still think is a serious question, by the way, is do we need slow AI?
Do we need slow Tinder?
Do we need slow right move?
Let me explain just what I mean by this, which is that in most processes of search, if you look at consumers, what they do is they refine their preferences according to what they find out there.
So they go into the property market, the dating market, the holiday market, and they have a set list of preferences to begin with.
If you talk to any real estate agent, most people who deal with a human real estate agent end up buying or renting a property which meets remarkably few if any of their initial criteria that's probably true of the people people marry as well i would guess that you if you ask someone effectively to write
down put it put it very simply we think we know what we want but we don't is probably the simplest way in which and the way we discover what we want is by a kind of exploratory process of discovery where we explore the market and what's available and what they cost and what we experience when having
a look at a particular house or person then refines our preferences and so this what you might call the right move approach to decision making which is define what you like we give it to you you buy one of those okay looks to us as if it's a perfectly sensible and efficient way of choosing a house.
But actually, we don't see what we don't see.
Actually, I was talking to someone this morning, I better not give away who they are, who discovered that right move, there are areas of London which are holes.
In other words, they don't fall into any predefined area on right move.
And property prices in those areas are disproportionately low because you can't search for any property that's in that area now it might be if you're looking for a much bigger area but in other words in other words they're not in kensington they're not in notting hill in other words they're these weird
little islands of undefined location where you can actually have disproportionately cheap property because right move is kind of blind to the existence wow you also have the problem which is you can't sell a property apparently now for 850 ,000 pounds your estate agent or anybody else will tell you no no you've
got to make it say 810 or 900 890 okay that's fine and the reason is that people search for property either 900 ,000 and down or 800 ,000 and up and two things happen one they're less likely to find you at all because you're further away from their searching point.
Secondly, if they do find you, the people who are searching 900 and down are a bit disquieted because they think you're too cheap.
And the people who are searching 800 and up think you're a bit too expensive.
So the extent to which what seems like a completely rational filtration process in online searching activity or decision making may be deeply flawed because it doesn't reflect the way in which we make decisions in the real world, which is we recalibrate what we want according to what we find.
We'll get back to talking to Rory in one minute.
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That's drinklmnt .com slash modern wisdom what was that uh parable of three men getting onto an airplane oh the story at the beginning no that's just a story about how undoubtedly in all kinds of areas driven partly by technology what's urgent um crowds out what's important and it's a joke it's an old
advertising joke told me by someone who is literally from the madman era which is you have a copywriter and art director and an account man, okay, who are boarding a plane to present work to a client.
And they open the overhead locker and somewhat implausibly a genie gets out and says, I've been trapped in that overhead locker for years.
To thank you all for releasing me, I'll give you each a wish so you can choose anything you want.
And they go to the art director who says, I'd like Picasso's life.
I don't mind my life, but I want Picasso's life, the locations the eye the artistry uh you know probably the women folk the romantic life that's what i really want and whoosh the art director disappears and then the genie turns to the copywriter who goes it's got to be hemingway you know he enumerates
a whole load of reasons why he'd like to be able to write and live like hemingway and whoosh disappears and then the genie turns to the account man and says what about your wish geez i want those two guys back i've got an important meeting in two and a half hours okay and there is that element where and by the way
we could we could refer to this in everything from things like the shareholder value movement to business quarterly reporting to the extent to which in advertising too much money is spent on short -term performance advertising and too little is spent on long -term brand building and that's not because it's
necessarily more valuable it's because it delivers measurable results faster.
So I'll give you a fundamental problem.
The FT wrote a very, very good article specifically about the UK, but I think it applies more widely, which is, how did customer service get so bad?
Now, the point is, I felt like writing an article to the FT saying, well, if you occasionally acknowledged there was something interesting about business other than their quarterly financial forecasts, maybe the problem wouldn't have happened.
If you actually discussed marketing occasionally or customer experience or, you know, the value of repeat business.
If you looked at business from the point of view of what you might call a competition for customers rather than the competition for operational efficiencies and cost cutting, maybe we wouldn't have gone into this total shitstorm.
OK, but parking that rant for a moment, what seems obvious, OK, if you spend some money on acquiring customers, you can see whether it's working very quickly.
And you can say very confidently, we spend X and the value of the acquired customers was Y.
Let's say you want to make a corresponding investment in customer loyalty or customer experience.
In other words, ensuring your existing customers have a great experience and so they come back, or dealing with problems very well so that your customers don't leave, generally, you could perfectly well prove that that was cost effective.
And indeed, my hunch would be that money spent there would be more cost effective in many cases than money spent on acquisition.
However, it might take you five years to prove the efficacy of what you do.
Because it's slower.
There are businesses which are fast.
There are businesses which are slow.
they're fast feedback businesses which you learn very quickly an example by the way a very fast feedback business is comedy you have an instant feedback mechanism from the audience which basically tells you whether or not a joke is any good and whether you've landed it and so apparently if you go to
small comedy clubs you'll occasionally be surprised because you're sitting there and there are only sort of 20 tables and chris rock will come in and effectively it's all a bit weird but he's trying out his new material for the next run before you go to bigger theaters you try your material out on a small
scale and that's a fast feedback business Amazon's a pretty fast feedback business I would argue because it has a very high degree of frequency of interaction with customers something like banking or insurance is unbelievably slow I mean if you're a bank and you piss off a customer they don't even leave
by the way they just go inert okay it's not it's not like people go i'm going to close my current account and i'm going to walk off they just open another current account somewhere else your current account they don't buy anything any other products from you but it's not the same as uh as something
like comedy where you know within seconds how whether you've landed something or not and then there are also things which which bother me which is there are also things where i was talking to the guy who founded ao and they they have this lovely little system where when they deliver a washing machine
or a dishwasher or whatever, if there are children in the house, because they deliver things themselves, they give the children a little branded bear, okay?
Now, as he said perfectly right, you know, someone in finance is going to say, okay, what's the cost -benefit analysis, okay, on that?
And his point is, it's impossible.
You just have to make a judgment, a subjective judgment, that the cost of the bear is trivial and the long -term effect is likely to be quite high.
What's that thing about the Bezos has got when anecdotes disagree with data most of the time?
I trust the anecdote.
The anecdote is usually right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing with Bezos is he's going to, I mean, this is true of all those people.
I mean, you know, the sort of also very true of Elon Musk.
They have a very unusual, sometimes highly seemingly irrational thinking style.
um speaking to someone who is very senior early on at amazon everybody except bezos hated the idea of amazon prime they hated the idea of prime video um uh they didn't like the idea of amazon web services now jeff has an interesting notion which is what he calls a two -way door if you talk to people
by the way at amazon it's a very very interesting i'm not sure i could cope with it to be honestly honest but it is a very very interesting culture in terms of its approach to everything from meetings to decision -making.
What a two -way door is, is something where you can walk through the door and if you don't like what you see, you can walk back.
So a one -way door would be deciding to build a sort of two million square foot distribution center north of Memphis, okay?
Once you've built that, it's difficult, not impossible, but it's difficult to reverse the decision.
There you actually depend on a large degree of decision -making rigor and rationality, you know and you need a really rigorous case but in other cases jeff would say it's a two -way door try it if it works whoop -de -doo that's great if it doesn't work we simply stop doing it and to be honest the trial
possibly cost less than we would have spent just arguing about it if we're adopting a kind of purist uh approach and i think it is important because why i think this is becoming vitally important is most business is probabilistic, but everybody in business wants to prove and pretend that it's deterministic.
So every spreadsheet is in some ways an act of pretense because it's past information, which you pretend has wonderful predictive value, as if it's kind of Laplace's demon, but it really doesn't, okay, because weird shit happens out of nowhere all the time.
And you have this fundamental problem, I think, where I think what distinguishes someone like Jeff is they're probabilistic thinkers.
They just go, well, look, it probably won't work, but if it does, it will be spectacular.
And they are in a position where they can take those decisions.
In their defense, most people, I think, first of all, most people are promoted within business for their aptitude in solving reductionist deterministic problems.
how do you optimize this particular?
There's a number in the far right -hand column of a spreadsheet somewhere next to a person's name that says, that was green this year.
They made the number go up.
Yeah, absolutely right.
Yeah. And actually, by the way, they probably, in most cases in business, you capture remarkably few of the gains from a bold decision, whereas you capture 100 % of the blame if it goes wrong.
Correct. Yeah. So certain decisions, decisions which are what you might call low chance of success, huge return, that's when people leave a business and become an entrepreneur because they realize that there's no point in actually doing those kind of things within a business because if things do well,
you get a pat on the back and a bonus.
If things go badly, you lose your job.
Speaking of things going badly, Jaguars rebrand.
What do you reckon?
Now, I'm in a small minority of people who would argue that before you criticise what someone does, you've got to understand what they're trying to do.
And they have been completely forthright about the fact they expect to lose all but 15 % of their customers.
All but 15 % of their customers.
Exactly, of their customers by moving to a much more upmarket expensive car on an electric platform.
And the argument I might make is that normally what they did is anathema to anybody who loves what you might call brand maintenance and brand management.
But by the way, they didn't change their name.
They didn't call the car Zog.
They still call it Jaguar.
They still, contrary to rumors have kept the leaping cat motif etc but what they've done is a very very bold kind of okay in a sense it's look bet the farm here okay either we do this we either succeed in which case great or if we fail to be honest we were heading for disaster anyway because you've
got to be slightly careful this is where uh you know uh okay when dylan went electronic okay someone shouted judas the crowd in the manchester free trade hall absolutely hated it jaguar purists are going to hate anything by the way i've had six jags by the way so i'm you know i'm a loyal jag enthusiast
i i love the brand and in many ways i love a lot of the heritage about that brand.
But equally, I love red telephone boxes, but I don't think it should be the BT logo.
Okay, I love, you know, Giles Gilbert Scott's design for red telephone boxes, but I'm also cognizant of the fact that I don't make many calls from payphones anymore.
And I like Burberry Max, but I'm also cognizant of the fact that because of various things like, you know, Central Heating and Uber, not many people wear Macintoshes anymore, you know, apart from Americans and flashers in my experience i was saying this the other day now there are occasions where you
might argue that electrification completely reshapes the competitive landscape for any car brand or any car manufacturer and that what you have to do is a fairly dramatic pivot i'm going to join get that in you yeah absolutely not enough stimulants in us exactly um the there are cases kid a for example
where bands produce an album that kind of alienates their existing fan base okay you might argue that for jaguar this was a kind of sergeant pepper moment okay where we've got you know fundamentally we've got to do am i right that there was a sort of pet sound the sergeant pepper interplay going on which was who was first
were they on some trajectory toward slow motion irrelevance was that where they were going the problem with jaguar is lots of people love the brand but the people who love the brand didn't necessarily buy jaguars from new in particular right and the new car buyer is a pretty niche audience to begin with i
thought the ad was deeply weird it wasn't produced by an ad agency by the way um it was as someone said it was less a branding exercise than a de -branding exercise you might make the contrary position which is that it got millions and millions of people all over the world talking about jaguar yeah which hadn't
happened for years now you know i'm not i'm not one of those people any publicity is good publicity that emphatically is not true okay um however it did signal the fact and by the way it's not as if jaguar hasn't done this before okay that a big change was afoot and that something remarkable was going
to emerge and the new car by the way which we've only just seen this morning just for people listening i haven't seen it what is it um it's high it's highly polarizing it's an extraordinarily bold design i personally like it it seems to come in two colors miami pink and london blue okay and the idea of a pink
jaguar is um transgressive heretical exactly yeah uh i don't know whether you saw their twitter was replying to people that were criticizing the campaign, whoever it is in the marketing department, they're being very non -apologetic about what they were doing.
We don't care about what it was before.
This is a new era, et cetera, et cetera.
You know, really no heirs or graces about trying to bring along the heritage or - Well, bear in mind, they have got an advantage.
Now, if you look at it from the mindset of a game theorist, okay, if you're a volume car maker, electrification is, God, i'm terrifying it's clay christensen and the innovators dilemma because you've got this huge sunk cost in both expertise and plant in producing internal combustion engine cars you
have this incredible engineering heritage which you know don't get me wrong i love that stuff i love steam trains okay i love red telephone boxes i love driving gloves e -types you know girls from lucy clayton being taught how to get in and out of an e -type without showing your pants okay which apparently
was something that finishing schools taught in the 1960s all of that heritage is wonderful but when technology comes in i mean okay blackberry purists okay this is this is you know this is a kind of rim moment where electrification fundamentally changes what it means to be a great car because probably
reliability assuming the software doesn't go wonky is going to be pretty damn good okay now i i recently had a bit of an issue where somebody said electric cars are expensive and i kind of went well kind of depends doesn't it because an electric skoda will be more expensive currently than a petrol skoda but in performance
and quietness and you know and what you might call driving dynamics and efficiency see and you know the the electric skoda is probably more akin to a petrol audi than it is to a petrol skoda and the guy i met who's the kind of electric car guru at wired magazine was asking this very same question which is okay
you've got a bunch of engineers you've got a bunch of you know if you think about it the people who hated dylan going electronic were folk people i'd rather like folk music but it doesn't really exist anymore does it okay i mean you know you get the odd little so he saw the writing on the wall but got
shouted at for having been ahead of the curve dylan had seen the writing on the wall and decided okay and someone shouts judas at him i don't believe you play it fucking loud as he replies right now um you might argue that jangu has had a bit of a moment which is look the things that made us great at le
mans or in the age of mike hawthorne fundamentally what the hell is a car in 2030 2040 when pretty much any car can deliver all the performance and indeed the quietness that a normal driver would hope for okay um and the wired guy ask the question, is it going to be all about interiors?
Is it going to be all about design?
Is it going to... Because, okay, how do you...
Very simple, tough question for Jaguar Land Rover is we've got Chinese competition.
We're never going to kind of undercut them given labour costs, all the other costs that apply.
How on earth do we carve out a niche for ourselves in this new future?
Now, for a small car manufacturer and a small volume manufacturer, Jaguar is making about 60 000 a year okay they do have one advantage which is they can completely pivot and start all over again uh whereas um a large volume car maker has to manage this incredibly painful transition complex supply chain i
mean you know there's a whole german we're gonna which supplies you know fan belts and weird bits all of that goes because i mean this is one thing by the way which I think we ought to say about electric cars which I think is missed by a lot of people which is that if you look at a petrol engine which is you
know it's a cathedral it's a magnificent achievement a really advanced you know petrol engine all of those things that move and rattle and bump and filter things and need to be replaced and and the gearbox and all that stuff all of those things exist for only one reason which is to rotate a shaft to
provide form forward movement okay now i'm team faraday here because the way an electric motor works is you put electricity in it rotates which explains why with the possible exception of your lawnmower every single rotating moving thing in your house uses electricity as the motive power not petrol
okay you know there is a wonderful advertisement by the way which was done i think for i think it was either renault i think it was the renault the first electric renault which is equivalent to the nissan leaf where they simply showed someone getting up in the morning and their electric that what would have been
their electric toothbrush was actually powered by a little gasoline engine ah that's very they shaved and there was sort of fumes coming out of their rays very good okay and it made that very simple point that nearly everything else in your life has gone electric.
It was only a matter of time before battery technology, driven actually probably by the mobile phone industry, made this possible for the car.
I mean, by the way, Henry Ford and Edison worked together on an electric car.
It's interesting the resistance that people have, especially around vehicles.
I guess second to a house, a car is a type of identifier in a way.
It's a status symbol.
It's probably, in terms of purchasing, it's going to be second largest in terms of your capital expenditure.
You notice, by the way, when you go back up north, that northerners have nicer cars than southerners do.
Why do you think that is?
Their houses are less expensive.
Right. But the price is the same of a Jaguar in Newcastle as a Jaguar in...
You get this extraordinary phenomenon in London, which really depresses me, and I've known people like this, who literally have a £1 .2 million house and a £1 ,000 car.
Fiat Cinquecento or something it pains the i mean come on you know i mean the car is a much greater thing than the house is looked as a piece of technology okay you know um you're a car fan or are you one of these weird people who just like young people ubers around the place so i have single -handedly
kept uber liquid in austin texas um but no i have a i think i said to you last year i was threatening to get a camaro and sure enough i did at the start of this year yeah the only way that i can non ironically buy an american muscle car is when i live in texas with an american driving license you just
need it to fit in correct well yeah i mean it's par for the course you know if somebody drives somebody drives an american pickup truck a ford raptor or whatever the equivalent a ranger i think they call it over here if somebody drives that over here you feel like they're cosplaying if somebody drives
it in america you think oh that's that's cute compared to the tundra next to you and the six the six bed whatever there's a ford f350 i think there might be a 450 isn't there as well it goes all the way up dude in texas there's ones where you know some guy will happily throw his kids in the back and take
them to the park on a saturday morning or pull what appears to be an articulated lorry behind him on a monday morning he's very versatile in that way one of the thing motorhome yet that would that be one of my temptations if i moved to texas an rv would be would be quite nice um one of the thing that i've
been thinking about since i've been staying here i'm at the royal garden hotel in kensington and uh on the front door there's maybe two or three doormen.
And it's not so much of, at least the places that I tend to stay in America, it doesn't seem to be so much of a trait.
Yet over here, it could be replaced.
I've heard you talk about this before.
It could be replaced with an opening door.
It could be replaced with a series of sensors and buttons and switches.
But it's not necessarily about that.
It's about the experience of the doorman being outside.
Yeah, what you're doing there is the old consulting trick of you define the doorman in terms that make him most amenable to automation.
So you basically go function of doorman, opening door, replace the doorman with an infrared automatic door mechanism, lay claim to the savings, but an awful lot of consulting activity.
Do you know management consulting firms engage in this thing which is called gain -sharing?
now i cannot believe that anyone in a company would sign up to this agreement because it's appalling where they effectively say we will effectively define the costs we have saved you and we want you to pay us a proportion of the cost savings which we identify but as roger l martin says any idiot can cut
costs the real skill comes in cutting costs without actually losing long -term revenue as a consequence and so short -term cost cutting is dangerously easy this is where i come back to that point of we're too impatient to be intelligent that intelligence and wisdom is slow whereas seeming logic is fast
you can seemingly logically replace the doorman with a automatic door opening device what you're failing to notice is the other tacit and um subtle uh human functions which are dormant which might be recognition hailing taxis also security okay you know basically you know you don't want drunkards sleeping
in your entrance to your hotel um um and and simply maintaining the status of the hotel that arriving at a hotel which is notionally a five -star hotel and kind of you know just being met with an automatic door even if it's very fancy automatic door americans have come to a london americans want a london hotel
okay if you take american or for that matter asian tourists they want london to be a bit london -y with a guy in a top hat okay i mean i a friend of mine booked some friends from los angeles in the hempel hotel which was um i don't think it exists anymore it was in bayswater but it's kind of like an la hotel
which is in london w2 and they were gutted these los angelenos i mean they were very cool people right but they said if i come to london i want horse brasses i want hunting prints yeah okay And so there are all these nuances which I think are very, very easy to lose because costs are quantifiable and instantaneous
and opportunity costs, lost opportunities, lost revenue, that's slow and it's generally hard to actually quantify.
A lovely story about this, which I wrote about actually in the Spectator, but people won't mind hearing it once more, I hope.
um i'm i'm driving along this dual carriageway on the welsh borders and we wanted to buy some milk and the motorway service station appeared to be closed all the lights were off the kind of you know the petrol fuel logo was off the fuel prices were off it looked you know like as i said like the bates
motel it was completely kind of unlit my wife said oh bugger it's closed we know we needed to buy her bloody lacto -free milk because she's convinced she has lactose intolerance but um uh I said no hold on a second I remember going there on Christmas day I'm sure that a place that opens on Christmas
day wouldn't close at seven o 'clock in the evening let's just go in anyway and sure enough we find a fully functioning 24 -hour store um with I think you know might have been a Starbucks or something as well or a Burger King and we're the only customers it's hardly surprising we're the only customers
because for everybody else on the road it looks like the place is closed so i go to the guy behind the till i'm a marketing person you're pissing away revenue here this is insane there are you know every every 10 minutes there are three cars driving past going oh shit you're closed so i go to the guy
behind the till i go why are the lights off on the on the road it goes oh yeah i think the guy on the last shift forgot to turn them on there was no urgency now it occurred to me when i left the lights were still off when i left if that guy had nicked a lion bar at two o 'clock in the morning and been
picked up on cctv right there would have been a kind of inquiry you know he might have lost his job there would be extreme disciplinary action cost of the lion bar is about you know one pound uh in lost revenue okay the cost of leaving the lights off is probably certainly in revenue terms a thousand pounds
that night could be more okay but sins of omission are much less dogs that don't bark in the night are much much less easy to identify than sins of commission and we correspondingly get much less upset by them and so what you often end up doing is there are a lot of things like giving a soft toy to
someone when you deliver their tumble dryer it's nobody nobody would can you imagine a world i'd love this world but i can't really imagine it where someone goes what you mean you deliver you deliver things to people with kids and you don't give them some branded merch okay are you serious what what a fucking
idiot the anchoring and set point that we have but no if you if if for some reason you know there was a cost attached to something as opposed, so opportunity costs, finance people basically pretend opportunities aren't there because they're too nebulous as far as they're concerned to pay any attention to.
But then you wonder why companies aren't growing.
And the reason is because they're fixated on the efficient performance of what they're already doing and completely uninterested in what they're missing out on.
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Talk to me about this problem with seeking solutions through addition rather than subtraction thing that you've been on recently.
That's an interesting observation, which is that we have an automatic default when we want to solve a problem, that we add things rather than removing them.
There is actually a very good point.
I think Nassim made this point when Elon was appointed the director of government efficiency, where he said quite rightly you should be the director of government effectiveness because it's perfectly impossible to do things very efficiently which you shouldn't be doing at all and that's a peter drucker
quote which is i think it's nothing nothing's more wasteful or stupid than to see something done efficiently that shouldn't be done at all and undoubtedly i think there are um particularly among things which are ostensibly well -intentioned okay we never asked the question, would we be better off if we
just got rid of this entirely?
And so there's a great quote from cybernetics, a guy called Stafford Beers, where the quote is, the purpose of the system is what it does, which is quite a lot of systems, quite a lot of bureaucracy has this ostensible purpose, which is entirely praiseworthy and worthwhile.
And so we actually attach much less scrutiny to that kind of thing than we do to something that's actually selfish.
I mean, one thing about being a commercial company is people go, what's in it for them?
Okay. What do they get out of this?
I'm suspicious. This is too good to be true.
I'm not really comfortable with this.
We deploy, quite rightly, high degrees of skepticism towards the private sector because we want to know what they're up to now to some extent if you're working in for example something that's altruistic or charitable we suspend that level of skepticism we go on so well -intentioned isn't it brilliant
okay okay oh they're working for so -and -so isn't that great now it's nonetheless perfectly possible that the ultimate consequences of that well -intentioned action first of all it's possible that the motivation isn't nearly as as wholesome as we may like to think um uh but secondly it's also possible
that just because something is well -intentioned doesn't mean the consequences are necessarily positive or benign and so i mean there is undoubtedly a really interesting question of what should we what what should we stop doing i mean i'm very interested one of the reasons i'm very interested in flexible
work is it occurs to me that companies looked at in one way are actually very inefficient i i tried to get i did actually get our finance department i said yeah forget about the usual method of financial reporting okay how much does a client have to pay us in fee income in order for my younger colleague
and by the way, the fact that they're younger is relevant because they're not kind of vested in the property market as someone my age is.
In order for my younger colleague to go out and have a curry, and what you look at is the client pays us, then there are various overheads and costs, and there's HR and finance, and there's office space, and there's all that other expense.
Then, finally, the money trickles down to the salary of the person actually doing the work once the kind of landlord has taken their cut and the shareholders have taken their cut and everything else trickles down to my colleague then from that incremental amount of money 40 will probably go in tax okay
then of the remainder 40 maybe 50 will go in housing costs and transportation costs commuting costs so it works out that in order to buy my colleague you know you know a trip to the uh koan or okay a client has to give us about 250 quid now my argument is if you could get rid of all that shit and just
do the work on zoom okay in other words in other words the people this this seems to be an extraordinary extent to which you know in large organizations the people who are who are creating the value the people who doing the real work i mean it's amazing that capitalism functions at all when you look
at the extent to which you know money goes in and then incidental costs particularly property i'm georgist okay particularly you know property costs chip chip chip chip chip aware all of that and so the actual incentive for the person to perform valuable work and the reward they receive for it has mostly
disappeared you were talking about feedback loops earlier on the feedback loop is so slow and it's so molested from what what goes in to what actually comes out the amount of time you're on 30 days you're on 60 days you're on 60 days from the end of the month you got it it's the big problem uh on the backend
for instance with um podcasting platforms so youtube has gamified not only for the audience but also for the creators you have this little number that's one of ten so it compares where this video is now since published in terms of the duration of time 30 minutes an hour two hours however long with other
videos and it tells you where it ranks first of 10 wow this is better than your last 10 videos at the same amount of time at the same period after exactly obviously some things are slow burn and some things are some things pick up afterward but generally it's a pretty good indication so it's pretty
good indicator is it yeah you do get the sort of Shawshank redemption phenomenon don't you where it kicks in it kicks in but you don't have that you don't have that on Spotify you don't have that on Instagram you don't have that on most other platforms because they're not quite as creator focused and uh
yeah the power of feedback loops is is fucking unbelievable speaking of the you mentioned there um some inefficiencies within the system and some changes to do with britain obviously two million people just signed a petition to we are disgruntled with mr starmer sir starmer uh we want to make some changes
there we've seen a lot of sort of turmoil and stuff across this year generally 2024 in the uk what do you make of the state of sort of british culture the milieu that we're in at the moment i did make the joke that um voting labor and having a chancellor who's come from the bank of england is a bit
like going on a club 1830 holiday and taking your parents along which it kind of defeats the object of the exercise of it in that one of you know one of the things i i think we would like to see as voters and i'm perfectly happy to give this government to, you know, I think you have to give the people
the benefit of a few years before you get pissy about it.
I mean, that is, actually, I'd be interested to know who's signing that petition.
Is it people on the left who are just disappointed?
Is it reform voters?
Is it conservatives?
I don't know. Who is it who feels most kind of cheated?
I mean, you've got to remember that there are an awful lot of people who didn't vote for them if you consider the size of their majority okay they've got a massive majority but the share of the popular vote was fairly i'm not sure if you can be disgruntled with somebody that you didn't vote for um well
it's interesting who's demanding a kind of uh run again um some of the things interest me because we kind of i think a lot of people know that there's fundamental iniquity, intergenerational iniquity, which is because salaries are taxed very highly, and wealth, particularly capital gains from your main property,
are barely taxed at all.
And that leads to, I think, a kind of absurdity, which is that one piece written about this is it's not actually intergenerational inequality that's the problem.
it's going to be intragenerational inequality when people start inheriting houses or not inheriting houses because you can literally have the situation where you can work incredibly hard for 30 years and reach a position of some eminence in a business or in an institution and because your parents happen
to live in an area of low house prices or didn't own a house at all You're still living somewhere crap.
Whereas your underlings whose parents lived in Surbiton or Kensington or whatever it may be are basically swanning around in palaces going on cruises all the time.
And that does strike me as a fundamental flaw that we've created a system where unearned income, which is not really particularly meritocratic or inherited income, is treated incredibly generously, whereas earned income, I think the top, if I'm right, is it the top 5 % of taxpayers pay 50 % or 60 % of all
income tax? I think so.
In America, it may be the same here too.
Probably the same here.
I mean, that's, by the way, it's a kind of statistical artifact.
You generally, you usually find those power law effects.
So it's not quite as weird as it sounds.
But nonetheless, that is quite weird when you think about it.
Now, one thing I thought was extraordinarily interesting as an idea is, you know that chap who wrote The Trading Game, Gary Stevenson?
He makes a very valid point, whatever else you think, which is that nearly all economic models use single representative agents to populate the models, which is they assume that the person whom they're trying to optimize for is an average of everybody.
And as a consequence, inequality doesn't feature in those models because you're simply dealing with an average.
And so if Bill Gates walks into a football stadium, everybody in the football stadium is actually a millionaire suddenly on average, okay?
It's simply not a reliable thing to do.
And one of the things that strikes me as genuinely horrific is the extent to which I think the tax system is kind of garantophilic in that there are huge, huge concessions in terms of pensions that are given out, huge concessions in terms of inherited property, huge concessions in terms of capital gains
and existing property.
You also get this utter absurdity which fascinates me, which is that there are five -bedroom, four -bedroom houses which have one or two pensioners knocking around in them.
Nothing wrong with that, you might argue, except those pensioners are often skint, okay?
Now, it's a weird kind of way of being a millionaire that you live in a massive house that you don't entirely need.
Now, by the way, if you simply saved a hell of a lot of money and you just like living in a big fuck -off house, well, you can argue that's kind of, you know, you're entitled to that.
But you literally get people living in these extraordinary houses who are going to Lidl and worried about the price of lemons.
Pretty weird. If someone told you and you're a kid, you're going to be a millionaire one day, but you're going to be really worried about where you buy lemons, you'd think, this is a pretty weird world.
I mean, one great idea, Roger L.
Martin's idea, is that you should, at the moment, you get your first 10 ,000 or whatever it is of your annual salary is tax -free every year.
Roger L. Martin, a Canadian, proposed that that should be a lifetime basis.
tax allowance 250 000 the first 250 000 canadian dollars you earn in your life is tax free after which the tax system kicks in now that would be extraordinarily beneficial to younger people who need the money more and who could build up some actually you don't need that much in the way of savings to
i mean one of the interesting things about the benefits to wealth um is that there are inflection points you know that first house deposit well actually having five thousand pounds you can call on in a crisis is a really really i mean you know it's a really really big difference it fundamentally changes
what people can do i mean very interesting thing when i first went to america i was i think i was 29 roughly and i remember thinking i'm glad i never came here when I was skint.
Okay. It's a bad country to be pouring.
It's a terrible country in which not to have $10 ,000 sitting there.
Correct. You know, one bad thing goes wrong and suddenly you're in Leavenworth doing a nine stretch.
And so there are these inflection points where you can take people, you know, one of them I always think is that when you start earning a bit above median income, you notice that actually it's quite nice because things are priced for people who are a bit poorer than you.
You know, televisions, for example, flat screen TVs.
Let's be honest. OK, let's imagine that flat screen TVs cost five grand.
OK, we both would have bought one by now, but we don't have to pay five grand because they're priced for sale to people who earn a lot less than we do.
And so, you know, there are, I think there are these interesting inflection points in earnings.
Now, what's really interesting, by the way, and this fascinates me, is the extent to which pre -2020, the only real point of negotiation with your employer was how much they paid you.
Because it was assumed that you worked a five -day week.
It was assumed that you came into an office or some other place of work for five days and that you had hours and you had a place.
those were non -variables, and the only variable was your salary.
Now, to what extent will people start to practice lifestyle arbitrage, which is to say, well, I could work for Goldman Sachs in London for $200 ,000 and something, whatever, but actually $120 ,000 in Lisbon, okay, and a pretty good broadband connection.
Earning in pounds and spending in pesos.
And the number of people who might simply – I mean, by the way, that applies within the UK.
You know, there are a lot of people But you live in Newcastle and get 10 times the house for the same amount.
Exactly. My daughter went to Newcastle University, adores the city, quite rightly.
I've been up there.
It's fantastic. You know that.
It's a glorious place, which gets the balance.
I think it gets a lot of things absolutely right in terms of the kind of yin and yang of a city.
It's manageable in size, but it's not boring, remotely boring.
It has beautiful architecture, but it also has utility and it's got a coast okay um my daughter actually said she said the tragedy is in a way i didn't really want to move to london which is bloody expensive if i could have persuaded six of my university friends to stay in newcastle we all would have tragedy
of the commons i haven't got the tragedy of the commons which is that you're forced to go along with this kind of majority consensus you also can be on the winner takes all effect you can be on the receiving end of that too though you can benefit from that which i have been in austin why does any scene
appear anywhere any scene appears anywhere because people go no one's really too sure why and because people go more people go and then before you know it you've got the the hottest new place I suppose it was Rogan in Austin was it he made he made one of the big ones but before him was uh Lex Friedman I
think before Lex was Michael Malice before him was Aubrey Marcus you know you've got you to track it back to wherever you want and now everybody has a fucking second holiday home from Jason calacanis coming over from you know investor bay west coast bullshit world to come and now live on a ranch wear
a cowboy hat so yeah it's uh is it you know can i be really mischievous here get it in okay and i always thought this is why brits like living in la which is that secretly everybody over the age of 35 wants to live in the suburbia okay correct but in london it's just not cool okay i mean if i took my
younger colleagues i couldn't get them to move to bromley if i put a gun to their head secretly i suspect they want a little bit of you know a bit of lawn and a bit of a place to park a car yes oh so you've got it you've got a blend of la it's totally cool to live in a suburban house isn't it same that's
where everybody same same in austin uh honestly the the suburbs the olden style suburbs so what's up north which is the domain is kind of a soulless hellscape that was created for people that work at tech companies to not have to go far to go to the office uh but when you're few things it was also built
after the invention of the car yeah so the distance from the center matters a lot less um by the way it should have i'm i'm i don't normally criticize the u .s um but you could you should create high -speed rail to someone like san antonio shouldn't you could link a couple of places i think the the rumor is that austin and san antonio
growing at such a clip that they're going to merge into one huge megacity eventually you know it's only without traffic i think it's only 50 minutes ish from sort of the edge of one to the edge of another and when you think about we've got this land we might as well expand it um oh you've got another
advantage in austin which is interesting because you saw in the property crash of 2008 you saw very dramatic property crashes in vegas phoenix austin and the reason is uh they're unusual in that they're not on a lake and they're not on a coast and so they can expand in four directions which i know that sounds
right san francisco can't okay if you're on a kind of peninsula how does that impact the price uh because simply there's four times as much land actually more than that because area expands at the square of distance yes so you've only got to go a mile from the a mile further out and you get uh you know
what is it the square of the the square of the distance a fuck ton more land okay so there isn't really much scarcity combine that with the fact that they were designed for the car so you i mean i love phoenix is fantastic because they actually synchronize all the they probably do this in they synchronize
the traffic lights so when you drive in at night you can ride the green wave have you done this oh well i certainly know the way that traffic flows work that if you hit a red light you're more likely to hit subsequent red lights but that's it right okay i thought that was there's something there's something
called riding the green wave where there's if you obey the speed limit you can basically keep going that's only if you hit the first green though if you hit the first red you think I'm fucked here for every one that I'm going to hit well you and your massive muscle car won't be I can try and go as quickly
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Just going back to the UK for a second.
Let's say that Starmer brought you in or whoever it is that does tourism brought you in to improve UK culture, sort of tourist destination type thing.
Have you got any sort of branding or psychological interventions, which would maybe be low cost that could make the uk more attractive across the board for tourists yeah for tourists or for people to stay we've got the you know second in the world the uk second in the world for millionaire exits in 2024
china fucking literal communist dictatorship authoritarian hellscape was first with about between what you've got to watch the super rich because the super rich don't give a shit about democracy okay because they can capture power using money yeah rather than using rights and the super rich I mean if you
look at Dubai which has done a fantastic job of effectively saying um we're just going to make this place unbelievably attractive for wealthy people to live here in terms of low taxes okay very low crime rate okay uh you have um cheap labor which rich people really love you know most of us are you know
you know in other words you get lots of people doing stuff for you.
So the service industries are fantastic.
And to be honest, very rich people aren't that bothered about being able to vote because they only get one vote, which is the same as the, you know, the teacher down the street.
Why would I want something I can't have more of than somebody else?
So it doesn't surprise me, by the way, that actually very rich people are often quite drawn to authoritarian spaces because they don't suffer the downside.
Okay. But they again, you know, in some respects, they can profit from the upside.
China lost about 13 to 15 ,000 this year.
The UK lost 10 ,000 -ish millionaires leaving, but we have 3 % of the population of China.
We have about 5 % of the population of India, and more millionaires left the UK.
Second in the world in millionaire exits, we have the same number of universities in the top 10 as America do, but only 20 % of the number of startup founders and entrepreneurs so why what what is it that's going on and one thing you could do and the portuguese are playing this game i mean a lot of people
have i mean i had an interesting conversation okay which is that the where people spend wealth is increasingly i think slightly undesirably okay uh being detached from where people earn it now in you know i grew up in the welsh valley as my scottish ancestors moved down to south wales because it was the dubai of the late
19th century. It's like coal money.
It was actually, you know, it was actually, you know, booming.
I mean, my great -grandfather, I think, moved down to Edinburgh, intending to join from a croft, intending to join the police force, and was told, don't bother here, South Wales is where you need to go to make money.
But the people, including the coal owners, lived somewhere within, they didn't live next to the mine, but they lived somewhere within the proximity of that thing i remember my grandmother who's not remotely left -wing okay quite the opposite standing on cardiff station looking around and by the way cardiff
was a lot grimmer than back then this was in the 70s than it is now it's rather nice now lovely okay and saying just think of the money that's been made here and spent in more exotic places i always remember that it was a strangely kind of socialistic sentiment from a pretty right -wing grandmother and what you
see i remember having this conversation with people who are responsible for invest in kent and i said to be honest it doesn't really matter whether you attract businesses to kent if you can get people who earn money in london to come and live in kent and their families all spend their money here okay
that's good enough and so when you have this detachment of where people make money and where people spend it one thing the portuguese are doing they're proposing lower tax rates for people under 30 they're proposing these nomad visas uh lisbon very cool very attractive city likewise porto um you know
attracts people who like kite surfing and other excitement italy's got this new flat tax you pay 100 grand and that's all the tax that you pay for the entire year that's a new one from them so i mean we don't seem now the other thing you can do is just make the place one hell of an entertaining place
now i've always argued i can't get anybody to disagree with this i don't think pubs cafes and restaurants should be should pay rates or taxes because they're actually a social space when you spend money this this is interesting which is that economics holds it as kind of this is a this is my gary steve
yeah yeah which is as well as these kind of single representative agent models which don't understand inequality and you know by the way really bad inequality is bad for everybody it's bad for the very rich okay you want people the ideal place in which you live is one in which you're surrounded by a few
people who are richer than you and quite a few people who are a bit poorer than you but not so much that they cause a ton of havoc well it's not it's not just a havoc you want actually social spaces to be roughly commensurate with where you are cohesive and if you if you live in a place where you have 10
rich people, okay? And everybody else is massively poor.
The 10 rich people got nowhere to go to eat.
There's a fascinating study that came out of Australia.
Candice Blake did this.
They correlated wealth inequality with self -objectification as measured by sexy selfies online.
And wealth inequality is positively correlated.
The level of inequality within a local ecology is positively correlated with sexy selfies.
By men or women or both?
Just women. Just women.
Yeah. So self -objectification, self -beautification, sexy selfies online is positively correlated with inequality.
What's their explanation for that?
Proposed mechanism is that in a high -wealth inequality environment, women can see not only how high they can climb, but how low they could fall with a potential partner.
So the effort you have to make in terms of Botox and - All the rest of it.
There's a very interesting theory about that, which is why Neiman Marcus, there's an academic paper why neiman marcus started in texas not in boston and there are two explanations where you get uh more males than females uh the luxury goods thing is important but also where you get a high degree of anonymity
so in other words you had a lot of people moving in who can who can effectively reinvent themselves yep as high status individuals okay now just to give an example luxury goods only work really when you have an audience of strangers okay so how about okay had i gone into the pub in monmouth where i
grew up which is a market town with sunglasses with machino written across them okay on inch high letters i would have been the subject of complete ridicule everybody knew where i lived what i did what my parents did what i earned etc and this would have been regarded as an utterly ridiculous thing
to do the signal can be stress tested but if I go to Miami, I don't know, that probably, I don't, you know.
So you're undoubtedly right in that a lot of these kind of display and signaling behaviors are contextually determined by the setting.
There's another one that I'll give you.
It's called the environmental security hypothesis.
So this is human behavioral ecology, which is kind of twinned with evolutionary psychology.
Got it. It's a little bit more concerned with how we react to the local environment around us, how we sort of interact and so on um there is some pretty good evidence to suggest that men prefer bigger women when the economy is bad so men under uh resource stress seem to prefer bigger women and this can be
tracked in a bunch of different ways there's a strange hemline index as well isn't there which is that you in the 20s you had very thin androgynous women with short skirts and then when you have a depression the whole thing slightly changes yep well it's the again the proposed mechanism is that in a time
of resource scarcity ancestrally you would have wanted a woman that looks like she could survive a couple of months yeah exactly a couple of months without a good harvest uh and that seems to have carried over now so two two really interesting ones kind of as you've said that as the economy wavers up
and down it seems to be that the preferred body size.
Overall, the sort of ideal body that women have also fluctuates.
But they did a really great study on university students in the canteen hall.
And before and after they ate, they showed them different women's body shapes.
And prior to eating, they preferred bigger women.
And after eating, they preferred thinner women.
That there is something about even the sort of ambient hunger resource scarcity, which impacts the environmental security hypothesis, this as it's known this is this is fascinating because undoubtedly i mean by the way i think by the way i'm i'm a huge enthusiast for evolutionary psychology but sometimes
i think it jumps the shark a little bit in terms of i think these things are contributory but i don't think what sometimes happens in evolutionary psychology is that this is believed to be the only game in town so for example that data on women having affairs on one of your with one of were earlier
guests, which seemed to validate one hypothesis rather than another.
And there is indeed a valid evolutionary explanation for what they claim that the data shows.
But I would argue there were also five other possible explanations for that phenomenon.
Not least, more attractive men are likely to be out there playing the field more, simply because their opportunities are greater.
And therefore, the fact that women tended to have affairs with people more attractive, but not necessarily richer than the people with whom they're in a long -term relationship with could be explained by multiple i knew that you'd come and do a quiz at the end uh talk to me about your assessment of trump's
marketing campaign um i didn't think you need to do that because actually what he did was um fairly consistent uh with what he'd done before he had probably elon was a little bit of a um uh clever signal boost say signal boost i think what you really have to analyze is the democrats as a marketing entity
and how spectacularly bad they are in that you end up the problem with living in a very tight urban bubble i didn't talk with rick rubin for the Christmas edition of The Spectator.
He's great. Absolutely glorious man.
And he made the interesting point that he had a kind of interestingly bipolar childhood and he spent weeks on Long Island, which was effectively a blue -collar existence.
And then he spent his weekends in Manhattan with an aunt who, as a kind of creative services director for Estee Lauder, was taken to concerts, you know, the usual cultural events, books, poetry, etc.
And the interesting observation, he said, is there was a downside to that, which is that the cultural life in New York was entirely driven and hence constrained by what other people thought of your tastes.
Whereas people on Long Island, the blue -collar culture, basically you like things because you like things.
It's similar to Rob's point that middle -class food, posh people food looks better than it tastes, and working class food tastes better than it looks okay um uh that's you know and and the constraints on you on your opinions on your tastes on what you could enjoy because you had to defer your primary
concern was what does this say about me to other people within my group now in a blue collar environment you can like what you like there are certain musical forms which tend to be gospel, I was mentioning this, country, where nobody really cares.
There's no particular kudos to be gained from liking country or liking gospel.
And therefore you're free basically to exercise honest subjective taste without having to pretend to like things that you don't in order to fit into a particular milieu.
And there is a problem when the Democrats become...
I've got a skin in this.
I've got a dog in this fight because actually Woodrow Wilson was like my third cousin twice removed, weirdly.
Everybody's got a racist in the family.
My misfortune is that my racist was the President of the United States.
But his mum was born in England to Scottish parents.
But the Democrats fundamentally, I think, are in this bizarre hall of mirrors where effectively their own opinions and thoughts have now become subordinated to a kind of artificial worldview where you have to buy the entire album, as it were.
There's a Times journalist who talks about this, which is sort of album politics.
In other words, it's not just that you have left -wing opinions.
You have to buy into every single opinion that is believed to be from the left.
And you have to buy the whole package deal.
And consequently, you end up with this very, very strange group of people thinking their norm.
And it's very similar to the phenomenon that Gillian Tett spotted.
I don't know if you've read the silo effect.
Have you had Gillian on the show?
No. Very, very interesting because she's an journalist but principally her training was as an anthropologist and ending up as a business journalist she brought her anthropological skill set and i to what was going on in business and by happy coincidence well in a sense she ended up looking at what was effectively
the um securitization of mortgages that whole business before the events of the big short before the crash and she immediately spotted that you had this group of people in a particular habitus or mindset who were incapable of understanding the world outside their own particular reference points and just
an amusing detail about that which i which i thought was just hold on a second i remember thinking okay so there was a trump event at um that huge new york hall what the hell is it called madison square gardens okay where there was a comedian i think he's a texan comedian if i'm right tony henchcliffe
and he he told a little joke about um puerto rico okay which is we won't repeat it here and the immediate assumption because in their worldview all latinos identify as latinx and have a massive sense of solidarity towards all other latinos okay because that's their peculiar worldview was that was that by countenancing
this joke trump had lost the entire latino vote i was sitting there going okay that's a bit like saying that if the guy had told an anti -french joke he would have lost the european vote okay the idea that latinos are so kind of homogeneous as an ethnic group that they identify you know band together
with the puerto ricans i mean cubans thought that joke was hysterically funny okay i would imagine that the other the other latinos found that funnier given that it's jibbing someone that's close enough to them i mean you've watched narcos right i mean you know the colombian mexican tension is enormous
i mean yes that you know there are points of shared commonality but you also have this thing between actually precisely because the countries are quite similar you get this kind of narcissism of small differences yeah uh and I always remember I remember looking at that and they're going he's lost the entire
Latino vote now it's going you clearly have a view of a community which is one which is based on you know probably you know some Marxist ideology about race yeah which is in complete denial about nationality or nationhood and it just struck me as really interesting that you could misread that so badly
um and something you know fundamentally the way they go about appointing people the way the whole thing appears to be kind of a coronation um it's it's very sad because you know this should be you know this could be a you know really wonderful there are lots of aspects i mean yeah in by european standards
i'd lean politically right okay you know i'll be honest about that by by euro standards but there are aspects to the u .s which strike me as ridiculously right wing okay not least the appalling vocation allowance yes okay yeah which is that's a humanitarian crisis i don't know two weeks paid vacation but also it's
weirder than that because unless you're getting married and going on honeymoon taking a whole week at a time is looked at as pretty dubious now i don't know about you it's not a holiday if you know which day of the week it is in my definition okay if you actually if you're conscious of the day of the week
you're not properly on holiday look at maternity leave as well in america that that strikes me again as absolutely extraordinary it's fucking barbaric and so and yet it's a wonderful case of status quo bias by the way because if you think i have never you know i pop to spectator parties and i have a drink
with nigel farage once or twice okay i've never met anybody in the uk so right -wing that they believe that um uh the that we'd be better off with fewer days of a roll back let's roll back this for eternity because we get another two percent of gdp if we just roll back vacation time i'm genuinely i've
never that's a really that's a really great point if there's anybody sufficiently right -wing that thinks that the UK is too open and free with the way that we give away.
The other weird American instance I had was that I met somebody who said they would happily pay $60 ,000 to a tax attorney or tax advisor to avoid paying $40 ,000 in tax.
They said this to me in absolute seriousness.
Now, Now, that is literally, you resent your tax dollars to such an extent that you would actually happily pay $60 ,000.
I think that at least from a business perspective, because people will have heard, I got my tax down to zero as an American thing, which is basically that you can drive profit down to the level where the, whatever it is, 32%, 37%, depending on where you live, that the government would have taken, there
is none for them to take because you've spent it all.
So you basically get a one third discount on anything that you want to buy.
But what that, it sounds sexy.
It's like, oh my God, he didn't pay any tax.
It's like, yeah, but he did pay 60 % of everything that was taxable that he had to drive down.
It's not like he got it for free.
He just got quite a big discount on whatever it is that he's talking about.
But yeah, there is such an aversion to giving money to the government, to the stage where people will happily do this sort of seppuku, like harry -carry thing.
Of actually almost harming themselves in order simply to spite.
Absolutely, yes. The hand will get chopped off in order to spite the finger.
Yeah, exactly. Despite the IRS on the end of your middle finger.
We'll get back to talking to Rory in one minute, but first, I need to tell you about Shopify.
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That's shopify .com slash modern wisdom to upgrade your selling today but it's you had this thing about uh people that pay lots of taxes needing additional privilege it may be an idea to offer them extra privileges okay i'm a big i'm loving this but you're slowly accumulating this is great it's burning
the it's a thought experiment which we're one of the things i think we're lacking in is that i would argue yes that my joke my joke suggestion was that people who pay higher rate tax should be allowed to drive in the bus lanes.
Okay. Now, just to be clear about this, I didn't mean that entirely seriously.
I didn't mean that it should be enacted.
It was purely a thought experiment based on the observation that rich people are pretty happy paying for things if a small amount...
So, when you are poor, a large part of your disposable income is spent on what you might reasonably call utility.
As you get richer, both attractively and unattractively, as i said um what you might call relative status in other words the relative quality of something matters more than its absolute value and so if you look at car manufacturers the top of the range x probably costs 25 more to manufacture than the bottom
of the range x but the sticker price might be double and that's simply because the people buying from the top of the range are more interested in status and more interested in, you know, leather seats and heads -up display and, you know, adaptive cruise control.
They're more interested in what you might call things you can show off about or things which are just novel.
Whereas the poorer person is buying the car as a mode of transportation.
It's closer to the economic idea of utility.
And consequently, it struck me that government should play the same trick that car manufacturers do, which is to say, yes, you pay a lot more tax, but in return, you get certain privileges.
You get certain advantages.
Now, by the way, the evidence that something of the kind, which is that if it was simply reframed with a thank you so there's an experiment from singapore which i think was adopted in the uk by a housing association which had trouble getting people to pay their rent on time and one of the most they
tried a variety of behavioral economic invention interventions but one of the most successful was simply every time you paid your rent on time you got a text saying thank you and that massively reduced the incidence of late payment subsequently it's one of those weird things and that's that's a total
just it's a tiny little reframing which is you did a good thing we're grateful to you we noticed yeah yeah i mean whereas i don't feel when i when i pay whatever vast amount i pay to the exchequer if they just said kind of we noticed thank you for doing the right thing by the way just to be clear on this i
do do the right thing because my wife does my finances she's a vicar in the church of england which is like having the shittest accountant in the world in terms of tax she'll say rory when you attended when you attended that conference they gave you a free pen i really think you ought to declare this you
know i actually declared all the capital gains on my bloody bitcoin oh wow oh my god that would bankrupt most people especially if you've got to pay it in fear no what was kind of pissed me off about that is had it been a house of course i wouldn't have had to pay a bloody thing no capital gains but but the interesting
thing the interesting thing there is i that i mean there was a guy who's the expert on this guy at berkeley called george acoff who was a left -wing guy who pointed out that the right to some extent enjoyed some unfair advantages simply because of linguistics so the phrase tax relief for example suggests
that tax is a burden from which you have to be relieved it's not paying your civic duties towards the maintenance of uh collective goods and you know as a brit okay as i said a right of center brit i can't help noticing when i go to la to be absolutely honest i'm not sure i wouldn't rather have a slightly
worse car and better roads okay because you know there is a correct ratio of expenditure of money which is spent uh at the individual level and money that's spent at the collective level and by the way one of the reasons i half jokingly suggest that pubs cafes and restaurants should be given a big tax
break, I genuinely mean that, is because I think they're a social good.
If you go to the pub, OK, you are maintaining a pub that I can go to the following day, and it actually benefits the whole community.
And you might argue that the rich people who go to the pub and buy the fancy spirits or the high margin drinks are actually subsidizing the lower margin drinks for people with less money.
So in other words, there is an ecosystem within that kind of thing, which is mutually beneficial.
There's such distaste though from anybody to the people that have got wealth, especially from the media in very much sort of demonized at the moment.
It's very uncool and guth to talk about the level of wealth that you have, especially when we've got inequality, cost of living crisis, inflation, housing problems, et cetera.
So it doesn't surprise me that it's hard to get people to be on board with doing something.
You already have enough benefits as it is.
Look at the wealth that you have.
I had this idea with Scott Galloway where I suggested that presuming that some rich people are at least somewhat smart, given that they've managed to get themselves to the stage of being rich.
They're lucky too. Yes, of course.
And he would acknowledge that.
He's very honest about that.
There's a million other reasons why.
But that some people in there will not be total idiots.
Perhaps some of the people that are real power users when it comes to tax.
I think Elon did this, made a statement the other day, that he's paid more money in tax than any human in history.
recently paid 10 billion to the irs probably romans who'd take him up on that i think yeah nations even when you're competing with entire you know empires perhaps that might be something different my idea to scott was why don't people who pay some uber amount in tax you know the top 0 .001 why don't
they uh get to have some sort of consultant at the irs or the inland revenue and they can maybe talk about discriminating where their tax dollars are spent.
You can say, I really like education.
The military, for example, or whatever.
Yeah, anything, but it treats your taxes.
First off, it makes your tax money more accountable because I think people that have earned a lot of money understand efficiency, at least in one form or another, in that they've managed to accumulate the money and they look at government and think, I'm gonna give you these tax dollars and I think that you're
just going to piss it up.
How many times has the Pentagon failed its fucking budget report here?
So by - You had something a little bit similar in New Mexico.
There was a guy called Gary Johnson, I think I'm right, aren't I?
Who's the governor of New Mexico, who was kind of libertarian and it was kind of Ron Swanson.
I don't know if you know Parks and Recreation, but you had a libertarian doing a government job and he believed, quite interestingly, he said basically i dislike all forms of government expenditure except roads and education he believed those things genuinely had to be collectively spent they were collective
goods and that i think his phrase is if you want economic growth you need a four -lane highway and so he was almost a case in point where in other words he he very very narrowly decided what the focus of government within new mexican who and was by all accounts actually a very he was a presidential candidate
um for the libertarian party about 12 years ago or something um but he was a pretty good governor great have you been to new mexico it's your neighboring no i haven't it's glorious go there it's utterly fantastic um the um santa fe opera give that a go by the way i'm trying to start a little tradition that the guests
on podcasts get to advertise something as well whatever you would like it always strikes me as very unfair santa fe opera santa fe opera is my a mid -roll podcast i was on jamie lang's podcast and started i think i was plugging a italian jamaican cafe in western um probably giving it a greater level
of indiscriminate fame i wonder how many people have bought air fryers and mustang mackies off the back of you i do think down the street it's had a market impact on the the mustang mackie i've got a new one for you uh only relevant for brits really although also possibly relevant for expat indians
in the united states the frozen piratha i saw you tweet about this the other day i bought this from ocado i thought why the hell is this frozen piratha got 170 votes and is like a five star literally five stars on ocado i thought what's ocado oh my goodness you don't know you see there are lots of things
in the uk so it's it's grocery delivery home grocery delivery very innovative bunch of people who started you know effectively robotic picking so they have it's very very high tech mode of grocery delivery they used to have a partnership with waitrose they've now got a partnership with marx and spencer
okay um it's actually probably better than anything you've got in the us actually we by the way in britain we never really celebrate our so i would include octopus energy and a cardo as you know and perhaps a um wise okay we occasionally do these things incredibly well and in the united states you'd
be fated for doing this whereas in britain you're just treated with kind of mild suspicion okay um and there is there is i think there is that british problem which is there is an acceptable social ceiling to the amount of wealth you have yes that americans have observed even in what you would think
of as pretty cutthroat businesses like investment banking that once they've got a flat in london you know a former rectory in the cotswolds you know a wife called polly you know a labrador two children a private school a range rover in lager okay basically that's it you've hit your ceiling and anything
more would be slightly dubious you know so there is that kind of weird kind of class -based ceiling to you know it's it's quite difficult to create a dyson in the uk okay but but what what's interesting in ocado is the frozen paratha is uh it was invented in what i call cinnamon valley which is this area around
wembley and london which is where an enormous amount of innovation in indian food preparation goes on which is one of the great i think one of the great um uh reasons i still live in the uk is the quality of indian food surpassed very pretty difficult to find in america i imagine austin you must have a large
enough expat community that it's started to raise i'm yet to find a good indian meal in austin texas much to my dismay okay we'll we'll go looking i'll crowdsource it maybe someone can comment below so someone can comment but the frozen paratha is a remarkable thing it just sits in the freezer you can have an onion one
you can have aloo paratha there's a garlic one but basically you take it out of the freezer where it's basically completely long life bang it in a pan with a little bit of oil about one and a half minutes either side turn it over you've had the kind of paratha which is literally you know if you went
to a three -star michelin indian restaurant you would not be disappointed by the paratha it's the great i mean what the hell is soured what's this sourdough thing it's fine right sourdough has a place in my bread repertoire but the extent to which it's come to dominate artisan bread rather like ipa dominated
artisan salted caramel in the dessert world yeah you got it exactly yeah these things these kind of these winner take all effects in a globalized economy are actually problematic because they're like the gray squirrel you know they're they eliminate the indigenous alternative myopia in the bread world
yeah yeah it is it is a problem you know i mean um and likewise you know the discussion of ai relative to discussion of the importance of zoom and remote working strikes me as off whack that actually over a longer time horizon um the importance of being able to have a conversation with anybody instantaneously
on any continent in a group or individually strikes me as you know it's not far from teleportation and yet nobody's really talking about it nobody's developing hardware for it that strikes me as something slightly weird i've been thinking a lot about um we built the new brand and we're building another
one at the moment with a guy called mike isretel and um i a lot of the time what we're talking about is sort of coolness and credibility two things that we're trying to aim for now with a millennial gen z degenerate influencer driven online tiktok instagram brand perhaps that's easy uh are companies
in markets that aren't necessarily so customer facing that don't need to have an instagram account do you think companies get too concerned with trying to be cool with trying to create sort of no um i think that the focus on the consumer is um there's a great passage it's only a small passage in john
k's book the corporation in the 21st century which is his attack largely the whole book is an attack on the idea of the shareholder value movement that the fundamental point is that the point of a corporation is not solely to generate shareholder value but also the fact that the pursuit of a single
metric is much less creative and much more likely to lead to uh value destruction including for the shareholders than the pursuit of multiple objectives the triangulation of multiple objectives, which is looking after your employees, looking after your shareholders, looking after your customers, and looking
after the wider society.
So a multidimensional objective from a company will probably lead to a greater variety of behaviors and a greater level of creativity than a single -minded kind of reductionist objective like short -term shareholder of value maximization and one of kay's points which he makes is that if you look at the companies
that have been kicking around in the fortune 500 or the footsie or whatever for a long long time it's nestle it's unilever it's procter and gamble it's wreck it okay it's companies which have a large marketing function which keeps them rooted in the real but changing world of what customers really want
okay and keeps them alert to effectively exploring new forms of value exchange which are ever -changing with technology taste fashion etc and those companies interestingly seem to have a much greater level of survival than companies that effectively develop some proxy measure of success other than the marketplace
and seek to pursue that now pursuing success in the marketplace is more difficult it's more painful uh it involves you to deal in things that are highly probabilistic rather than deterministic it's messy but ultimately in terms of resilience it seems to keep companies on their game in a way that businesses
that are basically focused on what you might call internal benchmarking metrics can find themselves actually massively detached could you give an example um well okay if you pursue yeah i mean if you pursue efficiency at the delivery of something okay you can end up very efficiently making something
that people no longer want or where you're completely depositioned because effectively what you're making so so in some cases for example the rules of the game change okay so there will be a period where for example um well i'll give you a perfect example of this okay which is an example i love to give
which is when i was a kid okay uh there were a few rich kids at school who'd been to skipple airport and they'd come back and go it's incredible like there's shops and everything you can buy i bought walkman for like so many guilders because before the euro okay oh it's amazing yeah we went there we
did this and then then you got then it was changi airport in singapore oh it's amazing i bought this they've got this they've got a fountain they've got that and the other you see and then you then you then eventually moved to dubai the crown moved to dubai of kind of blinged up airports okay and that all
goes on and then one day people come back and they go if you need to london city airport it's brilliant there are hardly any shops you get on the plane in about five minutes and you suddenly realize that everybody has been optimizing for turning an airport into a bloody shopping center yeah and then
london city airport comes along completely the opposite yep okay and just changes the rules of the game so i mean the hotel industry is interesting i mean okay i think i'm allowed a plug for this i'm a weird fan have you've said moxie hotel yeah yeah yeah a few times what's your take because i think
it's quite clear i think it's a kind of mental hack which is actually quite smart which is everything is really basic it's good good tv good wi -fi comfortable room but not very big no room service um no laundry as far as I can remember okay you wouldn't want to stay there for two weeks but two things
pretty good location um and secondly the ground the ground floor you is basically a bit like a we work in that you can just hang out there meet people there's actually a meeting room even after you've checked out you can spend three hours doing your email at the moxie without feeling like a weirdo.
Whereas if you do that at a conventional hotel, once you've checked out, you feel they want you to piss off.
Yes, because it's just a small reception area where you'd look like a weirder.
Yeah. I've spent a lot of time on the road over the last couple of years.
I've come to believe that the biggest determining factor about your enjoyment of a hotel is the quality of the pillows.
And it's not the bed.
Bad bed, good pillows, totally fine night's sleep.
Good bed, bad pillows, fucked.
So I... you need a pillow sommelier, don't you?
well, look, I'm trying to work on this at the moment, I'm trying to find a Amazon Prime pillow, which I can get in most territories that I go to so most, like, US, UK, maybe a Dubai or whatever that I can get next day delivery to any hotel, that if I get there and on the first day, when I check in I
go, oh, fuck, they've got one of those ones that makes the tss sound when you lie in it, I'm like quickly get onto Amazon order it and have it arrive.
You need Uber sleeps to go alongside Uber Eats.
Very good very good.
So basically it will deliver That's the worst part but I mean yeah interesting pivot at the moment.
Actually it's an interesting idea because you would also have a market if you had Uber sleeps you can have a service which if you basically missed the last train and ended up crashing at a hotel it would deliver sort of a shirt in your size for the following day and toothpaste and a toothbrush and all
the things you didn't think to pack because you weren't aware you were going to be staying at the hotel yeah that's brilliant there's a move at the moment in airports towards um like health wellness and stuff there's meditation areas there's gyms there's napping rent by the hour napping rooms which i
imagine are used for all manner of fundamentally by the way i mean the built environment in every respect has not caught up with technology and it's actually i think it's a total failure um it's largely probably because you can't measure but i always think okay there's nowhere at a station in a concourse
they've got all these walls around the edges which are underused now just put a shelf there for people to put a laptop on okay there are trains with no tables which drives me practically insane because apparently it's worth spending 120 billion to reduce the time spent on a train between london and manchester
but actually putting a table on a train so the person can work for an hour rather than basically sitting there like a tyrannosaurus rex trying to type on some on their knees okay that's that's considered apparently an unworthy expense compared to time saving on the actual journey itself.
And we will need, offices will need to actually, you know, fundamentally adapt to the fact that patterns of work are different and that you probably need fewer meeting rooms and you need more pods.
But also the open plan office was insufficiently variegated.
So if you take people who are non -neurotypical, for example, you know, I mean, my argument is that to some extent, the perfect office is not an open plan space.
It's 50 % library, 50 % pub.
In other words, half of it should be hyper -social and a bit noisy.
I actually like working in cafes.
I like background noise, even if I don't know anybody present.
Equally, I'm conscious of the fact there are people who can't work unless they have complete silence.
You also don't want to be in that all the time, necessarily.
It is a barbell, you're right.
If you have the final proofread of this particular piece of copy that absolutely needs to be right, if you're writing a best man speech, probably best to be in somewhere that's a little bit more chill.
It's your final run through.
You're trying to remember a presentation.
You're trying to do whatever.
Do you really want to be in the cafe?
But yeah, I mean, you'll have seen this as well.
To introverts, an open plan office is probably very tiring.
Well, I mean, I think on average, it seems like open plan offices really, really damage down productivity.
The difference even between noise cancelling headphones and complete silence is marked.
A mutual friend of ours worked at a place, a social media management agency years ago, and they had this huge Harry potter fan page thing and as a part of that they were doing a time lapse of them building the world's biggest harry potter jigsaw puzzle so they were going obsessed they had an entire
room you know it's one of these many many many stories and there was open plan office and fucking astroturf on the walls and everybody you know ping pong wednesdays or whatever and uh he just he couldn't work he couldn't think he couldn't focus so he had found that they'd kind of given up on this huge
harry potter thing they maybe got stuck at some stage of the jigsaw so he uh there was a point where every morning for a couple of weeks he went up and sat in amongst disused harry potter jigsaw puzzle pieces on the floor because it's the only place he could get any fucking peace yes yeah yeah i mean you
know we we have we have some weird sort of mysterious lavatories on the ground floor which i notice the occupancy rate is surprisingly high given that they're not signposted yes and i strongly suspect people are using them as a kind of escape pod need a little bit of chill time yeah yeah and i i um
you know i i the other thing i think is interesting is if you really want to bond people one interesting thing is to reduce the amount of money you spend on rent but i think you have to correspondingly ring fence a bit of that saving and spend it on what you might call staff jollies now doesn't i don't
mean total self indulgence but i mean you know away days where maybe we should take some office space by the sea somewhere like Margate, Folkestone, Brighton.
OK, just because actually, if you want to bond people, I don't think an office is a particularly good place for bonding.
I think if you take people on a trip together, you find people bond very, very tightly.
I mean, famously, you'll love this story from advertising, the Coke Hilltop ad, I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing, was actually that it was conceived at, I think, Dublin Airport.
because there was a massive flight delay.
And effectively, there's a quote from Bob Dylan in Brownsville Girl where he said, isn't it funny how people who've suffered together have more in common than those who are most content?
And these people had basically all been together, you know, and they were stuck at Dublin Airport like overnight.
And he noticed that effectively people were all going to the coke machine.
And because of the shared adversity, they were all bonding in ways that they never would have done had the flight been on time it's one of the reasons that throughout history armies have been encouraged to get drunk together a few nights before the first battle not because the sure the bonding thing
the fact that it's more difficult to lie the fact that you're a better liar detector when you're drunk than when you're sober do you remember that carlsberg campaign you know who your mates are no it only lasted i think it was um um it interested me from an anthropological perspective because there's
a theory that the reason young men get drunk and do stupid things is to find out who your mates are in other words the person who at the first sign of a police siren hoofs it around the corner is not your mate and so it's a kind of loyalty testing thing just as to some extent you know rude banter is a kind
of proof of stress testing it's a stress test of a friendship if if we weren't really good friends i couldn't say this to you therefore the fact that i'm saying this to you is proof of our signal of friendship uh i wanted to show you this europeans according to a study by simple analytics europeans
spend approximately 575 million hours per year clicking through cookie banners the prompts which appear on websites asking yes and by the way one of the brexit dividends should have been that we got rid of that because it was an absolutely stupid piece of legislation which adds by the way it's also counterproductive
because every now and then I go onto my google chrome and I get rid of effectively all the cookies right so you've had to restart it next two weeks it's even worse than usual in that every goddamn page I go to I have to effectively give permission or deny it to see whatever this thing was that was a classic
case of what i think is sometimes called you know the um what was the famous thing in in the in british india where they they created a bounty on cobra python yeah cobra snakes yeah and people started farming them to claim the bounty there was something to do with uh um trying to reduce the number of cars
on the road so they did they uh logged the logged the registration plates in one form or another and all of the rich people just bought second cars so they doubled the number of cars that were on the roads that that was athens yeah i think you could come into athens with an odd number number plate or an even
number number plate to reduce traffic and so everybody lined up at the the greek equivalent of the dmv and that when they were handing out car license plates and basically they said i really need an even number because my other car is not and so they'd all they'd all shuffle into order effectively i'll
swap you yeah in in the queue and no i mean i mean if you think about it there were extraordinarily intelligent if you'd given the job to some nudge theorists rather than to lawyers you could have come up with a very simple solution which i would have thought would be fairly amicable to everybody which is you
can set your browser to delete cookies more than x weeks old okay and that would be you know you you might mandate that that's an automatic option that's made available to you.
But the problem I have is that I like to purge all these things.
I never quite know what clearing your cache actually means, but I like to do it regularly because it feels cathartic.
But I like to clear cookies every now and then because it occurs to me there's probably an unwholesome buildup of the things.
But then every time I purge the damn things, it makes my browsing experience painfully bad we could have we could have got rid of that within weeks of 2016 if we wish to i have no idea why nobody's done it meanwhile we're still struggling with all of the problems everybody wanted to get rid of and we've
accumulated new ones and some of them have got worse and now keir starmer's done a massive u -turn on immigration that was surprising if we if we acknowledge the fact that the bad thing about government isn't really that money spent through the government is necessarily bad because there are things that probably
are better paid for collectively rather than individually, defence being an obvious example, okay?
I don't think it makes sense for everybody to employ a private army.
It's pretty logical that we should actually pool our resources in the provision of defence.
And by the way, I would also argue that the ratio of those things probably changes.
There are periods where technologically we'd be better off spending money on collective goods and there are periods where we're better off spending more money on individual goods and you know there's a ratio of the two but you you made the point that first of all if you allowed very high taxpayers some
degree of control over where their tax was spent that's the first thing interestingly good luck with that because any it's called hypothecation dan ariely is a friend of mine behavioral scientist believes that you could get people paying tax much more happily if it were hypothecated but the treasury
absolutely hate the idea because it removes from them the finance person's privilege of shoveling money around at their at their whim so they absolutely hate it also creates a level of accountability I'll tell you a clever clever case of hypothecation by the way was John Maynard Keynes had i think he
had it might have been a million pounds to spend he was the bursar of king's college cambridge and he um he had two things that were calls on his finances there was the arts theater in cambridge which was run and still is and owned i think by king's college cambridge for whatever historical reason and king's
college chapel which is a famous you know glorious medieval building and canes immediately gave a million pounds to the arts theater and nothing to the chapels and his argument was very simple he said raising money for the chapel is a piece of piss okay i can get americans to give money for this world
famous chapel whereas raising money for the arts theater is going to be damn near impossible so with the money i've got at my disposal i'll give it to the things that can't raise money at the expense of things that can the treasury absolutely hate her publication i also think that uh for example um
fundamentally i mean i've got an interesting idea which i'll share with you which i think is actually a usable idea which is what i call charitable yield management okay let me explain there are lots of things where you want to allocate resources according to willingness to pay so i'll give you an example,
I'm at Athens airport.
There's a massive queue for passport control.
There are people in front of me in the queue.
I'm paranoid. I turn up in airports like three hours early.
I'm totally paranoid like that.
Other people, these people had left it a bit late.
Their flight was leaving in 40 minutes.
The queue was about 20 minutes long.
I was pretty sympathetic.
Now, what you could do is you could simply have, in the end, someone spotted them and let them through.
It was quite intelligent.
But you could have a system where you pay 20 quid, you jump the queue.
Most people find that repugnant, but also they see that as the airport effectively profiting from their own incompetence, which is you're probably deliberately creating a long queue so you can maximize revenue from queue jumping.
If you had certain things where you paid but the money went to charity, that is an interesting thing because it still identifies willingness to pay.
In other words, you're clearly desperate to catch your flight.
It removes the incentive for fuckery.
It removes the incentive and also the resentment of the people doing it because, yeah, they may be richer than you, but at least they're doing a good thing.
So that could apply to parking.
In every car park, there should be five station car parks.
There should be five spaces where it's 25 quid to Oxfam on top of the parking charge to park there.
The reason being that someone who is absolutely desperate to park will always be able to find a space.
whereas someone who's got 40 minutes to spare can drive off somewhere else you've got maximizing area under the curve you're maximizing exactly that the area under the curve without creating resentment you can apply that to street parking one parking space in 10 and it's easy to do with ringo or pay
by phone or what's using austin what's the parking app in austin i had no idea it's just tap your card on the front you've got that so with those apps it's really really easy If you're in one of those charity spaces, you have a different code and you just put in a different number and 20 quid goes to
Oxfam on top of your cost of parking, which means that the parking spaces go to the people who most desperately need them without anybody feeling rooked and charities make a lot of money.
Now, that strikes me as quite an interesting...
You could apply that to road pricing as well, by the way, interestingly.
How so? you know uh well if people felt that a component of let's say you had a you had a high -speed lane if there's a traffic jam on the m25 you can pay 20 quid to use the it's equivalent to the multi -occupancy lane you get in the u .s okay there's a there's a premium lane which lets you jump the queue
a bit okay now i would use that if i go into heath row probably okay if i'm if i'm got a plane to catch if i haven't got a plane to catch i went now the great thing is what would create a lot of resentment is if people just saw a load of bentley's and you know flash cars jumping the queue it creates
fundamental resentment but actually if you made the charitable it would be less repugnant and you would still be allocating the road to the people who were most in need of the road well we have uh like fast lanes or whatever they're called preferential lanes all across America and that's basically the same
it's like the T if you've got the text tag or whatever then you can go through this one and by paying that it's $1 .86 or whatever in order to go through this particular lane but that lane's got far fewer people on it and you can everybody kind of I mean it's interesting road pricing is going to be very
interesting from a psychological perspective because one of the things they did with ULays which is in London which is that if you had an older diesel vehicle, you had to pay, was it £20 to come into the EULES zone, which was pretty extensive.
It went right. It wasn't like the congestion zone, which is just the middle of London.
It was pretty much right to the edges of London.
There were EULES cameras everywhere.
And what was unfair about that was not only that we can debate the whole legitimacy of the charge, but let's say I had an older diesel vehicle.
I live in Sevenoaks, which is just outside the ULES zone.
To be honest, I drive into the ULES zone six times a year, maybe eight.
I could just about swallow the current charge.
If you travel in every day, so 100 people paying the ULES charge once don't really care, whereas one person paying it a hundred times, it's practically bankrupting them.
And the fact that there was no recognition of that so if you were a nurse who lived outside london or indeed inside london and because of shift work needed to drive to work and because you hadn't got much money you had an older diesel car that was the fact that there was no equivalent of amazon prime
which is okay pay once pay for a year yeah okay was fundamentally unfair and that that again is down to gary stevenson's observation actually that if you optimize for the average you don't distinguish between one person paying something 100 times and 100 people paying something once i always notice
when you drive down the french motorway which is called the autoroute des anglais from calais down towards i think this one is towards a10 or something it's called can't remember the exact number and you always notice that for the first sort of 50 miles basically all the cars are english there's bloody
road it's been odd don't the local french want to use their autoroute and then you realize of course if you're english you drive to france once a year you pay the french motorway hotels if you drive a long way down to the south of France it's going to come to a few hundred euros okay but that's a lot
less than you'd pay for a higher car if you flew and it's just something you just you suck it up if you want to drive down to the south of France.
If you're French okay and you've got a stretch of motorway of 20 miles and it costs you five euros a goddamn day okay that's a thousand euros a year it's completely different completely different equation and so one of the things we need to understand much better is to economists prices a number but to
consumers prices a feeling and fundamentally economists have this weird idea of money that it kind of i mean one of the most important topics i think in economics is how to spend it i mean scott galloway did quite an interesting piece on on this uh just a few days ago which is in other words it's not just
about investment it's not just about wealth optimization the level of skill with which you translate available money into meaningful experiences in some into happiness well -being flourishing whatever you want to call it i mean that that's a skill in itself and there are undoubtedly people who do it
very very badly by the way not only people who are extravagant but actually people who are too stingy um so there's a wonderful piece of research uh by george lohenstein which looks at the fact that we all acknowledge in economics that there are people who spend too much in other words they get into
debt they're extravagant they live for the moment uh they they're probably you know they they kind of have short time horizons and optimize for the moment to a point where they neglect their long -term wealth.
But George Lowenstein also made the point that correspondingly, you would expect there to be people who are not spendthrifts, he called them skinflints, who actually find the act of spending money so painful.
Just the act of parting with money is something, you know, the very transaction itself is so painful, they spend far too little and i think he did a kind of survey on this and roughly speaking about 40 to 50 percent of the population get it roughly right and then you have a chunk of people at one end
actually skinflints outnumber spendthrifts if i remember his data wow so there is i mean one of his points is that he you know he's a very big believer in buying experiences rather than stuff um but um Um, and that's one of the reasons I think Americans, by the way, should have more vacation time because Americans
have quite a large non -working population, but it's all people at the beginning of life and at the end of life.
And the Americans massively over -index in terms of leisure or lack of economic participation in terms of students and in terms of retirees.
But they massively, they're massively too busy in the middle of life.
and one of the things i would argue is that if americans spent more money on experiences leisure travel etc which tend to be quite labor intensive rather than say buying more goods which is what you do when you have very little spare time would they actually would the actual american benefit because you
can't because you've got in other words it's better off having people working in a new orleans cafe than it is importing a chinese um device that you know i don't know i robotically cleans your cappuccino machine or something okay whatever it is that people are buying and that that's now having said
that you've got to be very careful about dividing what is a good and what is an experience because if you buy a guitar and then spend a lot of time playing the guitar it's both it's both yeah so it's very dangerous to say oh no it's just it's just goods are solid things experiences are intangible because there's
a combination of both rory sutherland ladies and gentlemen rory let's bring this one home i appreciate you eighth time ninth time on the show i love it every time you come on thank you it's a pleasure it's the light yeah i just feel to be honest i just feel i'm a crap version of eric weinstein i i don't
know don't invite eric every time i watch him i feel inadequate i just feel like this rubbish rubbish version of eric if eric's made it to the end of this episode uh i forgot to text you and ask what brand of shirt you wear he wears these incredibly plutocratic white shirts i'm just okay i'm gonna find
i will remember and if not i've just put it out on a youtube theory which is ingenious that um jeffrey epstein was basically uh an intelligence ploy yeah that couldn't survive into the internet age um that was one of those eye -opening moments where you go surely not act because if you think about it
okay for a government for a state actor right operating a billionaire looks expensive right but compared to an aircraft carrier national budget it's it's a it's a rounding out jeffrey epstein was the deal of the century rory sutherland said it here rory i appreciate you until next time mate thank you
very much indeed if you're wanting to read more you probably want some good books to read that are going to be easy and enjoyable and not bore you and make you feel despondent at the fact that you can only get through half a page without bowing out, and that is why I made the Modern Wisdom Reading List,
a list of 100 of the best books, the most interesting, impactful, and entertaining that I've ever found.
Fiction and non -fiction, and there's real -life stories, and there's a description about why I like it, and there's links to go and buy it, and it's completely free.
You can get it right now by going to chriswillx .com slash books.
That's chriswillx .com slash books.
