#973 - Rory Sutherland - Waymo, Texas Culture, Airline Lounges, OpenAI & Uber Eats

Welcome back.

Good to see you.

It's a pleasure.

What a joy.

And here in Austin, too.

Here in Austin.

Buckies.

You went to Bucky's.

Tell me.

Excuse me.

I actually brought you a present.

Oh.

I thought, you know, it wouldn't be fair if I didn't bring you some local specialities.

And, of course,

some beef jerky as well, jalapeno honey.

Thank you.

But the Bucky's thing is particularly good because they have a brand partnership with the

TX DO, the Texas Department of Transportation.

Okay.

So they license the don't mess with Texas advertising slogan.

Okay.

Now, this may surprise you.

Don't mess with Texas, the rights to it actually belong to the Texas Department of Transportation because it was an anti-littering campaign.

You're kidding.

No, no, no.

How old is this?

It dates back crikey to the, I think, the 70s or at least the very early 80s, I think the 1970s.

And it's a kind of famous advertising case study because how do you tell Texans not to litter?

Okay.

Now, in other parts of the world, you know, simple kind of blandishments or appeals to their sort of, you know,

their, you know, higher order concerns might work.

But this is a uniquely Texan message.

With low-key aggression, unspoken, there's a spread of

kinetic interaction.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And actually, funnily enough, when they presented it, one of the people said, I find this a bit abrupt.

Could we not make it, please don't mess with it?

But of course, that doesn't work, does it?

No, unfortunately.

Rather beautifully, Bucky's, which for the benefit of non-texan audiences is it's one of those things which I think is proof that one of the great things Americans do is it proves that you can take something that at a small scale is atrocious.

And if you make it big enough, it's a work of art.

And Bucky's has done this with the gas station.

By making it so enormous, you take it from something, you know, comparatively

ghastly.

Marching bands would be another case.

You know, if you go and watch the texas am marching bands marching bands are appalling at a small scale i think they're until there's a hundred people or more but if they're 500 people doing it it suddenly becomes magnificent yeah well i think the interesting thing about buckies for the people that haven't been again it's a hundred pumps maybe 200 pumps something like that and then the biggest costco sized building behind that sells everything from

life rafts to barbecues to jerky deer corn particularly i think they seem to go very big on deer corn which is not something else i think i don't know whether it's a hunting thing i mean whether it's just that you want to attract deer to your i i suspect that's unlikely i suspect it's a hunting thing

like a trap or whatever it's a kind of way in which you sort of create a trail of deer corn and then they wander into your sites or something bookie is one of the in fact the only fuel station gas station that i've ever been to that has so many pumps yeah that even if you're not filling up for gas you just pull up outside of one of the pumps i had an ethical dilemma as a brit because my wife said look all these other cars next to the pumps are actually empty the people have just left their car by the pump and they've gone into shops because it's under the shade now you wouldn't do that in ms simply foods back home

then you pull into one of the parking spaces and get out of the way but you're right there's so many pumps though the pump doubles as a parking space yeah it's also the only way to because that's covered over right you're in the shade and so it means that you don't get to be too hot they also have about 50 electric car chargers as well.

They've gone big.

Speaking of which, have you been in a Waymo yet?

No, because I tried to register.

Now, it's an Uber partnership in Austin.

It is.

If you get an Uber, double-click on it.

But

when I asked for it, they said you're on a trial or something, that I'm on some sort of

maybe it's because you're British.

It could be.

It could be some weird thing.

But interestingly, I'm still trying to get a Waymo.

I had a friend who took one in San Francisco, actually took about 10 because he became addicted to taking Waymos.

And his judgment, I don't know whether you agree with this, he's pretty comfortable in a driverless car just being driven around town.

He said, out on the open highway, if we hit 60, I'd get a bit nervous.

But he said at kind of town speeds, he was pretty content.

I think the fastest that I'll have been will have been 35 miles an hour.

It's just a little, but I do have a theory.

I'm going to give you this one.

So

I noticed when I was ordering Waymos on the app, it would say it's 10 minutes away or five minutes away.

And it would almost always be between 50% and 100%

more time than it said it was to get to me.

And it wasn't getting lost.

It wasn't, it wasn't accidentally going somewhere.

And then when I got in, my journey was also taking way longer.

What I've realized is there's only two reasons, I think, that humans behave on the road in regards to other drivers.

One is fear of retribution.

And the other is the guilt of inconveniencing another person.

But with a Waymo, both of those are taken out of the picture because the back windows are so blacked out that you can barely see if there's anyone in.

There's never anybody in the front seat.

And what retributive, they're not going to tailgate you and beep their horn.

You know, in America, road rage is a mortal endeavor, given that everybody's armed.

So

basically, every time that a Waymo is at a junction, it gets, no one lets it out.

No one behaves courteously to it.

Everybody knows if they pull in front of

pedestrians, I do it all the time when I'm walking.

If I see a Waymo in front, I'm like, it's a little close.

It's going to slow down.

I mean, there's an economist, Douglas McWilliams, in the UK, and he and I occasionally talk about this because we're both car enthusiasts, about the extent to which motoring

actually teaches social skills, social calculus.

So, one of the little bits of social calculus a good driver would probably perform is that your readiness to let someone in from a side junction would be dependent on how fast you're going already.

If you're stuck in traffic, okay, the calculus is, well, no skin off my nose.

If I let this person in, I lose five feet of road or whatever, you know, by being generous.

Consequently, we engage in those small acts of kind of altruism as motorists.

We're also hugely sensitive to when you perform a favor, whether the person thanks you.

So one of the great inventions, which I think originated in Japan, is the idea of flashing your hazard lights to say thank you if someone lets you in.

I've never had that in America.

I've seen it once or twice here.

It's less common, but it's spreading.

It's one of those strange things.

Interesting.

It's a kind of, truck drivers kind of propagated it in the UK.

But I mean, I just remember talking to Robert Trivers.

I finally was kind of like, you know, the kind of Diane of evolutionary society.

Robert Trivers is a fucking legend.

Oh, my God.

He was talking about in Jamaica, where, you know, your entire emotional reaction, if you perform an act of generosity, is nothing to do with the cost of the act of generosity.

It's whether it's acknowledged.

Right.

So if you actually let someone through in East Kent, in London, nobody does it, but in East Kent, I noticed that if you pull in to allow someone to come through

a narrow, it's usually alongside a row of parked cars, and you don't at least give them a little wave, it's

bad form.

It's really, really not done.

But also, we learn this kind of calculus of, okay, how much does it benefit them versus how much does it cost me?

And there's a kind of non-zero sum.

Domesticating effect effect of being on the road.

So I think that's probably true.

I wonder if that's contributing to some of the extended adolescence delayed development thing we're seeing among Gen Z.

They don't drive.

The fewer and fewer people.

If you're not careful, can be quite psychopathic.

There's that guy in London, right, that catches people that do that illegal U-turn.

What's his name?

He's in the Australian system.

He's actually, I think he's Zimbabwean.

White Zimbabwean originally.

Oh, God, that's a terrifying combination.

Fuck probably.

I don't want to get on the wrong side of the white Zimbabwean.

Interesting on the roads thing.

Cycling Mikey.

That's what he's called.

Yeah.

In the US, so if you, in the UK,

if you are in front of the car that is in the lane that you're trying to get into, and the car that's in the lane you're trying to get into isn't moving quicker than you, you're either moving at the same pace or around about the same pace.

It is almost maybe 90% of the time, the car that's in the lane you're trying to get into should pull back, give you a little flash, and they'll let you to go in, right?

If you're more than about half a car length in front of them, if they can see your indicator, you do that.

In the US, people treat their lanes like it's their territory.

They're so fucking...

Texans, interestingly, despite their reputation for individualism, Texan drivers seem to be quite generous.

I mean, apparently, Massachusetts is the worst place.

But you're right about the whole thing of lane possessiveness, that it's more extreme here than it is over in the UK.

But your point, by the way, is quite worrying because it occurs to me that we're breeding a generation of young urban people who can't drive.

And therefore, that sort of domesticating influence is lost.

If you just sit around in public transport, you lose that social calculus.

And it occurred to me that when I say they can't drive, they may have passed their test and they may have a driving license.

But there's a problem because.

It's very different to being able to drive.

Well, if you live in London, two problems, okay?

One, you don't drive very often.

All right.

Secondly, driving in London's horrible anyway.

It's not really enjoyable.

But the third problem is something occurred to me, driving is only really enjoyable when you do it frequently.

So you'll know this experience.

Okay, you pick up a hire car, you're in an unfamiliar country, the hire car is unfamiliar, you're not quite sure where the indicator thing is.

um

the the country may have sort of weird norms like four-way stops that you're unfamiliar with for the first 24 hours of driving you don't enjoy it you know you're fumbling around it's it's system what is it it's system two not system one to use a carnival phrase it's only with frequency that driving becomes system one so now i've been in texas for five days i'll pretty much pick up the car outside the hotel and i'll drift off pretty contentedly the first you know the first five hours of driving were a little bit fraught and it suddenly occurred to me that a lot of people if you live in a city and you don't drive frequently and you only rent cars you don't know what it is to enjoy driving you're always in that alien sort of the alien kind of initial zone where it's you know, it's kind of um, you haven't got over the hump.

No, I love driving.

I've heard you say what have you given that you've lived in Texas for a few years, what have you gone for?

I've got to ask about this.

Uh, 6.2-litre V8 Camaro.

Fantastic.

Okay, that's really

hard.

I've gone totally fucking feral, I think, rather than assimilating.

Uh, it's beautiful, it's really fun.

Dude, it was 40 grand, 45 grand USD.

Oh, don't, I know, it's insane, don't you?

20 for a 22 model?

It was beautiful.

It was everything that I wanted.

It's got wireless Apple CarPlay.

It's got cooled seats that you can press the remote start and it'll turn the engine on and begin air conditioning the car before you get in, including cooling the seats down, which in 105 degree weather is actually an extra story.

Literally, it's fucking life-changing.

Yeah, exactly.

I was like...

And this is 35 grand GBP, 30 less than that, maybe.

I mean, they pay for cars in dollars less than we pay for them in sterling, generally.

It's crazy.

So, yeah, I love it.

I love it.

I hope actually this is one area where Trump's tariff negotiations.

I'd quite like to volunteer for the Trump team negotiating with the UK trade people on the grounds that, you know, compulsory and zero duty on MAC trucks.

Well, exchange.

You can have our Land Rovers, you can have our Rolls-Royces, you can have our Mini Coopers, and we'll...

Yeah, well, you would upgrade your Mustang Mackie.

Yeah, no, no.

Have you still got it?

I've still got it.

Love it, actually.

I'm debating.

There's an interesting question about whether the new Cadillac lyric will be introduced, which is electric.

And is arguably perhaps,

what would I say?

Well, you know, it's an extraordinary.

I like luxury cars.

Okay.

So this is.

This is a slightly embarrassing.

I used to have a German boss, and I used to really, really rile him by saying things like, Lincoln Town car, best car in the world.

Okay.

Because when you've got off an eight-hour flight in New York, that's what you want to sit in, isn't it?

To be driven into New York.

And I think Europeans are absolutely unhealthily obsessed with cornering on the grounds that you don't do it, right?

Acceleration is really valuable.

You don't throw your passengers around corners at extreme speed.

I don't, you know, I don't drive as if I'm on the fucking Nureburg ring, okay?

I drive in a way that maximizes sort of, I like a little bit of speed and maneuverability, but I don't want all this yoga

about hurling things around hairpins.

So a really good American car, this is not a fashionable opinion, I might add, in Britain, but my love of American cars is unabated.

Good.

How would you improve airport experiences?

I've spent a lot of time in airports recently.

So, I mean, one of the interesting ones is they're too big.

I mean, the, you know, the

shopping center component, which was novel when it first started, has now become obligatory.

And you basically have to walk through the Houston Galleria before you can catch your plane.

And

London City Airport, you've probably used that, have you?

No, I've never never been there.

Okay.

It's

this is this is what's so funny.

Okay.

So there's an idea I'm playing with in marketing generally and in innovation, which I call reverse benchmarking.

Okay.

So the idea is what most companies do is they benchmark themselves against their competition.

Now, the great writer on this is a guy called Roger L.

Martin, who's my own personal, he's Canadian, my own personal business guru, extensive writer.

He was dean of the Rotman School in Toronto.

And he wrote a piece called Benchmarking is for Losers.

Okay.

That all you do is you diminish your margins by making yourself in direct competition with your other competitors.

So you don't benefit

your profits or your shareholders.

And also you don't benefit your customers.

Okay.

And the reason you don't benefit your customers is because they're then deprived of choice and differentiation.

And you don't benefit the overall category because the category loses value because it's more homogeneous.

And my argument is, and I got this inspiration from that great book.

You've probably had him on, Will Gadara.

Have you ever had him on?

No.

Okay, Unreasonable Hospitality.

Fantastic book about a guy who ran 11 Madison Park.

He's a major sort of food innovator in all kinds of ways.

I think he's married to the woman who invented cereal milk, which I think is one of the most brilliant inventions, which is, you know, the milk you get at the bottom of Cocoa Pops would be the British, which is tastier than anything else you've ever drunk.

And she had the inspired idea of just flavoring milk with breakfast cereal and selling it as a drink, which

I think is just genius.

Okay.

Now,

his brilliant thing was he's number 50.

I've told this story a lot, so apologies to people who've heard this before.

He's number 50

restaurant in the world in the San Pellegrino Restaurant Awards.

It's a three-star Michelle restaurant in New York.

That's 2011.

He wants to get to number one.

Pretty, you know, remote ambition.

It's not going to be easy.

But one of the things he did was what I call reverse benchmarking.

He took his team to the number one restaurant in the world, and they started doing what we all do, which is, how are we doing compared to them?

They do this really well.

Let's copy it, etc.

And at the end of the whole experience, Ghadara just goes to see him.

I'm not interested in any of that stuff.

They're already doing that well.

If we merely copy them, no one will notice.

What I want to know, given given that you've just been to the best restaurant in the world, according to San Pellegrino,

is what was a bit disappointing?

Because we're going to double down on that.

All right.

And

the approach was they finally came up with two things that were a bit disappointing, which was one, the coffee was nothing special.

I mean, I found American coffee quality unbelievably high variance.

And they just said it was fine.

The coffee wasn't disgusting.

It was just there was nothing particularly interesting about it.

And of course, because he'd taken a few people to the kitchen along, a few of them wanted to drink beer.

And the beer drinkers were treated a bit like second-class citizens compared to the wine drinkers who are given all manner of bullshit with a, you know, sommelier and a letter conversation about the terroir, you know.

And so he goes back to his own restaurant and he appoints one of his guys who's a coffee obsessive, the coffee sommelier.

And another guy, I think, from the kitchens who is obsessed with American craft beers or all craft beers, he makes him the beer sommelier.

Now, imagine you're in this restaurant.

Now, most of the people in the restaurant aren't going to ask for beer, but 10 or 20% of them will.

Okay.

And they're expecting, yeah, we've got Sam Adams on draft or we've got this in bottles.

And instead, they get a beer menu from the beer sommelier with suggested beer pairings.

You know, the citrus IPA goes really, really well with the cod or whatever it might be.

Now, those people,

you've blown their minds.

Okay.

It's not a question of, hey, that was a bit better than I expected.

So this reverse benchmarking is find out something that your competitors have completely overlooked, do it really, really well.

And I would argue as a marketer, and then actually turn it into a feature, you know, spotlight it.

And you could, you could almost take this and make it into a, I'm not going to say it's everything, but it's a generalized theory of innovation, which is, you know, what Steve Jobs did was take a field where everybody was focused on the tech and the capability of the machine to the complete exclusion of any aesthetic or usability consideration.

You made it beautiful.

And what he does is go, okay, now, what I'm not saying is you can be shit at the technology so long as you make it lovely.

No, you merely have to be kind of, you know, what you might call top decile in what you do somewhere else.

But then you go off and you find the area which everybody else has ignored.

I look at things like I'm a big fan of the Moxie hotel chain.

I often talk about that.

And what that is, is double down on the ground floor.

You know, make the ground.

We work on the ground floor, don't feel weird when you checked out.

And that's one of the marvelous benefits you discover through experience.

You know, that actually after I've checked out of a Moxie,

every other hotel makes me feel homeless.

But the Moxie, you know,

okay, take your shopping trolley and your plastic bags and go and push them through the streets until your flight leaves.

Whereas in the Moxie, you just hang out for another five hours and get on with some shit and order their coffee and you don't feel remotely unwelcome.

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so what would you do to airports right that's a really interesting question um

uh what interests me about london city airport is the fact that there's a natural benchmarking tendency which is that when i was a kid the rich kids had been to you know they might have been to actually wouldn't have been Dubai back then, would have been Shahjar,

but they'd been to Skipol or they'd been to Chang'e in Singapore.

They go, it's amazing, those shops, you know, it's like, because back then we hadn't seen a shopping center before, and it was really novel.

You know, I bought Walkman, you know, it was fantastic, right?

And then suddenly all airports became like that, okay?

And suddenly people went, if you've been to London City, it's incredible.

You go in and six minutes later, you're at the gate.

There are hardly any shops.

It's brilliant.

Okay.

So there is a really, really interesting idea.

I mean, there is scope, lots of scope for really interesting innovation.

I think it's a lot easier also, it's worth noting, it's a lot easier.

If you want to premiumize an experience, it's a lot easier to innovate on the ground than it is in the air.

Now, there is a fantastic thing which a friend of mine called Jeremy Stone tells me about, which is at Washington, Dulles, where they still have these vehicles, which I think were designed by Eero Saarinen, the Finnish kind of inventor, where your lounge drives to the plane.

Okay?

So you get in something that looks like a room where you're all sitting down and, you know, you've got a few little tables and you're comfortable.

And then the actual lounge is on wheels and drives to the plane.

Wow.

Now, it's a really, really interesting innovation because there's a Soviet-era innovation thing called Triz.

which is it's the Russian for a technique for creative innovation or something.

And they have a whole list of kind of principles, one of which is make the thing that stays still move and make the thing that moves stay still.

It's just something in kind of mechanical and engineering innovation, which is a different way of looking at things.

And so what's interesting about that, of course, is

the planes don't need then to go to a gate.

So the constraint, first of all, you probably save a lot of fuel because the plane doesn't have to spend so much time taxiing.

The plane can be parked pretty much next to the runway.

It can have a a much smaller number of gates or whatever it is.

And it means that every time you expand your airport, you just buy a few more vehicles.

You don't have to go into a $1 billion.

Well, you treat your airport more like a car park than a building.

Right?

How can we slot these different maneuvering Lego pieces together so that they can fuck off in a straight line toward where the plane is?

Here's a weird one.

So one thing would be, nothing to do with airports themselves, but it occurred to me the other day.

I was thinking, I was trying to do a bit of reverse benchmarking.

No hotels offer you a monitor.

Okay.

An external.

You might have a 4K, you might have a 4K, you know, 85-inch TV, but in order to plug your laptop into it, you'd have to rip the thing off the wall.

Okay.

It's weird to me that no hotels offer a dual-screen experience.

And it's weird to me that car hire companies,

if you wanted to employ all of America's young people in the summer,

see if you agree with me.

If you could pay a car hire company, very simple thing, you pay $100,

okay?

And it's big money, okay?

We will meet you at the arrivals gate with your keys, and we will walk you to your car.

Oh, yeah, that's good.

Like a concierge.

Because, yeah, because that's the word.

A car hire is terrifying.

If you're familiar with the airport, it's fine.

But if you're going to be afraid of the site, where's the Avis?

Oh, no, that's

surprising.

We've moved off site, so there's a shuttle bus that's going to be a lot of fun.

There's a huge queue that I need to get through.

Yeah, yeah i haven't pre-registered my driver's id all of this stuff hasn't been submitted here's a qr code here's a single piece of id that says i'm the person with the qr code here's a one-time password that's texted to the phone that two-factor authenticates the fact i'm here hello sir have you ever been through uh dubai airport or or the middle east and been met by one of those concierge people to buy i think it's no i haven't got that right that's wrong There's a word for it, which is an Arabic word for hospitality or welcome.

So you get off, you walk off the plane.

That might be a book by someone in the 12th century.

So don't ignore that bit.

Okay.

You walk off the plane and someone meets you at the beginning.

Well, it's the same as being picked up by a driver at the arrival's gate exit, but it happens as you get off the plane at the gate.

And then they say, oh, Mr.

Williamson, here, let me take your bags.

Let me take you through a special bit of immigration.

Here's a

arrival's lounge that you can get into.

Please give me all of your documents.

I'll go and speak to the people for you.

This is, and it's air-conditioned and lovely, and there's water and a cool towel that smells of cucumber.

And they look after your immigration experience.

I've only ever done this once, and it wasn't me that was paying.

It would be nice as well.

Because actually, the airport experience,

if you go through it frequently, does get weirdly stressful and annoying, precisely in a weird way because it's repetitive.

And there's that paranoia that you're only one lost bit of paper away from complete.

We were debating this.

Why is it that airports are so stressful?

Now, there there are a load of things why is it that the uh the boarding pass is completely unlike the dimensions of your passport yeah shouldn't it have kind of 3m sticky post-it note glue on the back well imagine if every imagine if every um passport around the world just had a small number of magnets on each corner and you could have a tiny bit of printed on the printed paper a tiny bit of magnetize it snaps onto the back the same way that your iPhone has the MagSafe thing on the back and all that you would need to do is hand the person hey, his passport and boarding pass.

Because that's the thing.

You know, you don't ever know when you're going through TSA at the front.

Sometimes they seem to want your passport, sometimes they seem to want your boarding pass, and I can never fucking tell before I get there.

There's, by the way, a very interesting hack.

There, I mean, the various hacks, one of which is, and I can do a bit of product placement here for the Hotel Emma in Southeast Asia, which is absolutely fantastic, by the way.

Is I do actually carry an open bag.

Because

the trouble with having everything zipped up, as I said in the spectator, is that every time you want to retrieve something, it's like making love to a goth.

You know, they're just too many zips, okay?

Right?

You know, you know, you know what I mean?

It's, it's kind of, you know, this teaser, oh god, I left that thing.

Oh, which of these 17 compartments is it in?

And I think a lot of baggage design has gone in the wrong direction, which is multiple sealed compartments.

But you actually need one thing where you just go, I'll chuck it in there.

I have a friend who uses a workman's bag, like a carry thing that you would have drilled in.

unfit no no no no it's imagine that but cut the top half off and make the handles longer so it's basically a tray clever yeah and it would have you know this is where the hammer goes this is where the drill goes and you can see everything from above and he just picks his bits out and puts them back in so London City Airport which I recommend you because I think you can fly to Newcastle from there.

I'm not quite sure.

It has some pretty good strengths in that they have the new scanners, so you don't need to take your laptop out of the bag.

Now, it's amazing how irritating that is.

It shouldn't be, okay?

But, you know, the kind of rigmarole you've got to go through deciding what goes into your check luggage, what goes into your hand luggage is really, really tedious.

So there are technologies which are starting to improve things, undoubtedly.

Because

it is kind of weird why that's so unpleasant.

But

I suppose what it is, is there's something about going back to school about an airport, which is you're at the mercy of various...

Being dictated to, you've got to wait in queues.

You can't do the thing you want.

another element slightly weird one i would think which is oh you've great privileges in you're in group one uh which means you get to wait in an unair-conditioned airbridge for 11 minutes standing there like a prat before we'll let you onto the plane whereas i imagine the people in the later groups can just breeze straight on i don't know what's going on sometimes so i think it's an interesting one at least in america uh

something i've noticed i live 12 minutes maybe 15 minutes from Austin Airport.

The reason that it gets stressful to me is that there's an inverse curve of tolerance that you have because you start to take the piss more and more.

You assume that with experience, you're able to navigate the airport more quickly, but it's mostly out of your control.

Yes, maybe you've got all of your stuff in the right places.

You've packed the night before, you've already pre-ordered the Uber, you know when it's going to come.

You know that if you order Uber Black XL, that it actually arrives a little bit quicker, or they can take a different road because of the HPV people or whatever the fuck.

But then when you get there, if TSA is slammed or if you, you know, you forgot that it's the beginning of spring break or something else that's going on, you're still going to be screwed.

So for me, the problem is

as you get more experienced at it, you try to take the piss more, but your experience isn't able to impact how quickly you can really go through the airport experience.

So you know this, you know this weird thing that, you know, the biggest car company in the world doesn't own any cars.

That's Uber.

The biggest lodgings company in the world doesn't own any property.

That's Airbnb.

And I always wondered whether you'll piggyback on Ryanair, which for American listeners is a bit like Spirit Air, okay, in the US.

It's a very ultra-low-cost carrier.

Okay.

And this is how you do it.

You'd basically produce, you'd have a luxury airline, which was totally banal in the air, but then that's only an hour and a half anyway in Europe.

Okay.

So you'd buy a country house near Stansted Airport and it would cost you £600 return to go to, let's say, Madrid.

And you'd turn up at the country house, park your car.

There'd be a party going on, like something out of Eyes Wide Shut or, you know, the beach party in the Wolf of Wall Street.

You know, there'd be fine wines and Belgian chocolates.

And then you'd be driven to your Ryan airplane.

Okay.

Cost of flight, £17.95.

Okay.

And then you'd be kind of met at the other end.

So in other words, in other words, you take a totally banal experience in the air, but you absolutely make the ground experience fantastic.

In parentheses of something that's wonderful.

So there's emphatically scope for creating a kind of parallel network of

air routes, which are small airports, small airport,

simply because Austin probably is a lot easier than, say, Houston or Dallas.

Although

Dallas gets very high scores from users.

Austin's great.

It actually, Dallas and DFW employed its own behavioral scientist, someone called Courtney Moore.

I don't know if she's still there, but she had some very, very interesting ideas.

So how do you stop people feeling compelled to queue before the gate has opened?

And one of her ideas was you made the gate ambiguous until you were ready to board.

So you don't know where you're supposed to go.

So you basically say, you know, your flight to London from DFW is boarding from gate 47 or 48.

So you go, well, there's no point in me standing in a queue because I might choose the wrong gate and I'll look like a prat.

So I'll go and sit in the coffee shop instead.

That's clever.

And then only when the gate opens does it become obvious which gate is actually yours.

It's interesting with gates because you can be more and less lucky based on where the gate's located and what the close retail spots are around it.

If you're in between the DKNY and the Louis Vuitton shop, you think, what the fuck?

Oh, that wanted to be next to the Starbucks.

Heathrow, Terminal 5.

Everybody thinks Preta Monje, good.

If you're going through Heathrow Terminal 5, you need to go to Pratamonje.

It's a British staple, even though I don't think it's British.

It's not meant to be.

I think.

It's built in Britain, but pretty much is hardly a fucking.

You might be right, it might be owned by McDonald's, actually.

I think it is.

But

if you're looking at the main Prat, if you're looking at the big windows at the far side, you've come in from the back.

If you take a left all the way down toward the lower numbers, away from the business class lounge behind you,

keep going all the way, all the way, all the way down to the end.

Take a left, keep going, keep going, keep going.

There is a much smaller Prat that's there that still has everything, but it's down and on the side, and there's never any queue.

You've got a little walk-in.

You go past the WH SMS, have a little look at any of the books.

But

it is a...

There used to be a brilliant EasyJet hack, which was that

there was a pillar at the end of the check-in desk.

I don't think it works anymore at Gatwick.

And the pillar led people to believe that there was only one gate there, but there were actually two, but the queue was the same length.

Okay.

So it was actually...

Because nobody could see the extra little check-in desk, effectively the queue moved twice as fast.

I think they've changed it now so everybody queues in one line but there used to be a rather brilliant i mean there are little hacks you can find so an interesting okay here's an interesting theory for airports okay

which is

that generally people who fly infrequently aren't that bothered by streamlining the whole process whereas George Clooney and up in the air, if you're a totally frequent flyer, you get almost unhealthily obsessed with streamlining the process.

And one clever thing you can do as an airport, it probably wouldn't work at the scale of something like Heathrow, is you could build in secret shortcuts which were known to your

the tube has them.

I mean the London Underground.

So there are places where it signposts the exit as over there.

But the Cognacenti know that if you turn right down a, you know, down a funny little tunnel, you cut 150 yards off your wall.

But it wouldn't do to advertise it because it couldn't handle the traffic.

If you don't advertise it, you simply allow them to be Easter eggs.

Okay, so let me give you an, let me give you an Easter egg, which is going to ruin this for everybody that's listening.

Amsterdam Schiphol Airport.

If you go to there.

That's a really annoying airport, by the way, because they should have made it two terminals, really.

Yeah.

Okay.

So what they've done is they've endlessly expanded that airport.

You know, and D-E-F-F-G.

And if you're from Gate, whatever it is, C148, I mean, frankly, you could have walked home.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

So.

Most of the, a lot of people have layovers in Amsterdam.

It's a real hub.

It's well positioned.

Problem is

it's kind of a bit of a fuck-on to find somewhere to relax.

It's really difficult.

And the way that they've done this, kind of the same way that those benches have been designed in New York City to mean that homeless people can't lie on them because they're precisely the inverse of the shape that a human spine is supposed to make.

Some weird medieval torture device that's masquerading as a fucking piece of art next to the street.

But gate D2 in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the only one that I've found that doesn't have armrests in between the seats.

So it's a low bench that's padded and there's no armrests in between it.

D2 Skipole is that right?

D2 Schiphol, and you can lie down, put the thing on, you can lie flat on this.

I've spent many a time extra.

There's a gate in London City, which is most people stay in the main kind of holding pen.

But if you walk towards gate three or something, there's a little cafe and a seating area next to it, which most people don't know about.

So that's that, that's whoever's whoever's staffing the fucking.

Yeah, whoever's staffing the Easter egg Predamonge and is near gate D2 in Amsterdam Schipol is going to be fucked.

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Talk to me about takeaway food.

You linked me in with some guy that makes crazy Indian takeaway foods.

Oh, yes, it's nostalgia foods.

And Narish Sankara, who's a food scientist at Berkeley, who,

like most Indian émigrés, and indeed British émigrés to the United States, definitely...

Woefully disappointed.

Not always.

There are very good Indian restaurants in the US, but they're few.

Okay.

I mean, certainly in proportion.

I mean, of course, there wasn't much of an Indian population.

And of course, your spicy food is partly taken care of with things like Tex-Mex, etc.

Okay.

But anybody who's either British or Indian or Pakistani, Bengali, et cetera,

would feel a bit deprived.

And so he's found this technology where you basically you can ship chefs over from Hyderabad.

They then prepare biryani, which you then preserve using NASA food preserving technology.

And I've tried it and I've shared it with other people and it's astounding.

Was it the the parathas that you were talking about?

Oh, that's a different one.

That's a thing called a frozen paratha, which you probably could get here.

And that's an extraordinary thing because you just, weirdly, you don't thaw them.

Take them straight out of the freezer, bang them with a bit of oil in a frying pan, about one minute each side, and it's fantastic.

Yeah, I can't believe the email thread that I was put in was

somebody, somebody at berkeley.edu telling me that my industrial-sized order of NASA freeze-dried fucking Indian food had been.

I was like, what?

How have these five different

things contributed to result in me eating Indian food?

But ranking.

He also makes haleem, which is one of my favorite things of all time, by the way.

If you've never had it, what's halem?

It's usually, I think, lamb and I think wheatgrass, which is kind of soaked overnight in some shape.

So it's like the only way you can describe it is like a very meaty porridge.

And then you can pimp it.

If you ever go to saloo in Kinnerton Street in London, they then bring you a little tray which has little bits of chili, little bits of ginger, little bits of something else, maybe saffron, and then you pimp the top of it by sprinkling these things like and make your own pizza.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it sits, he probably sits on top of rice or, yeah, typically I think it would come with rice.

Absolutely magnificent thing.

It's wonderful.

And he makes haleem, he makes biryani,

and hydra buddy biryani is considered the kind of gold standard in India.

Okay.

What's happened with changes in people's ordering preferences, given that so much of this is now done over screen?

You look at McDonald's, you look at even...

I would be very interested to know the difference between a touch.

This has a really interesting thing.

I don't normally talk about AI because everybody else does.

But one thing that strikes me as interesting about AI is when you change the context and the choice architecture within which people choose, so it's a screen rather than face-to-face.

Okay.

They make different choices.

If you want my frank opinion, I think the whole property market is broken because everybody searches for property in the same way.

Okay.

Now, one way in which you can innovate very reliably is it's quite hard to change a million people's behavior.

Okay.

Because people are driven by habit and they, you know, they've already got a, I mean, they've already got a solution to the problem a lot of the time.

Yours may be better, but they're, you know, I mean, literally, when mobile phones were invented, we forget this because your generation think nobody had mobile phones.

They invented the mobile phone.

Everybody bought a mobile phone.

It was about 20-something years before it reached kind of, you know, really mainstream adoption.

Now, part of that was price.

Part of that was technology.

A lot of it was people saying things like, why would I want to make a phone call on the street?

I mean, literally, because they didn't really envisage the value.

that a mobile phone brought to you until they owned one.

Okay.

And there's also the whole social proof thing that in the early days of owning a mobile phone you were a bit of a wanker okay so translation for americans jerk okay

now

uh what's got interesting there is that behavior is slow to change okay but if you change the context or the or the interface which people use to make a decision everybody's behavior changes

And so in McDonald's, one of the things they found, I think people tend to order a bit more when they order on a screen.

I think I've heard anecdotally that the number of particularly males who order a meal with two burgers in it has gone up a lot because you felt awkward doing that face-to-face, even with a complete stranger who you're never going to meet again in your life.

You just felt a bit awkward, okay, doing it.

Whereas when you're ordering on a screen, they don't even know how many of you there are, okay, because it's a screen.

Obviously, upselling may or cross-selling may become easier.

You know, there's a limit in a spoken conversation.

So it does strike me as interesting with AI, which is

if, which is possible, you know, there's this new device I think Johnny Ives been involved in.

I wanted to talk about that.

Which is a thing which you wear around your neck and it uses the processing power of your mobile phone, but it basically talks to you.

Okay.

I think you'll also need a matching eyepiece.

I think that the glasses piece is a hitching monocle would be quite good, I think, wouldn't it?

I could see you stuck.

That stinks of you.

Absolutely stinks of you.

The digital monocle.

yes, the digital pense net for uh yeah, or lignette, you know, those things on a handle, which you but um, uh, they, um,

uh,

if you change the way in which, so if, if suddenly, instead of going to a screen, I'm going, I need to renew, I need to rent a car, I, you know, I'd like you to show me details of this, I need to choose a toaster, and that changes from being screen-based to say conversational and iterative,

then everything changes.

Okay, Now,

there's a pot.

Okay.

There's a possible way in which AI will make me completely redundant, which is not in the way that most people anticipate, which is advertising generally is a business trying to reach consumers.

Okay.

The natural direction of travel of an AI-empowered world

would surely be the other way around, where consumers appoint agents to find them things to buy.

So actually, once you have unlimited, what you might call search,

there are no search costs, you know, okay,

right, for the consumer, effectively, in the sense that the searching is being done by an AI

agent.

Then,

effectively, what you're doing is the consumer is appointing an advertising agency to find them stuff rather than the company appointing an advertising agency to find them customers.

And I can't see, you know,

now I'm sure they're, you know, I'm sure, you know, I don't think I'm going to starve to death, but it does strike me that that would seem a pretty natural direction of travel.

And for example, things like the, you know, the real estate industry now.

Okay.

Now that that sort of works with fairly crude search, but it's not, I think it's very, very simplistic, which is where do you want to buy a house?

How much do you want to spend?

Do you want a flat?

Do you want a house?

Do you want to buy?

Do you want to rent?

Okay.

That's actually, it seems perfectly satisfying to the person going through that process.

But I don't think it's a very any more than dating apps are a great way of finding a lifetime partner necessarily.

Okay.

You know, the process of dating probably should be highly iterative, which is that you use what you find in the marketplace to refine your preferences.

Yeah, you train it over time.

You do it with your YouTube algorithm.

Even Spotify.

Spotify suggests new bands and songs to me.

Like, this really, you know, I wouldn't have even picked that and it knows.

And that, going back to your air fryer girlfriend, not a Corvette girlfriend idea, experience good.

Look, just trust that I know your preference.

There are things where the experience is better than the promise.

There are things where, I mean, the classic case where I always think the experience and the promise are absolutely loggerheads in consumerism is camping equipment.

So you buy a tent or a sleeping bag, and the thing that really impresses you is how small it is when it's in the bag.

And then you use that sleeping sleeping bag, you take it out of its bag, and it turns into something, you know, basically the size of the Hindenburg, right?

Okay, you think that is magnificent.

How do they manage to get that sleeping bag into that tiny bag?

And then it's raining and it's eight o'clock the next day and you've got to get the sleeping bag back in the bag.

Wet.

Okay.

Wet.

And it's a living fucking nightmare.

So you could say there are airflyer girlfriends and there are sleeping bag girlfriends.

The air flyer girlfriend is, wow, this is much better than I, you know, it's much more than it said on the tin.

And the sleeping van girlfriend is, God, it looks so great.

But I mean that about

all kinds of things are like that, which is, you know, the conflict between the promise and the, you know, and, you know, undoubtedly advertising, I think, sometimes over promises and under delivers.

And then there are experiences where you under promise and over deliver.

Interesting with the way that dopamine works with that stuff, right?

That

over-promising on the front end is good for getting people through the door.

And I imagine that you can launch businesses very hard with that.

But how do you get repeat purchase and how do you get good customer satisfaction with that?

Actually, I wish, very interesting question, actually.

I wish there were, there are a few things.

This is the whole question of how search works.

And

it really comes into the field of sort of decision science and choice architecture.

Okay.

So at the moment, you tend to get ratings for restaurants.

And I've always wanted hotels.

And one thing I've always wanted TripAdvisor to offer is a list the most polarizing hotels.

Okay.

Those really interesting hotels are going to be slightly divisive.

Okay.

The Moxie would be divisive, actually.

You know, if you turned up except for

four, you know, where's the fucking pool?

There's no kids' club.

But anything that's really good for some people is probably going to be deficient on some other measure.

You know, I mean, the most extreme, I've always given this example, the hotel I stayed in in East Berlin, where

it was a former east german police station the the rooms had been cells okay you actually slept on a large platform above your own shower because there wasn't room in the cell to have a whole bed and separate shower there was one television in the room it was black and white wasn't even a flat screen one channel and it showed still does show to this day the big lubowski on continuous loop now if you'd turned up expecting the marriott okay it would have been literally trauma traumatizing okay on the other other hand, if you wanted something that was authentically

experience holiday, and I ought to make the point, okay,

I ought to make the point that in the middle of the hotel, it was a bit like the Moxie in that thing, in that we invest in the commonal areas, not in the rooms, okay, there was a barista and a coffee shop.

Are you sure it wasn't a panopticon in the middle of the hotel?

Everybody's room being looked at.

I'm pretty sure you're right.

It should have been a panopticon, it shouldn't be.

That would have been

real authentic.

In the middle, in a kind of courtyard, was literally a coffee shop where I had probably the best flat white I've had in my life.

When are we going to get a Hindenburg?

We spoke about this last night.

We want the dirigible.

Yeah.

Talk to me about everybody's desire to have a dirigible.

Well, I've always wondered, by the way, I didn't fully answer the first question about star ratings, but I've always wanted...

You mentioned repeat purchase.

Nearly all businesses.

over-invest in acquisition and under-invest in

customer attention.

And the reason is, I'll tell you the companies I don't think do that.

I think

family-owned companies tend not to because they've got kind of reputational skin in the game and they've got longer-term time horizons and they're actually building a brand.

Okay.

I think companies that are owned by like private equity, companies that have short-term time horizons, are obsessed with quantification.

And it's always easier to quantify and measure acquisition of customers than it is to actually measure retention of customers because retention of customers is harder to measure, but it's also slow okay if you do something but I would argue and this is when I this is what I was going to go the only really obviously it doesn't work for one-off purchases like marriage okay right it wouldn't work for okay but repeat purchase you know Amazon should have a kind of repeat purchase omiter obviously again not on things you'd only buy once in your life but actually it's a pretty significant measure it's not just how many people bought this thing it's how many people that bought this thing before re-bought so to tediously go back to air fryers okay very simple question if your air fryer broke would you go and buy another one the next day yes from you yes okay now that's not true of yogurt makers okay

and so they consumers would benefit enormously now interestingly there are some libertarian economists who believe in this that it'd be perfectly acceptable for the government to collect information on certain things and to share it with consumers to make them better informed so one interesting thing would be people who enter this category.

So, you might have, you know, yogurt maker.

I'm being a bit unfair to yogurt makers.

I'm sure they're people who love the for rights.

I can never be bothered.

Churn our own butter as well.

Why don't we do that?

Exactly.

Let's pretend we're 17th century peasants.

Yeah, I don't really get that.

But it would be useful for the government to, you know, electric cars, interestingly,

generally have a very high repeat rate within the category.

You know, it's it most people who actually go electric don't revert.

Question on that.

I wonder how many of those situations are due to the fact that when you've planted your flag in the ground and your next door neighbor's gone, oh, Rory, that's a, well, that's an interesting.

Is that it's a MAC E, it's an electric one.

Oh, well, you, it's the future, you know, it's the.

And then four years later, when the car needs to be renewed, and you go, yeah, I got the 6.2-liter V8 fucking Camaro.

You go, but what about the oligarch you said about that?

And you have to eat your own pride.

Part of its consistency bias, by the way, part of its regret minimization, part of it may be sunk cost, which is it took me three months of effort to become really good at owning an electric car, such that I could turn up more or less anywhere, charge the thing, not look like an idiot.

Having invested that cost, okay, I'm more likely to actually.

And you reap the rewards.

Which is, in a sense, you know, in the dating market, that's why women have to play hard to get.

Okay.

Which is the cost of acquisition probably translates into loyalty and consistency.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't want to to give somebody the job as they're at the interview the first time that you see them it's literally not a good indication currently places like gold with the sax not only will subject you to about six interviews okay probably three of which are entirely gratuitous but they don't even offer you a job they wait for you to ring and ask no way somebody literally told me this

test of agency literally they said it's really weird because i had six interviews and they all went really well and i haven't heard back and somebody said you won't hear back they want you to ring up and actually pester them.

Now,

it was certainly one New York invest a New York Investment Bank that literally would do that.

They go, I'm not going to actually offer the guy a job.

You know, we've done six interviews, but

it's on him now.

It's on him.

We did six interviews.

It's now on him.

There are products, by the way, which is almost certainly goods to add a degree of friction.

Because if there's a degree of difficulty, I mean, I have this.

The Ikea effect?

I have, yeah.

The effort you put into the acquisition of something contributes to the perceived value of the thing.

Yeah, this is your bit about the difference between cheap strawberries and pick your own strawberries.

Yeah.

Fundamentally, they mean something different.

One of them is I put effort into the creation of value here and therefore that the low price is destigmatized.

Whereas if you made IKEA really, really easy furniture to buy, I think they had to offer delivery when they moved to the US, didn't they?

Because they were met with complete incomprehension or something.

Because Americans had a higher expectation of service.

But fundamentally,

IKEA is pick your own strawberries.

I've put some effort into the creation and

accumulation of this

items.

Therefore, the low price is partly a reflection of my own effort rather than just low product quality to begin with.

Yeah, there's double effort as well.

For the people that have never been to an IKEA, first, try and find the nearest IKEA to you.

It is a real experience.

Halfway around, there's great quality meatballs, but it's a...

There is a big one near Austin, isn't there?

I seem to remember it.

It's not far.

It's just in Round Draft.

I remember driving past it, yeah.

It's just in round driving past.

It's not quite as big as the Giga Factory, but it's pretty vast.

Yeah, yeah.

You walk around this big maze for ages.

So not only did you have to build the thing yourself, look at the instructions, have an argument with your wife about how it was going to work, even before that, when you were in the selection period, you had to go through, we are here to get kitchen stuff.

Well, we've got to walk through the bedrooms, and we need to walk through the lounge, we've got to go through the lighting department.

Oh, we're at the kitchen.

Okay.

That piece of art over there is quite, no, we're on kitchen dude.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

It's an ADHD sufferer's nightmare.

You could actually sort of sell IKEA blinkers, couldn't you?

Which are sort of, you know, to focus you in.

Effectively, yes.

Well, you could get a, you could do the concierge service again.

Sir, I'm going to take you directly to the kitchen area.

I've just told you.

Exactly.

It's like being

fucking abducted.

Exactly.

But I'll lead you straight to the kitchen section.

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When are we going to get a Hindenburg?

When are we going to get one?

Yeah, oh, yeah, you're absolutely right.

Blimps.

Yep.

So we had this conversation that actually helicopters are not only dangerous, but actually they're a poor status marker because they suggest you're time poor.

And so the theory was that the air yacht, which by the way, did exist, you can see it on YouTube.

After World War II, there was a company that turned something like Boeing Stratofortresses into flying luxury yachts, which I think could land on water.

So it actually wouldn't be the stratofortress.

It must be in some sort of seaplane.

Okay.

And there's actually a tragic thing of a family who said out to fly around the world and were actually killed by people somewhere in the Middle East because they landed somewhere in the middle of some tribal conflict.

But the airship

would be extraordinarily high status as a mode of transport because it suggested you had money, but you also had spare time.

And of course, you could have a degree of luxury, which is difficult in all but the largest aircraft.

I mean, I've always wondered about it, which is why is it that yachts are high status, but RVs are low status, relatively?

Because I think American RVs, did you ever watch Matt's RV reviews on YouTube?

I did, yeah.

Matt Foxworthy, absolute genius, in my opinion.

And actually, by the way, interesting detail about salesmanship: three things we like about this motorhome, three things we don't like.

Actually, that's it.

That's your one-star, five-star reviews again, right?

Actually, the admission, the admission of what you might call disarming candor is actually a good element of salesmanship because it actually contributes towards trust.

The too good to be true heuristic kicks in and people actually get a bit unnerved.

And one way of doing it, of course, is just to say it is expensive, but it's worth it.

But some acknowledgement of a downside

can be actually particularly, I think Robert Cialdini says close to the point of sale, can be very convincing.

Jay Leno on Jay Leno's garage talks about the fact that he won't buy a Ferrari because the whole thing is mired in all sorts of weirdness.

Okay.

But he was very impressed because when he was buying a McLaren, he said, I'm quite interested in the ceramic brake discs or whatever it is.

And the guy said, are you planning to track the car?

No.

He said, I'll mostly be.

He said,

let me save you $20,000 straight off the bat.

You know, because if you're driving around LA, they take ages to warm up.

You'll end up hitting the car in front.

Now, that's a brilliant way of establishing trust, of downselling someone slightly.

Who else?

Alex Homosi is very, very good at this.

And that guy is an absolute genius, in my opinion.

Yeah, he's one of the best funnel hackers in the world.

Absolutely brilliant.

I mean, it's fascinating to watch.

You know, I feel like, you know,

but

the airship, because I've always thought when you think about RVs, okay.

99% of the world's interesting things are actually found on land, aren't they?

Really?

Okay.

And so there are also problems with the very big yachts, which is you can't go into small harbors.

So you end up next to an even bigger yacht, feeling that you failed in life, you know, at the Monaco Grand Prix.

And I've always thought that actually,

if I was supremely rich, having a really, really luxury land yacht would be a great thing.

Didn't we think about the fact that a hot air balloon is even more high status than a blimp?

Because at least with the blimp, you have a tiny little turbine at the back that can direct you roughly.

Well, the hot air balloon says, I've got money.

It'd have to be a luxury hot air balloon.

I've got money.

I've got lots of time to spare and I don't really care where I've to go.

Yeah.

I'm so rich that I'll make it good wherever I go.

I mean, that's very much the weird finding in airlines, which is that when you have a flight that's cancelled and people have to travel

on the next day, the general finding of airlines is that the people in the middle of the plane are really angry about it.

Okay.

The people at the, you know, some of the economy travelers, they're like students, okay?

You give them a free night in a four-star hotel, they're going off to Asia for you know, five weeks anyway, okay?

This is a bonus, they're delighted, okay.

They, you know, they get a night in the hotel, it's all a bit of a novelty.

The people at the front of the plane just go, yeah, that's fine, I'll just go back into the Savoy and I'll book an extra night.

And then they're not bothered either.

The people in the middle are going, absolutely.

Premium economy are fucked.

I mean, the whole question, by the way, of you know, one of the most interesting things, you know, we're both fans of evolutionary psychology.

And one of the great predictions made in evolutionary psychology was made by Geoffrey Miller in his book, Both Spent and the Mating Mind.

Have you had him on, actually?

I have multiple times.

Multiple times.

Okay.

This is a case of someone actually getting it bang on the money.

He predicted that social media would fundamentally change not the human urge to display status, but what the currencies were.

So he predicted that travel would become much more valuable as a status marker because you can now photograph yourself in front of Machu Picchu, okay, and basically, you know, while all your friends are at work in the rain, okay,

and that the nature of the things that would actually enable you to display status through digital means and cars would be probably diminished, or household possessions,

except to the extent that you can photograph them, would be kind of diminished.

And that prediction has been pretty much borne out.

And what you're, I mean,

what's interesting there there is that, you know,

a very interesting question would be

status of a job.

Okay.

There was no debate, okay, that it was better, if you had to work in London, okay, it was better to earn 100x than 50x, okay.

If the choice becomes to today's young,

you can live in Lisbon or Fuerto Ventura or for that matter, you know, in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

You can live there for 50, or you can live in London for 100.

It's not altogether a slam dunk to decide who's got the better job.

You know, when you were both competing for identical resources, and that the only variable in employment was

how long you worked, how much you got paid.

That was employment economics for hundreds of years, basically.

It was assumed that place was a given, that when you worked was a given.

And so the only variables were effectively you know, how long you worked, how much you got paid.

Maybe commute.

And yeah, I guess, I guess, I mean, there would be people who choose jobs because the commute was easier.

Famously, there was one London bank that moved next to a railway station and they found they could never get rid of their older staff because it was, they'd all moved to the country, bought an F off house, and they just rumbled in on the train and

walked 100 yards to the office.

Those guys weren't going anywhere.

But suddenly you have this technical employment market where as well as free time there's free where and there's free when so if you can work where you like when you like and a colleague of mine brian featherstone horse said also if you can work with whom you like all of those things are now negotiable value counters alongside the money

And so, you know, it's a really interesting debate.

If you're an employer and

you want particularly talented people, but you haven't got the immense budget which enables you to compete with JP Morgan or something.

Well, offering lifestyle benefits or locations where near affordable housing strikes me as a pretty smart place to go.

What would you do to improve food delivery apps?

This in the US, there's even more than there are in the UK.

So many different.

We have Deliveroo, which you don't have, do you?

We have Just Eat, which you don't have.

No, and just Just Eats kind of feels a little bit sort of internet in 2005-y to me, up against something like an Uber Eats.

I mean, Deliveroo, interestingly, is I mean, they're probably moving to delivery of not just food as well, which is interesting.

I mean, what ultimately happens there

is fascinating.

So you use DoorDash, presumably.

I use Uber Eats.

I use Uber Eats, but one thing that...

They do this slightly annoying thing that I always find, which is, oh, yeah, okay, your meal comes to $35.

That's a bit expensive, but hell, they're delivering it.

What the hell?

And then they go, pay us another $5 and we won't urinate on your food.

Pay us another $7.

And by the time you've got them finished.

Have you ever done this?

So if you go into, hit me with it.

If you go into the Uber app, just a normal Uber app here, and then it's got this suggestions thing in the middle.

Now, everybody below your two most recent places that you've been and whatever it is that you're going to type in about where you need to go, everybody forgets that.

If you go to suggestions, you look here, car hire, bikes, stuff for teens.

And then if you go down, get anything delivered, food, grocery, alcohol, convenience, health, personal care, baby, gourmet, pet supplies, flowers, retail, electronics, you can get anything done, a courier or a store pickup.

So if you've left your watch in a gym,

you can send the fucking Uber guy to go and get it for you.

Or you can get your pharmacy delivery.

You can get them to get pretty much anything.

What they're interestingly suffering from is the interesting thing, which is kind of the Starbucks Pratt dilemma,

which is Pret is mentally known for food in the UK, and they want to sell more coffee.

And Starbucks is known for coffee, and they want to sell more food.

And what they're doing there with Uber, which is quite clever, is they're obviously predominantly associated with one particular application.

Okay.

And people have got into the habit of getting food delivered because they had food delivered before.

You just booked it by telephone.

You know, it was a pizza in 1989 or whatever.

That was Domino's whole stock in trade.

And so actually, getting people to broaden their repertoire within,

it's quite a common marketing dilemma, which is, it's almost, it's almost the market equivalent of the innovator's dilemma.

You get known for one very good thing.

Now, Starbucks, I think, possibly, you know, I think Howard Schultz was conscious of this.

They were so desperate to sell food because they saw it as incremental value, you see.

Okay.

And so, you know, in other words, you know, the coffee stuff was one thing, but the food they more or less saw as incremental profit.

That you then start diluting your coffee credentials if you're not careful.

Yep.

And, you know, it's interesting with, you know, for example, Prat, I think, you know, has experimented with various subscription services and so on and so forth

to get people to up the coffee consumption.

Well, like a loyalty card.

What Uber's doing there is it's quite because they do trains in the UK.

Obviously, you don't, you know, so you literally can book, you can book any train on Uber.

No way.

And coaches, and I think

a few other things.

Fuck me.

I haven't been back to the UK for long enough.

Wow.

That's cool.

And so, but I mean,

what's the problem you have with the?

Because I find that I've used Uber Eats, and apart from that slightly weird thing of continually demanding extra money.

I'm a fan of Uber Eats.

I think the main issue I've got at the moment when it comes to the intersection of food and digital is I'm still often overwhelmed and confused when it comes to choosing, especially in a city that I'm not familiar with.

And I don't quite know what the metric is that I want.

So,

distance from where I am, especially if I'm going to go somewhere.

You know, you land in Manhattan, you're on the Upper East Side, you think, I want to go for some food this evening.

And maybe you don't even have that specific, your missus can't decide, whatever.

You go, fuck, like, okay, so I need to kind of reverse engineer what I think it is that she wants.

And she says she doesn't want anything, but I need to, if I get this wrong, I'll know.

And if I get this right, it's acceptable.

My wife claims to be lactose and gluten-intolerant, which makes things even more tedious.

Right, okay.

So I'm looking on Google Maps and I go, okay, well, I'll order by, first off, I need to filter by open now.

That seems pretty important, given that I'm trying to go now.

But after that, it's just this, it's really difficult to okay.

Well, this one's 4.5 stars, but it's only got 100 reviews.

This one's a four-star, but it's got 2,000 reviews.

And it's.

You're probably a Brit, so you'd like to order the food by degrees of spiciness in some cases, would you?

I mean,

I do.

It's certainly a criteria I look at.

Yeah, it's just I struggle, and especially if I'm somewhere new and I'm on Uber, okay.

I can either order sweet green or carver a flower child for the millionth time, or I can try and get something that's at least remotely

localized to wherever it is.

It's going to be a unique experience.

But also, I've got such potential buyer's regret here.

I think, God, this is my only sustenance for the evening.

I've had to wait 50 minutes for it to get to me, and I'm going to hate it.

I agree.

Yeah.

By the way, by the way, I think all these people will start to

have to start offering Munjaro portions soon.

Okay.

You know, because actually, if you look at the effects of, what are they, GLP1s on people's calorific consumption, it seems to affect all sorts of impulsive behaviors, actually.

Seems to have an effect on sort of gambling addiction and weird they never anticipated.

But if you look at Walmart had a lot of good data on this because because they obviously have pharmacists, but they also have their loyalty card data.

So they can see the effect that it has on what people buy.

What you might purchasing, I saw a talk from the chief economist at Visa about two days ago.

And purchase, now some of this is people eating out more and shopping a bit less, but purchasing, which was on a constant upward trend, purchasing of food from the grocery aisle, which was on a constant upward trend, seems to have flatlined.

Now, what's interesting about that is that's with probably 8% to 10% of the US population on some sort of GLP-1

treatment.

Now, if it causes flatlining with 8%, what the hell happens when it's 25?

So now, I don't think the prognosis is all bad.

I think that people on those things will actually have small, which maybe, maybe, maybe this is, you know, the direction of

capitalism, I would argue, or the desirable direction of consumer capitalism, of which I'm something of a fan, is actually less but better.

You know, the quality is going to be better.

It's more than having a chocolate bar that's, you know,

that's the size of a small field.

You have, you know, in other words, you treat yourself to smaller quantities of things that are of a higher quality and you become more mindful about your enjoyment of them.

Did you see that speech at the end of The White Lotus where the lady from

a speech which is, you know, effectively, we're the most privileged 1% percent of people in the history of the world.

We have a duty to enjoy ourselves.

It's a wonderful argument.

Wonderful argument.

And it was, it was interesting because she wasn't an altogether sympathetic character.

It's probably fair to say.

Although

the whole family were actually more interesting in many ways than anybody else.

I don't know why they were chosen as being from North Carolina.

I think she, there's a whole load of American nuance in there that he went to Duke and she went to UNC or something.

Okay.

A whole load of weird sort of stuff in there, which as a Brit, I couldn't entirely disentangle.

But

there is actually a degree of validity to that, which is that, you know, if you're in a privileged position, it's actually slightly rude to your ancestors.

It's disrespectful to your ancestors in a sense, and to other people less fortunate than you to go around not enjoying the things that you have in some active form.

There's a meme that's floating around on the internet at the moment, and it's a guy stood in front of this sort of cosmic backdrop, and it's millions and millions of small silhouettes of people.

And it's my entire ancestral lineage watching me lift weights instead of talk to a girl for the 3,000th time.

Perfect.

Yeah.

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I mean, that's that's an interesting one as well, isn't it?

Which is the

uh

I mean, one of the other things the economist revealed is the amazing number of single-person households.

Uh, you know, in other words, people not in a relationship.

Think the most common living arrangement for a man under 35 is still at home with his parents.

Over 18 and under 35, the most common living arrangement is still with parents.

And that

you're going to unfortunately bring me on to one of my other hobby horses, which is the need for land value tax to make property more affordable and basically to get these oldsters out of houses which are bigger than they need

because family formation has become impossible.

Okay.

Now, this is one of those cases which I often talk about, which I think we need to be permanently alert to, where something comes along as an option and becomes an obligation.

Explain that for me.

Okay.

So Naseem Taleb taught me all this stuff, the huge difference between an option and an obligation, which is...

Personally, I hate drinks parties, right?

I like dinner parties.

I hate drinks parties.

Last night for me was what?

One, two, three, four, five, six.

That's close to my upper bound.

I think when you get to seven.

Seven to eight, that's starting to get a little much for me.

Back at home in Monmouth, there's a man called Wilson Plant, who was an extraordinary man.

I mean,

he sat in the pub, sort of presiding in the pub, and someone would have a discussion and, you know, it would get a bit intellectual and go, well, how do you know D.H.

Lawrence thought that?

And he'd reply, because he told me so.

He knew everybody, Nancy Mitford.

I mean, it was just one of those people who...

In his 20s and 30s, he'd just been in sort of London society.

And he had a rule for a pub conversation, which is between the graces and the muses.

And I think I've got this right.

There are three graces and there are nine muses.

And his argument is that once a pub table, you know, once a pub table gets below three, it's time to go home.

Okay.

Once it gets above nine, you should split off and form another table.

I am in agreement.

I think, I think it's...

And by the way, I don't mind drinks parties in the garden.

because you can wander off.

Well, that's little clusters.

But if,

particularly when you have 59, inside, you can't hear a fucking word anybody's saying anyway.

Okay.

So back to your land value.

My options and obligations thing.

Okay.

So interestingly, the only good thing about a drinks party is you go, yeah, yeah, that's fine, Saturday night.

And if you don't feel like going, you don't have to go.

Whereas a dinner party, if they've actually prepared food and they're going to be eight of you and they don't, you know, they want to match up the genders or whatever it is anybody does.

I don't know if anybody does that anymore.

Okay.

But you have to go.

Basically, you have to have a really good reason not to go.

So that's an obligation, whereas the drinks party is an option.

Okay.

And the ultimate option is six of us are going to the pub this evening.

If you feel like it, come along.

That's an option.

Okay.

Whereas

Dave's stag party is a fucking obligation, right?

Okay.

Now, Nassim taught me this distinction, which obviously understands perfectly from finance.

You know, it's a massively important distinction, whether you own an option on something or whether you have actually an obligation.

Now,

what happens quite a lot, I think, and we need to to be really alert to it, is something comes along.

Now, a classic example of this would be parking apps.

Okay.

Now,

the parking app comes along and you still have machines.

You still have meters that take coins.

You still have a pay and display machine, as we call it in the UK.

But if you want to, you can pay by app.

And you go, oh, that's fantastic.

I really like that.

That's great because I don't always carry a lot of coins with me.

This makes it really convenient.

Absolutely fantastic.

And you go, isn't this good?

The world's getting better.

And then the people who operate car parks parks notice that

it's a lot cheaper if they just get rid of the pair and display machines.

Okay.

And also they probably lose a bit of money from fraud or theft and the maintenance.

Maintenance and all that stuff.

And then suddenly you're stuck with only the parking app.

If you're 70 or 80 years old, this sort of shit is starting to turn the world into a nightmare.

The extent to which you're expected to have a smartphone and have the eyesight to use it and master a pace of change which is actually to some extent imposed on us.

It's not chosen by us.

That's becoming,

by the way, you're talking about airports.

Okay.

There is nothing at an airport between disabled, request a wheelchair and walk.

Okay?

There's no halfway house for someone who's a bit elderly, but doesn't actually want to be wheeled through.

And

I think, you know, given the fact that wealth is more and more concentrated, again, among the old nowadays, the extent to which a lot of modern built infrastructure is extremely disrespectful to people who are just a bit elderly.

In other words, they're not fully registered disabled, but they are constrained, I think is monstrous.

Anyway, another example of what starts as an obligation

as an option and becomes an obligation is actually the two-income household.

Okay, so there was a period, obviously, women entered the workplace, married women particularly entered the workplace a little bit during World War II.

I think it was something 10 to 15% of women were actually working in war work.

That changed things.

But for a long time, it was, do we want to actually both go out to work and have a pretty blinged-up, you know, fancy-ass lifestyle option?

Or would we prefer that one or either, you know, it doesn't have to be man or woman, or would we prefer if one person stays at home and one person goes out to work?

Now, for that blissful period, it was still possible to maintain a household with children on one salary.

The two-income household was great news for property owners.

It was great news for the government because you had twice as many people you could tax.

What it meant for the typical family, now I'm not making any value judgment about this, I'm just simply saying what's true, is you lost 40 hours of discretionary time each week.

without necessarily enjoying a market improvement in your discretionary income.

Because all that happened was that house prices basically went up to mop up the spare income that was made possible by two people in a relationship working.

And therefore, the gains went to landowners, landlords, or indeed, you know,

our parents' generation to some extent, rather than to the people actually doing the work.

We were all exit liquidity for everybody else.

What do you make of Gary Stevenson's ascendancy and that sort of messaging that's happening in the UK?

Well, first frivolous point, which is if you want to help with wealth redistribution, Gary, go out and spend some fucking money, right?

I mean, he was earning like two or three million pounds a year and only earning one pair of shoes.

Okay.

And his mates from school were working in JD Sports.

And I did help, I couldn't help thinking reading the book, Gary, Gary, just go down to GDA's JD Sports and just buy a few pairs of shoes.

Help out your mates.

Okay.

You know, get a hot tub.

You know, you know, but his fundamental insight, unbelievably stingy.

Do you not think you did that book?

I haven't read it.

I've seen him talk on.

But geez, Gary, just,

you know, enjoy it for crying out.

Okay.

I think you get that weird thing, actually, in banking, which is so much of your enjoyment stuff back then was covered by an entertainment budget, okay, that you got really, really resentful about spending your own money.

You see what I mean?

Most of us, the money comes in, 80% of it walks straight out again because we piss it up the wall.

You know, you know, you know, I haven't got an air fryer for the second bedroom, you know.

But there are people who kind of, you know, if you're in that very corporate world where more or less all your fun is taken care of by some expense account, you actually find spending your money disproportionately painful.

He's absolutely right in his insight that money is becoming unhealthily concentrated.

In the two things I would say, he's absolutely right that economics uses these single representative agent models, which don't capture inequality.

Okay.

I would argue personally, Gary, that you need to read up a bit about Georgism, which I think the great ideas of Henry George and the land value tax would actually take care of a lot of that, in my view, if you tax land ownership.

Because property ownership is effectively

you are buying the right to impose taxes on the younger generation.

So

I mean, when people invested in gold, okay, it doesn't do anybody else any harm because I can make do without any gold.

Okay, you know, I'm not massively into bling, not hugely into jewelry, okay?

We can all get by without gold.

If there's a bloody

Dutch tulip boom, okay, I'll just switch to gladioli.

Okay, but I can't substitute for property at some level.

If your employer demands you work in a major city, okay, and land and commutable land is scarce,

other than the blimp, of course, where you could just live tethered above bercley square 400 feet up okay other than your blimp solution there's no escaping the depredations of rent-seeking landowners

and what has happened is that we've in a way we've sanctified wealth and been pretty mean on income okay so we've taxed away income discrepancies pretty energetically but they aren't that big okay i mean what i mean by that is

if you look at income inequality, even before tax, never mind corrected after tax,

you know,

the number of people who earn like, you know, 20 times median income, okay, is they exist, but there are very few of them and they pay an enormous amount of income tax.

I mean, huge amounts of income tax.

In other words, that's someone who's probably like a high-end lawyer in a partnership in, you know, a London Magic Circle law firm.

Now, there are a lot of people I'd rather the money went to than people in law firms, but nonetheless, those people pay a lot of tax, whatever you think about it.

By contrast, wealth inequality is monumental.

I mean, there are people who, if they walked into a football stadium,

every single person on average in that stadium would now be a multi-millionaire simply because Bill Gates walked in.

There aren't inequalities like that of that kind of extreme form in actual earned income.

And yet we have this incredibly aggressive system of redistributing earned wealth.

And yet we treat wealth that's actually resident in asset values and things as completely sacrosanct.

And the problem is, until you actually get to that point where you start actually taxing now, Texas does it amusingly because you have quite heavy land taxes.

So, ironically, what's often stereotyped, I think, unfairly as, you know, the most conservative state in the Union, which in fact is not, okay.

But, you know, it's a highly conservative state, you actually pay quite a lot of tax on the value of the property you own.

So the property taxes in Texas, I think around 2.5%

if you own it.

Now, the great effect that has is that it makes property less expensive because you have to pay tax on it and it prevents you using property as an extractive store of wealth.

Okay?

And the extent to which I think you have to argue that speculation in property has been absolutely deleted.

It has led to enormous redistribution of wealth effectively to the not necessarily very deserving old at the expense of the hardworking young.

I just find it impossible to dispute.

I'm 59, by the way.

I did okay.

I surfed the wave.

I didn't surf it very well.

I now own, you know, a couple of flats.

I don't own a house, nothing blingy.

Okay.

I now own a couple of flats sort of outright.

But there are people who bought a house in 1974

whose children, this is literally a case I know of, okay?

So there's a woman living on her own in a five-bedroom house not far from where I live, which is probably worth with the garden 4.5 million, okay, or 3.2 or something like that.

She has no money to spend.

She has all this money tied up in a totally illiquid form of wealth.

So, you know, she's kind of going down little and comparing the price of lemons, even though she owns a fuck off, you know, 3.5.

Her children are kind of worried about how they replace the shock absorbers on their car.

And then

the argument would be, why should those children go out and work really hard?

What I do, to be obviously honest, is get into debt, go off to Barbados, wait for your mum to die.

Fuck me.

No, no, but that's, but, but nothing you do working, let's say, as a school teacher.

So there's this great book you must get her on called The Inheritocracy.

Okay.

By a woman called Eliza.

Oh, God, I'll remember it in a second.

You're becoming increasingly left-wing here, Rory.

No, no, no, no, no, no.

I'm pretty right-wing in terms of people's earnings because you have actually earned them.

So, Henry George, effectively, the way to understand Henry George is it was an approach to life which actually had a brief but extraordinary success,

popular success in the United States.

The game of monopoly is based on it's trying to interest people in George's principles of extractive rent-seeking, okay?

And the basic principle of Henry George is that it's it's, now, I'm going to qualify this, it's extremely free market and capitalistic with regard to the fruits of your labor, okay?

Anything you do, any, anything you build on your land is yours to keep, but it's effectively highly socialistic in terms of land ownership and arguably ownership of limited resources.

So a Georgist would also tax

oil, for example.

You know, anything that's, and the argument is you didn't make those things that would have been in the 19th century.

They would have said, this is God's creation, and you're only, you know, you're actually, you don't own it because you didn't make it.

You don't have the right to own this thing because you didn't make it.

What you are is a custodian of it, and you pay commensurate tax on the land you own.

Okay.

Whereas you would, in purest Georgia circles, you have no income tax at all.

Okay, that probably a bit extreme.

But it's the there it's sometimes called geo-ism.

And it's there's there's also a school of thought which is kind of environmental Georgism, which is you tax the consumption or

you tax anything where you rivalrously consume something of which more can't be made.

Right.

Yep.

Okay.

And what happens in Texas, quite interestingly, is all these Californians apparently move to Texas and they go, God, the land here is really cheap.

Let's buy loads of it.

And then six months later, they get hit with a massive tax bill for their land ownership.

And they go, what the hell's going on here?

We bought this land because it's cheap.

And the Texans reply, that's why it's exactly you pay 2.5% tax on it.

Did you ever look at that issue with fighter pilot seats that was designed for average?

Yeah, that's a brilliant point.

So that's similar.

That's analogous to Gary Stevenson.

Have you had Gary on, by the way?

I haven't.

He was supposed to come on in London a couple of months ago when we last had you on.

I hope he's out shoe shopping instead.

I'm in advertising.

Meet me halfway, Gary.

Yeah, well, there's an interesting if you want to redistribute wealth, it does help if rich people occasionally go out and buy something.

Yeah, there's an interesting

debate going on about whether or not Gary Stevenson is basically thinly veiled performance art, that you've got this,

the get-up, the same pair of joggers, all the rest of this stuff.

It is, I don't know, it must be difficult to have.

I think he's okay.

Apart from his consumption patterns,

I think he's fundamental.

So there are a few things where the problem with all these models is that the assumptions of the model that are necessary to simplify the model eventually come back to bite you.

And looking at average wealth as if it's somehow representative of, you know, that a successful

getting richer on average.

The fact that for 30 fucking years in the US and the UK, we presented rising property prices as a good news story is monstrous.

I mean, that was just the most monstrous misrepresentation of information.

You don't say petrol's good, gasoline's gone up, but good news, you've got a full tank of petrol, so your car's now more valuable, right?

Is it a case of kind of a luxury belief that the sort of people who would be writing and consuming those and understanding those sorts of stories are likely to already be people who own property?

So their lesson is not going to be, holy fuck, it's going to be hard to get onto them.

Absolutely true.

Even worse, of course, every single MP in London throughout the 70s, well, 80s, 90s, 2000s was basically heavily invested in the property market because they got a massive perk.

They got their mortgage paid on a London home.

So there wasn't a single person there, with the possible exception of someone, you know, was Ken Livingston ever an MP?

I'm not sure he was.

But apart from a few very, very principled leftists or possibly a couple of Georgists in the Conservative Party.

It's a weird, by the way, it's a weird sort of philosophy because it's both left-wing and right-wing.

And so it has its

own Milton Friedman was a fan.

So was, was um

uh god i always remember i always forget her name i was married to malcolm mclaren you know the fashion designer vivin westwood she was also a georgist you get richard nixon winston churchill wow it has its adhering really crosses the spectrum

what happened in the model was that adam smith thought there were three sources of wealth creation which was land capital and um labor And future generations of economists thought it's too complicated having three things because it makes the maths difficult.

So we'll pretend that capital and land are the same thing and they're not.

Because capital is potentially limitless and you can create more of it.

Land is effectively an artificial bottleneck.

It's a rent-seeking device.

I'm interested whether or not you've got any insights around painkillers.

Every single time that I think about

a psychological effect of something that people assume has got some sort of a drop-off rate, I know that there's some studies saying that more expensive painkillers are interpreted as being more effective.

So even if...

Yes, no, no, no, no, that's under.

I mean,

I'm the only person who complains you can't buy expensive aspirin anymore because my argument is I haven't got a 30p headache.

I've got a £2.50 headache.

By the way, I think there are a whole load of things where in the human brain, the X has to be commensurate with the Y.

Okay.

So the reason, if you're buying a house, the reason you have to have a posso estate agent is because fundamentally, if I'm spending this amount of money, I expect a certain amount of money to be spent on the act of persuasion.

And it may be highly performative, but it's just a kind of idea of what's proportionate.

You know, if you turned up to look at a sort of $5 million mansion outside Austin and the guy just turns up and goes, here are the keys, go and have a look yourself.

It's a bit like the fact in women's fashion that

if you spend $150 plus, you've got to get a rope handle bag, right?

It's the, there's a commensurate amount of bullshit necessary to accompany any activity in order for it to seem somehow natural and right.

Lovely finding, by the way, from the Visa Chief Economist about the American South, including Texas.

They look at what happens to consumption patterns when people suddenly get more disposable income.

Okay, typically gas prices fall.

Suddenly, disposable income goes up right across the board.

What happens?

Two things that are really different.

Women's expenditure on clothing, massive spike.

Men's expenditure on clothing, flatline.

Okay.

Because in the South, if you've got a pair of jeans and a shirt, you're fully dressed.

That's it.

I think that's fantastic.

But

the

no, I mean, Gary's point, by the way, about that thing, which is that the single representative agent model, the average model, is flawed.

Because actually,

one of the most interesting philosophically, okay, the perfect place to live is not somewhere where everybody's a lot poorer than you, right?

Because their consumption patterns will then mean that there's nothing for you to buy.

Standard of coffee.

I always had this slightly socialistic idea when I was watching Downton Abbey, okay?

If I'd been the Marquis of Downton, right?

Those people were immensely rich.

Well, they had been broke, but he married the Canadian, didn't he?

So they were kind of rich again.

There was a whole period where nearly all aristocrats had to marry Americans because it coincided with a massive fall in agricultural prices.

And

there was a kind of after World War I, there there was kind of agriculture.

Oh, I don't know.

That's, do you know what it was?

Partly?

It was refrigerated shipments of beef from Latin America and grain from Canada.

So suddenly the value of agricultural goods in the UK fell off a cliff.

And so the aristocracy basically headed west to try and pick up an heiress.

But

what I always thought about those people is they, you know, they obviously lived in a fuck-off house, you know, downtown Abbey.

And, but they ate food cooked by the same woman every single night.

And my theory was that what I would have done had I been the market of Downton is I would have trebled the salaries of all my servants.

Okay.

And I would have given them three days off a week because then an interesting Indian restaurant would have opened in the nearby village and you would have had somewhere else to eat.

Okay.

Oh, wow.

Do you see what I mean?

Yes.

You know, there'd be a car dealership and there'd be a bit of other stuff to cater to these richer people.

Then actually, redistribution of wealth in some ways is not altogether a bad thing because you want everybody around you to be a bit poorer than you.

Have you looked?

You know, let's be honest about it.

You want your neighbors to be a tiny bit poorer than you so you can show off a bit, turn up a lot of people.

But there's also

fuck off 6.2 litre.

Camaro.

Is there not a rule supposedly about you never want to own the most expensive house in the neighborhood?

There is an argument that says you buy the cheapest house on the most expensive street, not the most expensive house in the cheapest street.

I've also got various property rules for how to game it, which is like find out something that everybody else hates that you don't mind next to a pub.

Okay.

If you're thinking really long term,

you might think that with car electrification, being next to a busy road isn't the downside that it once would have been.

It's going to get quieter up.

It's going to get a bit quieter, and your worry about pollution might diminish.

But that's quite a long game.

Yeah.

But don't worry about the school district if you haven't got kids or you're not planning to have kids.

There are, and one of my complaints about the property market is there aren't mechanisms for you to look for negatives.

Because actually, a negative I don't care about is actually a positive.

But no, in terms of drugs, by the way, you're getting back to the placebo effect on drugs and do they have to be expensive?

Does the packaging matter?

There's a serious issue here, which is I don't think vaping would have taken off if you'd medicalized it.

If you demanded people went and got vaporizers on prescription and they came in sort of, you know, typical medicalized packaging.

I think the fact that it was a bottom-up trend with all the marketing hullabaloo and pizzazz and packaging and flavors and you know all the extraordinary kind of uh you know the distribution uh you know i think that contributed to the successful adoption of it i think if you if you'd made it medicalized i think you would have got about a quarter the rate of adoption similarly low alcohol beer

And low alcohol, no alcohol beer fascinates the fuck out of me, partly because I think it's placebo beer.

I think that when we drink a zero-alcohol beer, we still enjoy some of the psychoactive effects of drinking alcoholic beer.

I would love the power of association.

I would love to see a behavioral, observational experiment go on to see what's the words per minute, how many swear words does somebody use, how much does their body language loosen up, having not ingested any alcohol but drunk something which is supposed to masquerade as.

There's a bit of a theory that among regular drinkers,

that you drink alcohol to give you the license to behave like a drunk person not that that it it it's kind of both do you see what i mean it's partly that the alcohol loosens you up but it's partly that the fact that you are drinking alcohol makes you feel you can uh you can loosen up um i've certainly experienced a weird effect which quite a lot of people i've spoken to have had the same effect which is you go out for the evening Typically, I take a train out of London back to Otford, as it happens, and then drive home from there.

And once or twice I've been out and I've had two or three pints of zero alcohol beer.

And I'm suddenly driving home from the station.

I go, shit.

Okay, I'm over the limit.

No, no, no, no, I haven't had any alcohol at all.

But I've had two or three of those kind of weird panic moments where I go, because mentally, somehow, I've been out for two or three beers.

And yet, obviously, as far as the breathalyzer is concerned, I'm sober as a judge.

Edward Slingerland wrote a really interesting book about the history of alcohol.

So two cool facts on it.

One, drinking alcohol makes you a better lying detector.

So, your ability to detect deception improves.

That's where it comes from, because I heard that from somebody else.

Edward Slingerland.

And the second thing is that drinking reduces your ability to deceive.

So, you have this really wonderful effect.

Oh, so In Vino Veritas, which is effectively that both you're a better lie detector and you're a worse liar.

So,

this is now if you think about it, the argument there might be that by suppressing certain, what you might call, highly literalist parts of the brain,

we actually gain powers of sort of intuition over things like lying.

Because the part of the brain that processes language might, you know,

this is going Ian McGill.

Have you had Ian McGillchrist?

Yeah.

So Ian McGillchrist would probably say the left brain tends to have a very literalist interpretation of language, but it processes much language.

But metaphor or analogies are processed in the right part of the brain.

A little bit broader.

And it's a bit broader.

So one of the things that might be absolutely true of alcohol consumption is it makes you less literal, which may explain why it

increases.

I mean, there is that weird view of alcohol that it's, you know, that being a human is kind of tiring, and this gives you two or three hours of knowing what it's like to be a bit of an animal.

Right.

You know what I mean?

Regress back to a feral state.

No human is ever as happy as a cat that's found a warm place.

For be as deep is about being like a cat.

You effectively start just, you know,

people seem to react hugely differently in my experience.

Some people become violent, some people, you know, but there is that element to alcohol that it probably enables you to enjoy the sheer physicality of being.

because it quietens down those parts of the brain without the awkwardness of thinking.

Yeah, yeah.

Interesting one related to people being tired of being themselves.

Parents are all in on all-inclusive travel again.

Demand for kid-friendly all-inclusive resorts is up 70%.

Luxury tailored to parental burnout.

So that's the all-inclusive, which is basically you have.

Part of that, of course, is choice reduction, isn't it?

I mean...

If you've got an italian restaurant and an indian restaurant and a chinese restaurant and there's a buffet you don't actually need to choose where you're going every single night it's self-contained the whole thing is so i always wondered about this which is one of the reasons i always recommend i've got a few recommendations for holidays from my 30 years experience one

the only generalization i'll make is that holidays where i rent a car are better than ones where i don't because you get serendipity Okay, now you can achieve that through walking in a city, but that business where, you know, I ended up stopping on the outskirts of Florence to recharge an electric car.

And then because I had nothing to do for 20 minutes, I wandered around the corner.

And there was a kind of leisure center and public swimming pool.

Not the kind of place you'd ever visit as a tourist in Florence.

And then I walked a bit further and then my wife and I discovered this fantastic cafe, which was just, you know, it was a totally casual cafe, but it was just glorious.

And it's one of those things you, you know, pleasant surprise, optimize for pleasant surprises.

And the problem with having a really planned holiday is that you don't get any surprises.

In fact, you tend to get negative surprises.

So that's why I'm a big believer in car rental,

you know, on holidays, because you just stumble on things that nobody else knows or a beach that nobody else goes to, and you just feel great about it.

And also it means that if the hotel you happen to book is absolute shit, there's almost certainly something pretty good 10 miles away and you can just get up in the morning and go and escape.

I mean, I've never booked a hotel that's absolutely shit, but I booked hotels you wouldn't want to stay in for too long.

But on the other hand, there's an element, this is the contrary point, which is

one of the reasons I quite often go on holiday to an island is there's a limit to the number of things you feel obliged to do.

The curse of Tuscany, okay, is that within about 90 miles, there are, you know, there's Siena, there's Lucca, there's, there's Florence.

You go, you've got to go over the mountains of the moon to see the Piera de la fucking Francesca's.

And you go, fucking hell, I just want to sit by the pool and get quietly pissed, you know.

And so, the great thing about islands

is that

they constrain the number of things you feel obliged to do.

And the second time you go back, you've already done the things you were obliged to do.

So you don't have to do the things you wanted to do.

So there is an element to things where

actually

choice limitation, presumably childcare is taken care of.

One thing I've repeatedly said to the hotel industry, by the way, talking about when you said child-friendly, all-inclusive.

And I said that I actually said this to expedia in their headquarters.

So I hope they listen.

Okay.

You've got to get rid of that designation, adults-only.

Okay.

Because I know what it means.

It means you don't allow kids.

Okay.

But I see adults-only hotel.

I go, look.

Perverts.

Perverts.

Okay.

I don't know.

I go, you know, I swingers.

You know, I'm quite keen on a quiet thing without too many noisy kids, but it doesn't make me think that.

It makes me think I've got to spend my whole week in a gimp mask while a German dentist urinates on me.

Now, I don't want to do that.

You know, call me old-fashioned, right?

And so adults only is a terrible designation.

I did a competition on Twitter and

literally 15 people came up with better alternatives to adults only.

What was some of your favorite?

One of them was just grown-ups.

You know, hotel for grown-ups was one brilliant suggestion.

Because grown-ups and adults are just a little bit more than a hundred because if you were to call it a mature hotel.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or you just, you know, you just go, you know, quiet hotel, or you just say, oh, you know, over 16s only would be fine.

But adults only, I'm going, oh, no, tell me.

Awful demarcation.

You're right.

Skims are now selling a bra with a nipple piercing in.

But that's not really.

So the bra is pierced, but not the nipple.

No, so it's got sort of a silhouette.

It's got the silhouette of a piercing.

So it looks like you've got a nipple piercing, but you don't.

I have to confess.

The taps and piercing thing, I was born in 1965 on the Welsh borders.

Okay.

I've never really got my head around that shit.

No, no, no, I don't mind.

I told my daughters they could get tattoos if they wanted to, so long as they said, dad.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

That was the

heart.

Yeah, the heart, a massive heart.

That was allowed.

Nothing else, of course.

But it's quite clever.

It's a Tromp Loy nipple piercing.

Now, the only problem there is it is false promise, isn't it?

Because

people who are really into that piercing stuff.

Are going to be disappointed.

Are going to be suddenly disappointed.

And people who would be turned off by it are going to look at somebody who

doesn't have a nipple piercing.

So it's not going to work.

I mean, you did hear that wonderful story, did you?

It's one of the funniest things I've ever heard about the problems of the rich, which is the great complaint of Carolyn Klein's daughter.

You never heard this?

No.

That this is not a problem you ever anticipated about coming from a family where your parents are rich or famous, which is Calvin Klein's daughter's great complaint was that just at the peak moment of getting romantic with a man, you are suddenly confronted with your own father's name in in shy letters.

Now, I've never, you know,

my wife, okay, has never, has never had to pull down my trousers to be confronted with Clive Whitmore

written across the elastic band in huge letters.

You can imagine that's a bit of a turnoff, isn't it?

You know, it's slightly alarming.

It doesn't set the mood.

That's fucking brilliant.

Ad campaigns that have cuddly animals that are anthropomorphic.

Yep.

Here we go.

There we go.

Buckies for everybody who hasn't been.

It's the Texas Disneyland.

But you say that ad campaigns that include a cuddly animal that talks to you are more successful.

Fundamentally, I've always wondered whether the theory is that

the odd extreme, the extreme opposite of that was for many, many years in the UK, BMW

advertising would never show people.

The most you were allowed to show was the silhouette of someone driving the car.

I remember thinking that, yeah.

Yeah.

Oily windscreen type thing,

reflections.

And the argument is, what's your user imagery, right?

And the cuddly animal is a brilliant, brilliant cheat to that because user imagery is problematic, okay?

In that, I'll give you an example.

Okay.

The average person who buys a car from new, let's say it's a, you know, Citroen, I'm probably out of date here.

Okay, let's say a small car from New, Volkswagen Goff, okay.

Average age of the person buying those from New is in, I think, the late 50s.

Quite a lot, you know.

That means, and that might be median age, actually, but I mean, certainly in the late 50s.

By the way, do you know the car brand that has the lowest average age profile of any purchaser?

And you're never going to guess.

Well, at one of the lowest, I need to qualify that.

It's not the lowest.

You know, Rolls-Royce.

Really?

Yeah.

Twice.

Footballers, rich young people.

Oh, of course.

You see?

So interestingly,

interestingly, Rolls-Royce has quite a young profile because if you make it rich-young, you're more likely to buy a blinged-up car as a rich, young person than you are as a rich, old person, probably, aren't you?

Well, for obvious reasons, I suspect.

Some of them reproductive.

But the user imagery is always problematic because...

Some of your users probably don't necessarily like your...

So obviously, ads for small cars do not show 59-year-old men driving them or 65 year old men they show 27 year old women which is a tiny niche of purchases of new of those cars new it's quite it's quite a common purchase of those cars secondhand but new

very very few you know you've got to be pretty you know you've got to be pretty rich at 20 something to buy a new car at all

and um uh the

so so you have this problem with user energy now the you know the typical bmw driver what's aspirational to some people might be repellent to others Okay,

so showing people is problematic because you immediately get into questions of class and age and everything else.

Now, sometimes you can play that game brilliantly, as with John Smith's beer, where you show, you know, an old bloke in the pub with his dog Tonto, you know, which is obviously not intended to be emblematic of the people who bought the beer, but it's kind of emblematic of people who, you know, in a sense, were beer connoisseurs, you know,

that kind of thing.

But actually, animals are a brilliant, brilliant escape from this because

most people will like that Bucky's beaver, okay,

in a way that a person, even in some cases, a celebrity spokesman, you know, may not be liked by everybody.

It may be repellent to everybody.

But animals both attract attention for evolutionary reasons.

We look at things that are that have two eyes, the whole thing in pareidolia.

We see faces in things.

Okay, we see faces in clouds and all that sort of stuff.

And that's because we're evolved to be highly attuned to spotting not only other human faces, although that's obviously important, but actually spotting anything with a face.

Okay.

And

you get extraordinary biomimicry, by the way.

I mean, fantastic things where if you have orchids that look like the genitalia of insects and things like that.

Is this Santatum's stuff again?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

that's the wonderful book, The Evolutionary Ideas by Santa.

Yeah, I mean, you looped me in with him four years ago, something like that.

for people on he has he came on for evolutionary ideas people that need to that love this

imagine an intersection between david buss and rory sutherland and you've got sam tatum uh yeah that that was fascinating but no it's uh it's interesting to think about this seems like what you're doing what you're doing is you're hacking perception yeah you know in that it's what you might call uh i never remember what it's called it's um there's a there's a field of sort of philosophy which is called phenomenology

which is how humans actually perceive the the world.

In other words, the yawning gap between what is, as is measured by engineers and physicists, and what we feel.

Now, the simplest example of, which they do in the United States, I think it's fantastic,

is the difference between the temperature and the feels-like temperature.

Because you can sometimes, I wander around Phoenix, Arizona.

I hate hot, humid weather, but I wander around Phoenix, Arizona, you know, at 100 degrees.

I'm pretty happy.

And so the feels-like temperature is much more important to my sense of well-being and what I wear and where I go than the actual temperature.

The place that's got the most, the highest variance of within a day, intraday variance for that, it's New York.

If you go to New York, oh God, like March time.

You're rude about the London climate.

This really pisses me off that New Yorkers are always dissing London.

But actually, it probably rains more in New York than it does in London.

I wouldn't be surprised.

But also, the city is uninhabitable for about three months of the year.

Well, look, if you leave the house on a morning in March and you need a big coat, a large coat with a hoodie underneath, and by midday you wish that you put fucking shorts on.

I know.

It's unacceptable.

Rory Sutherland, ladies and gentlemen.

Absolute joy.

Rory, I love you to bits.

Thank you for being here.

What a pleasure.

What have you got?

We hadn't had any product placement.

We've done a good job for Buckies.

Yeah, Rory.

Come on, do us a little ad.

Do a quick ad to camera for Newtonics.

Well,

I was trying to start the interesting precedent where guests on podcasts got to advertise their own stuff.

because I thought they've done all the traveling.

You know, why is it the host?

What do you want to advertise?

Why don't I say Bussy's Bites in Westram, which I think is Kent's finest Jamaican-Italian cafe?

There we go.

So there we go.

I'll advertise them.

I always think they're wonderful.

Bussy's Bites.

This actually is extraordinarily drinkable.

And it may well be, you know, a component of it, I'm sure, is the placebo, but it does seem to be actually efficacious.

That's what we wanted to hear.

Seems to be efficacious.

Exactly what I needed.