 This episode of the podcast is supported by Audible. You can download and listen to the world's best storytelling. I use it all the time to and from work. You can listen to audiobooks, original series and more on their free app to get your free 30 day subscription, which includes a free book. Click on the link in our show notes and enjoy. Hey, folks, welcome to the podcast. Today I had a great conversation with Peter Whitehead. Peter had had a great career in journalism and he had 27 years at the Financial Times and once he decided to retire, he wrote a great book called The Rise of Anti-Socialism, available on Amazon, I believe. And we had a really cool conversation about anti-socialism and all the different things that go into it and maybe what we can do to combat it. Hope you enjoyed the podcast. Hey, it's Lewis. Welcome to the podcast. Enjoy our conversations anytime, anywhere. Cool, and we're live. Peter. Great. Thank you so much for coming in. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for asking me. It took a while for us to finally sit down properly. Well, this is sort of the third go, isn't it? At least. The first go failed and then couldn't speak last time. Literally. You were the first podcast where we podcasted and technology let us down massively and we've had to redo, so. But take two is always better than the first. Plus, also, we've had an election. A lot has happened. Officially out of Europe now. It's a lot has happened in the last couple of months. Absolutely, yeah. It's crazy. Before we dive into that, what is your background and how did it come about writing a book? I suppose most of my career working for the Financial Times, 27 years at the FT, you see a lot, whether you like it or not. I was never sort of in the deep end of the business, business coverage, but you see an awful lot. You pick up an awful lot. You're editing columns. You're mixing with people. You overhear conversations. You have conversations. And before that, I was at the London School of Economics. So again, a lot of it just down the road from the FT. So are you lecturing or? No, that was what as a student, I was doing a law degree there. So I spent a lot of my time within a few hundred yards of the Thames over the past sort of 30, 40 years. Did you go straight to journalism after university on local papers? And then in my late 20s, I joined the FT. It's just such a great place to work. You could have multiple careers in one place. I worked for weekend FT. I ran departments. I had my own solo editing roles and working on the news side as well. So it's a really worked, it did features for magazines like the How to Spend It magazine. I went to Switzerland skiing for one for a day. I had breakfast at the Savoy in the morning and dinner at the Savoy in the evening. Tough life. And then sometimes we've been to Switzerland skiing. Everyone came back with blinding headaches. Really worked very well. Those sorts of things, you know, it's just such a varied, lively career. And it was, I just absolutely loved it. But then you come to a point when you think, I've been here, what do I do next? Do I want another challenge, which is going to take another four or five years and put me up to my virtually retirement age? Or do I look at other things that I might do while I'm still young enough to have a go at them and take early retirement? And that's when I looked into it. That's what I chose to do because I wanted to play more sport. I wanted to do more music. I've always had that as a major hobby and I wanted to do that. Released an album in 2012. I wanted to do more of that. Nice, you're a singer. Yeah, I haven't got round to the second album yet. Right. Five years, six years of retirement. I still haven't managed to fit it in because it's such a busy thing. Retiring is not sitting back. So you're busier now than you ever were. Oh God, you don't watch daytime telly when you retire. Things find you. You're constantly on the go. And including writing the book, which sort of just evolved really out of some lectures that I'd given while I was at the FT. I gave to a couple of business schools. Was asked to talk about executive rewards and pay. And most journalists do, well, most people do, I guess, can you come and give us a lecture? We have 200 students and a couple of professors in the room and can you give us a lecture about executive pay? You say, yeah, of course I can, yeah, of course. And then when you're actually two days away, you think, how am I going to do this? What am I going to say? And so massive amount of research, very, very fast and it uncovered for me an awful lot of things that I hadn't come across before. And so putting all those things together and trying to make a chronology and trying to explain where executive pay, the levels of executive pay had come from. It sort of produced a really fairly clear timeline of how things had changed since the sort of 60s, 70s through sort of the 80s thatcher revolution through to today's executive rewards and the way business operates now. And it was, it all sort of fell into place. And then once you've got that framework of how things work and how things are happening, you then start to, you can then start to fit everything that's happening, such as Brexit and the latest election results and globalization, even the latest virus outbreak. They all fit into the same sort of, you can fit all of those things into a framework, which made the book hard to stop writing because things keep happening and you think, oh, that's part of it as well. So there had to come a point where you just say, right, stop. So it all kicked off with executive pay for you? That was the trigger that made me go and look at the way businesses operate and why executive pay is so high and why the disequilibrium in the system has appeared. So high compared to like normal employees? Yeah, the multiples have just gone, they used to be 20, 30 times, a managing director, that's what they used to be, would earn 10, 20, 30 times what the average or lowest paid employee was. Now it's, those multiples have gone to the hundreds and beyond and they are enormous. And they say, why is this? And one of the reasons once you start sort of delving around here, it all comes back, you can actually almost time it to a particular day in July the first 1976 when a paper was produced by two American economists. And from that moment, Michael Jensen and William Meckling, from the moment that they... It's in the US. The US, yeah. They were building on work that other people had done to be fair. I mean, it was not completely new, but they absolutely crystallized this idea that executives running businesses should be rewarded in the same way as shareholders to give them the same incentives as the shareholders. And that immediately changed their whole outlook of how a business would run because no longer were you running it as a sort of something that's built into a community, you're immediately running it to maximize the amount of profit and short-term gain for, that's what shareholders are in it for, buy, sell, move on. So all of the incentives changed, not from July the first 1976, but over the next five to 10 years. And at the same time during the 1970s, I see that as a period of enormous participation in society. People had a say. Unfortunately, a lot of that say was through trade unions and trade unions played their cards really badly. They were very sectional, narrow. They pursued the interests only really of their own members, which meant that by towards the end of the decade, they had really antagonized so many sections, even people who would support unions normally. We'd had a succession of minority governments and we've just seen recently how difficult it is to run a country with a minority government. We'd also had throughout the 70s, the oil crisis, which had caused a lot of problems which were blamed on unions which had nothing really to do with them. And so by the end of the decade, you've got another force as well as this theoretical readjustment of how executives were going to be rewarded changing the way they run their businesses. You'd also got a groundswell of saying, we need to sort of curb the unions, we need to do something a bit differently, which then triggered the Thatcher election in 1979. And then from then on, you're in a completely different culture and a different society and a different way of working. Everything, the changes were so dramatic between the end of the 70s and the 80s. And even at LSE, the span of time I was there, the people, I started in 1976 and everyone starting that time, there were some people that we were mixing with that started in 74, so mid-70s. And you were there from? I was there from 76 to 79. And so you're mixing with people that started in 74 who were graduating in 77 when we were there. And the sort of whole raison d'etre and motivation of those people was to do things. Then there were sort of supporters of CND, supporters of anti-apartheid movements and Amnesty International and Free Nelson Mandela and fight the cuts of big issues. By the end, the young people... Produce the fat in what like, actually like go on the streets and protest them. Yeah, protest, yeah. We had all sorts of protests over international student fees at LSE. We occupied the building for about three weeks and we support the police's right to strike banners outside the windows. And until the night the police came in and threw us all out at 3 a.m. on Saturday morning and photographed everybody and the tired, bedraggled students thrown out onto the old witch. But that was the student body of the 70s by the end of that time there, 79, the youngsters coming in had a completely different outlook. It was much more about I want to get a good job, I'm here to get a good job. It was, I don't think anybody arriving in the sort of mid-70s was thinking I'm here to improve my job chances. They were there to learn and to experience much more generally. But by the end of it, it'd become much more vocational and I want an economics degree because I can be an accountant rather than I want an economics degree because I want to understand how the world works. And that sort of changed. You think that's a bad change? Yeah, I think we've seen a lot of the ill effects of that change coming through over the last 20, 30 years because it's divorced business and the way companies operate from people and society because they no longer work to provide to the community benefits at all. They, the whole thing is about money and the whole thing is about exploiting resources. And so the world is gradually being turned into this gigantic rubbish dump because the timelines are now so short between people buying clothes and throwing them away and having a new kitchen every three or four years. These are unsustainable, it's really stupid things to do and they're all sparked by this idea that we've got to keep growing somehow or whatever growth is. But what a growth is actually measured in decimal points and not in terms of sustainability or satisfaction or happiness or any of those measures it's all about the bottom line and that's the big change. It's true in for every company and every person because it feels now that companies, but obviously remember that companies are made up of people and for sure to your original point incentives government behavior, absolutely. And so if you incentivized to make more profit because you're going to earn more money, I mean that's what you're going to do. But it does feel there's a swell of people caring about the environment, caring about society, a lot of philanthropy and of those things. So it does feel, you know, people do care maybe they're not all protesting in the streets to change but you can, you know, you can do that in different ways. There is an increasing amount of protest in the streets. I mean, Greta Penberg has shown a lot of the youngsters away although I'd deny her claims to be revolutionary in the first in this because Greenpeace protesters were risking their lives again and along the decades ago in the same sort of cause. But no, you're right and there is a lot going on and I think it is largely because people are now beginning to realize that the way we're carrying on is not sustainable. And so you have got these movements. And again, it is what you're incentivized to do and at the FT obviously you get to meet lots and lots of chief executives and lots and lots of senior business people using me in politicians. And individually, you would actually say they're really, yeah, you understand the situation you're right on, but when it comes to those final decisions they're swayed by other incentives. They've got a real conflict of interest between their personal and their business lives. And for the most part it has to be the business side that wins because they're out of a job if they don't. And no matter how much we just see chief executives being recycled and chured no matter how badly they perform there is still, there are reputational issues that senior business people have to abide by. But then if you're in business and you're building a big company and you're making profit and you're paying your taxes and you've got a spare cash to help the community that you're living in. I mean, that's a great thing, right? No, that's good. And that is, yeah, I mean there are companies that are doing that. And the FT was one of those encouraging that. And a lot of the people had too. We had awards every year and the business and the community awards. And there are excellent things being done and lots of good ideas. Yeah, so it's not an absolute. We're not talking about absolutes here at all. And that's, this is one of the problems with actually sort of stating things in books or in conversations is that it all comes out as an absolute where it really isn't. It's a shift. And some of these shifts, yeah. And the title of the book is The Rise in Antisocialism and sort of antisocial behavior. Again, it's a small shift in the way people behave and act. But it is, when you aggregate it up, it is quite a big change in the way the whole of society operates. But overall, people are not that different to how they've always been. And I think the basic tenets of behavior, at least this morning on the drain coming from Waterloo to Bank, people behave really, really well. There's no fighting, pushing, shoving. Some people behave very antisocial. I mean, I had a guy, what do you think about this? Because times have changed a lot. I had a guy standing next to me on the tube and obviously it's really busy and he was reading an FT, but a proper FT, the paper. No one else on the carriage is reading a proper paper. And he's there acting like he has a right to hold this massive paper, bushing into literally everyone around him as he turns the pages and makes like a point of, I'm reading this paper and it's my right to read this paper now. And it's funny because absolutely, but you look around the effect that he was having on others. And I mean, almost without, you can read it in their faces. Everyone was thinking this guy's really antisocial. Well, obviously I'm torn on this one because I applaud him really, really. Even though I don't obviously work there anymore, I still think it's an excellent institution and a wonderful provider of news and opinion. But yeah, no, I see what you mean. And you see that all the time, those sort of little inconsiderate behavior. And that's not, we haven't just invented that. That's always been the case. Those things have happened, but they do happen with a different sort of air of entitlement these days. Whereas before that, I've then probably thought this. Now I think they are more entitled to do this. And this again is something that I mentioned in the book about the number of rights that people have been awarded. I mean, the Blair government was massive on providing people with rights to do things without any corresponding responsibilities to do, to exercise them so that they didn't take away other people's rights or... So for example, sort of gambling rights, drinking rights, all sorts of personal rights that were in the plethora of laws. I mean, the Labour government produced so many, so many, so much legislation between 97 and 2010. A lot of it was all about enabling, if you allow people to do what they like, then it means that somebody has to pay the price for that. The idea of, I've got, I have this right to let off fireworks at midnight every night if I choose, because that's my right, or I can park where I like, or I can do whatever, and I can read my paper wherever I like. And then the lack of enforcement, because if you give people rights over the right to read a newspaper or a train and they exercise that right and nobody enforces it, then people start to get this idea that, well, actually, I can decide for myself what my rights are, and you're going down a very slippery slope, things escalate. No, I agree, that's really fed into society a lot. You know, certainly you're finding with the various movements. I mean, you have the, I think it was in Canada where if you're transgender, you have the right to be called they or them, et cetera. I think one of the universities made it like law and inverted commerce, so you couldn't address people by he and she. And so the debate there was the individuals' rights to be called what they want, but then at the expense of other people's rights to use the language that they want, so freedom of speech. It's very interesting how it's gone into society. And all those people who want to be called he or she, which now can't be anymore. So, yeah, everybody's, one person's right, there's another person's denial of right, potentially. So these things were not really balanced. They got out of equilibrium. And I think this is, maybe it's to do with age and the amount of things you see or maybe the background, but if when things get out of balance and out of equilibrium, that's when things start going really quite badly wrong. For example, the use of the abuse of the planet really, it's now completely out of equilibrium. And so we're destroying so much so fast for frivolous reasons. We've now got to find a way back to getting things back into balance again. So I think when things are out of balance and they have been a lot, a lot lately. How do you think social media has affected everything? I mean, if you look at your industry, journalism, I mean, massively now, right? Absolutely. With social media, it feels like, I can be a journalist, everyone can. And so you've got so many different sources to get your news from now. Yeah, I think so. It's interesting how it is. No, I think it is, it's a huge thing. Other industries have been through this process as well. The music industry took years to come to terms with the competition from online and streaming and so on. I don't think the news media, they've coped fairly well, but it's hard to know what journalism is these days. You know, people, youngsters come up and say, I'm doing a journalist, of course, I want to be a journalist. And I say, well, do you actually understand fully what a journalist is these days? What do you think the job is? And you get all sorts of different answers. And I think your social media and the number of outlets, it's so easy now to set yourself up as an influencer. Most influencers are advertising hubs or free salespeople, but it's very, very, so easy to set yourself up as sort of an alleged news media without any resources. But, and this is, I think, where bubbles start to form and why we've seen so much polarised debate is that if you don't have a broader outlook, which a large media organisation will provide, I mean, the FT and the BBC, for example, both have huge range of views within their organisations. And so, although they're always accused of bias one way or another, the BBC's been accused of bias from both sides. Because it goes to your point of incentives, government behaviour, and so you find that there's a swell of people that just don't quite trust big corporations, whether they're like the big, massive, whatever, farmer or kind of these kind of companies for profit, or a BBC or an FT who will also form profit. Yeah, well, the BBC, not so much. BBC, no. Sorry, that's true. The FT, yeah, but the FT, you have to look at how these companies operate. And in terms of its journalism, the FT has always been the number one watchword, and I was asked this by a bunch of friends where you were having dinner and something like that. So what's the most important aspect of journalism? And I said, it's only one word that really matters, that's integrity, and my wife's also a journalist. She said, oh, no, I think curiosity, you've got to be curious. I said, well, if you're curious without integrity, you're not a journalist, it's worthless. You've got to have integrity. And I think that's where the big media organisations score heavily, in that they take all views and they analyse and provide sort of objective, factual, fairly straightforward, real news should be fairly straightforward. And I think... So reporting the facts. Yeah, I mean, there's different aspects. Yeah, reporting should always be the objective. And obviously, you've got language as a problem. The language you use, the words you use, always can be used to open up accusations of bias one way or the other. And subjective, unconscious biases or nervous accusations. These are really, really difficult things and nobody can sort of get away from that. But the problem with social media, and it's funny, I was looking back at some cuttings that I did and I did wrote a column in 2008 saying that Twitter is a minefield for people because when you're on Twitter, who are you? And that was my big problem. I said, who am I? I persist when Twitter was just starting. Am I an FT journalist or am I me? And I think Alistair Stewart has just been caught in that trap. The journalist, the ITN journalist has just been caught in that trap of is he representing his company or is he him? From what he said, if he was him, it wouldn't have been a problem. And it's things you're 12 years on, we really haven't worked these things out. And Twitter has now become quite a nasty, a nasty world. You can't really say anything without, anything even reasonable without being attacked from all sides. Well, that's the other big third thing, is are you who you work for? The other big thing is you can be anonymous. And a lot of them on Twitter, people can just hide behind their screen, they can be completely anonymous and they can just berate you for no particular reason, but they just want to get their hatred out. Now, there is the punishment beating aspect of Twitter, but there's also, I think, probably on a larger scale and even more dangerous is the bubble aspect, is that people, and Facebook's bad at this as well and all the other ones, but that you only really follow or listen to people who think the same as you. And I think this is what we saw during the Brexit debate very much though, that people were not never experiencing the views of anybody that they disagreed with. And so it really magnifies people's views and opinions and hardens them and solidifies them into one big group over here and one never the twain shall meet and there was no real discussion. It's so true. Sorry, go on. Yeah, and I thought one of the really interesting things was, I think I'm a huge admirer of Grayson Perry. I think he's, as an intellect, he's absolutely brilliant. And he did a programme during the Brexit debate where he said, I'm going to design two great big pots and I'm going to talk to a group of remain voters and a group of leave voters. And I'm going to ask them about their priorities in life and the things that they want most and we'll represent that in the designs of the pots. And so he did this and the pots were identical, absolutely identical because what people wanted on both sides was exactly the same, you know, a good life and the one lot had got it and the other hadn't. And he brought the two groups together at the end and it was really quite moving because they had no understanding or realisation of the lives of the other party. And once he got them together, they actually blended incredibly well and admired each other's pots and said, oh yeah, I wanted that as well and I couldn't have that. And I said, well, I really saw you. And it was a really interesting experiment in actually trying to bridge that gap between these two bubbles in which people were living all the time and never experiencing anything else. That's just super true. I was, I'd realised that. I was, as you said, everyone I follow, all my friends, typically think the same as me. But I made a conscious effort and this is to be honest, after the Brexit result, to follow people that I knew completely didn't agree with me. You know, I started following like anti-Semites, far right, hardcore left, you know, people that, I mean, I'm very centre. So I just wanted to follow the extremes because often you hear from the extremes the most, but when you go and speak to people, average Iranian and the average American, lots in common, very friendly. But it's always these extremes that cause all these big problems. And I think if you looked at Twitter during the Brexit and the Donald Trump election, you wouldn't have been surprised at the result because there are a lot of people that are living in a really bad state and they just want to improve their lives and you can understand why they started. But I think now you can really do it. Like with social media, because they say now online is the real world. You know, that's the world that we're living in. Kids born now, I mean, that's it. Yeah, that's where you get your info from. That's where you spend most of your time. The access to information is crazy. So no excuse to... Yeah, but I think what we've got to do is make sure that people are not just as they grow and move into a bubble, that they don't actually just stay there, that they do manage to experience, as you've done, actually do go out and look for alternative views and try and understand other people because it's too easy to think that everything you read in your bubble is what you... is all there is. Yeah, with respect to your integrity thing, nowadays, so I get my news from a lot of different sources online, like most people, but you don't know, you know, what their integrity is like, what their biases are. Often, most people, if we're honest, most people just read the headlines and you're still scrolling through, seeing these headlines. Some good, some not so good. You see, like, Nissan doubling down on the UK after a hard Brexit in the FT yesterday, which is cool. A lot of different things. So yeah, it's an interesting word and back to your kind of original comment on antisocialism and the change in pain incentives. It feels now, maybe, are we on almost like another point where social media now is either accentuating that or... And I think social media has got a lot of potential for good as bringing people together and actually sort of sparking a lot of thought and debate. And it's just a shame that it's been dominated by the noisiest people who, as you say, tend to be on the extremes. And I think a lot of the people in the middle just tend to think this isn't worth it. I mean, I've withdrawn largely from Twitter. I think it's just not worth it. You just get some bore who then, yeah, have it your way. It's just not a debate that is worth having. But I think there's an awful lot of potential there. And right from the start, I could see an awful lot of potential in a lot of social media for bringing people together. And I think it needs... But first of all, it needs to actually focus on what the requirements are of actually what a movement or what change should be. And I think what's... The curious thing about writing a book is that you don't actually know what you've written until people have read it and tell you. This was quite a bit of a revelation for me is that people come back and say, well, this is what you've written. They think, oh, right, yeah, that isn't what I've written at all. I want to mention, but really, smart people have read it. And one came back and he's written books himself and said, well, you obviously love unions to bits and you hate companies to bits. I said, well, no, that's not it at all. You know, I can see problems on... There are big drawbacks and problems on both sides. And then on both sides, there's no right or wrong here. And he was saying, what... He was saying, this is the solution I've got. And that made me think, yes, actually, when you were in this discussion and the debate goes on, obviously, even after you've published something, when you're talking about how things should change, you're talking on different levels because it's no good just saying, well, we've got to do everything. We've got to go back to a simple rural agrarian society to save the planet. We've got to do simple things, which I think probably ultimately, we have got to in some form or other somehow. We have got to go back to a much simpler way of living. Otherwise, we're all going to die anyway. But there are other levels of this. One of the things, everything is about perspective. And it depends what your view of the world is. I mean, back to your point about university and when you went, most people were going because they wanted to learn, not about having a great job. Of course, now the debate is, do I want to, can I afford to go to university? Am I going to be able to get a better job after? Do I want to spend the money? I mean, in the UK, it's what, nine grand a year. America, like 40, 50 grand or whatever it is, like a lot more expensive. So now, this is not a question of, unless you often work extremely wealthy family and you're like, do you know what? I mean, what's a few hundred grand? I'm going to learn some cool stuff. Most people are like, do I want to come out of debt with loads of debt? That's my life going to be life after. So we're never going to get back to that now, unfortunately. So it's a one-way street. So a lot of these things that you do, sometimes it's very difficult to back out of where we are and sometimes it's impossible to back out of where we are. Yeah. Yeah, debt is one of those. Debt's a bit of a disease and I really do feel sorry for youngsters who've saddled with debt. It's something that, you know, when we were, we did everything we possibly could to make sure our daughters didn't end up coming out of university with loads of debt and just about managed it. So I think debt is a really, really bad thing. Obviously, you can't go through life without any debts at all. But to leave university with a huge amount of debt that's going to be hanging over you for potentially decades is a really bad message to send. It is, but then also it's perspective. So someone might be thinking differently to that and thinking, what a great investment. It could be. I only have to pay back once I start earning a certain amount of money. I've learned, I've done a great physics degree. I'm going to be the next astronaut that goes to Mars. Whatever it, you know. Absolutely. I think it's all perspective. There will be lots of people who will think that. Yeah, I'm sure that's right. And the other cool thing now is, and I wrote something on this recently, is you don't have to go to university and get a degree to get a good job. And with the use of technology, you can do online learning. You can look at YouTube. You can get a mentor. You know, there's loads of great things to use to learn. Yeah. Which has really changed a lot. Well, as we were going through that process of student fees rising, that's when I was editing the executive appointment section and I wrote columns about and had people write features about alternatives to university because you could start to see that the balance of benefits of going to university is beginning to change. You know, if you've got 40,000, 50,000 pounds with the debt at the end of it and you don't want to go into a high-flying, high-paid career, the investment is probably going to not be worth it. And so we were looking at other alternatives. We're looking at apprenticeships about travel, about partnerships with companies who are not going to university but actually going straight into a job. And those sorts of things, there is a world of choice, but the trouble is all of the still, even now, there's still such a strong trend towards university education. Absolutely. And even more so. Absolutely. Even though there ever used to be. Yeah. Because when you only got 10% of people going to university, then that was 90% not. Employers had a different range of options. Yeah. Even though it was only 10% going to university, there were another 30% and whatever, going to polytechnics and pathologies of further education. It wasn't that further education stopped for everybody. But there was a complete range of different vocational courses and which are now all lumped together as universities. And so it actually makes it a bit more divisive than it used to be. You've either got a university degree or you haven't. Yeah. A lot of them always took for that. I'd like to see, I think it was, I'm not going to get my facts right on this, but we discussed it in the office on Friday. I think it was Oxford or Cambridge have kept certain number of places for people from a lower socioeconomic background. And some of the parents who had sent their kids to private schools were complaining. We've missed a lot of this money. Yeah. We hear this a lot in our part of the world about how unfair it is that, yeah, it's a never-ending argument. Can't win or you can't lose. No. Because if your kids have been to private school, you think, well, they've got better grades. And then you have to think, well, why have they got better grades? Because they've been pampered, they've had extra tutoring. My kids, somebody who's not, my kids are actually brighter, they've got half a mark below your kids. And they've had none of the advantages. So that means they must be brighter. So it's an argument you can't really win. And social engineering on that scale is, I mean, it is helpful, but there's a lovely lady, the freelance. And she went to Oxford, very, very clever and smart girl. But as a woman of colour, she was not, she said it was quite an ordeal a lot of the time. Oh, right. And so even though... That's medical. Is, and I think there's, I think this morning's paper I wanted to do recently, the first black head of a college was talking about how difficult it is and about how when she was there, you know, there was, even though you open up access, it doesn't mean that the culture will change. Slowly. It's maybe slowly, yeah. Culture changes very, very slowly. I think we have now, is it Oxford? And they have a new head of philosophy. The Asian lady, I think she's 35. Yeah. I think things are changing a lot. Yeah, no, they... Yeah, probably, yeah. But I'd argue that, I mean, just because you get three A's, doesn't mean you're smarter than someone who's got three B's. Absolutely. It depends what the context is. Yeah. And I agree 100% on that. Yeah, it is all about the context. Yeah. That's why you see so many smart market traders with no formal education whatsoever. Definitely. Who'll have the shirt off your back before you even know what's going on. Stay true. Because they're smart, they're quick. Yeah. That's where they grow up. No, I love it. On retirement, because obviously that's where we started. And so you mentioned in your book that it's in danger of becoming a privilege for the rich or does it even exist now? How do you think that's gonna pan out? Well, yeah, I mean, the way the demographic changes are happening with people living longer, I mean, I personally don't think that the demographic change of increasing longevity will continue forever because I think we've got a bit of a bulge at the moment where the people in their 80s and 90s now have probably had the best nutrition in history. And we don't, we load a crap a lot of the time. Trying not to. Which is not, we're not gonna live as long as the current people who are currently 80 or 90 because we eat so much rubbish. And so, but even so, I think we, it's still going to build a huge sort of over a top-heavy society of older people, for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it's difficult to know how to deal with that, whether you want people to work longer. Companies don't really want people to work longer. The FT didn't want people there. Once they went to the late 50s, the FT didn't really want you there any longer, particularly, they wouldn't throw you out, but if you wanted to go, absolutely. If you wanted to stay? No problem. If you wanted to stay, no problem either. Yeah, I had to, I had somebody in my department that was, I think they were over 70 and they were looking to lose somebody and I'm managing editor called me down and said, could you go and have a word and see if they're, nobody are dead, so even question, so I called this chap in and said, how would you feel about retiring? And he said, oh, thank goodness for that. I thought nobody was ever going to ask me. They said, I don't want to outstay my welcome. Of course I'll. But there is no retirement age in the UK anymore. But no, that's right, so you can go on. And it's, we shouldn't assume everybody wants the same thing, I mean, from my point of view, it's the best career move I ever made. Every retirement is busy, I do lots of, but I can afford to because I was at the same organisation for a very long time and it's not a massive pension, but it's adequate for what we want. I mean, fairly simple needs, we're not extravagant. And it means I can do charity work and play sports and music and write books and do silly things, you know, and it's, and that's great for me, but I've talked to a lot of people who are contemplating retirement and they say, I can't do it. I'm gonna have to carry on as long as I can because I don't know what I'd spend my day doing. I don't know what, so people are very, very different and have different needs and I don't think there should be one particular solution for everybody. I think if you want to retire early and do different things, but the problem then becomes what you can afford to do. Those, if you've got the choice, some people will choose to work on and some people won't and that's nice for them. But if you can't, if you don't have that choice, that's another matter and that's why I think we need a big, go to a guy back to the overwhelming sort of thread of the book in the lack of equilibrium and the extremes of diverse levels of poverty and wealth. That's, going back to that, that's the fundamental issue is that some people have choices and some people don't and the right way to go is to give it more and more people so that eventually everybody has the same sort of choices about whether they choose to work on to whatever age they choose or whether they choose to... But also, so that's more kind of a quality of outcome, right? It feels like, and I mean, people have had been wealthy and poor forever. Yeah, of course, absolutely, yeah. And I think the big thing I think is that when you're, say when I was at school, you get taught there's three stages in life. So it's like education, work, retirement, but it's not, for most people, the retirement thing isn't really something that you should get to hang up on because I think most people won't be able to retire. They're just not, you need too much money to be able to, you know, if you live into 100 and you retire at 55, that's 45 years that you need to fund your life for. It's a long, you know. Well, yeah, definitely, yeah. It's big and they say if you're born now, you might live to 100 or just a bit more. Both of my grandmothers are 98, still going strong. So I think maybe in people's minds, again, like they need to think about they're not going to be retiring at 50 or 60. And it's, you know, what's the next stage of that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think that, I think that's right, yeah. This is why I think that this sort of all-or-nothing idea of work is going to become outdated because that's what a lot of people in full-time work would like to do. They'd like to sort of gradually think, well, and working part-time is a very, very, very difficult thing because it doesn't really suit companies. It doesn't suit, a lot of companies don't really want part-time people, even though it's actually quite a good deal for companies because if you're somebody's working two days a week, you normally get three or four days' worth of work out of them because that's the way it works. And especially if somebody's doing a four-day week, they're normally pretty much doing as the equivalent of a full-time worker. But also, it's great because you wouldn't get this person otherwise. They want to work two days a week and you can always organise something. And you have this great thing now called Skills as a Service or the gig economy, also known as contract work or part-time work, whatever. The Skills as a Service sounds much cooler and it enables a lot of people to do these different gigs, right? They can work for a few months. They can do a project. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. Again, everything has a yin and yang, if you like. They're good and a bad. So you go from skills as a service and people able to work flexibly and interim management type roles or whatever to the other extreme of zero-hours contracts, which, again, you've got both... They're both in the same category, but they affect some people one way and some people another way. One person's flexibility is another person's exploitation. So, again, it's the two sides of the coin. What can we do about all of this? Well, this is where my book falls down, is that I say right at the start there are no easy solutions to any of this because we've gone up so many one-way streets that you can't back out of or very difficult to back out of. But I think, again, it's whether you tackle the grossest inequalities first and let's try and actually be a bit fairer and have a little bit more justice and equality to begin with. And that might involve going back to the way that senior executives are incentivised, maybe give them different incentives. And companies are doing that. Companies do. There are some that will incentivise senior people to be a bit more aware of their locality, their community, and so on. Those are first steps, I think. And then, ultimately, as Australia continues to burn and the California continues to burn. Hopefully not, hopefully not. And these things become... And the realisation of what's happening and the oceans eventually completely clog up with plastic then we will actually have to start to do something a bit more radical. And then you're into this much more... And we're on a spaceship to destroy another planet. But I think my theme recently has been kindness. And we have more kind people. People are just a bit kinder to each other. Yeah, kindness is a very good idea. Hiring kinder people. Like you can try and find kind people. Because you know, this thing about the top salesperson in the company or the best business people. There's always this thing of that there. They don't give out crap about, you know, the mean and that. But you can be the best salesperson and you can be the kindest person. Like it goes, you know, they're not exclusive. I think you can be both. Yeah, and we've had a lot of movies sort of glorifying those raiders almost, I mean the Wall Street and films like that with... And that has been sort of an admired ethic, this idea of when we've had protestors in London of city guys throwing 20 pound notes out of the window down at the onto the hideous scene, really. And I think kindness absolutely is a much undervalued. It's not even talked about really. It's almost ignored. And it is something that I was talking yesterday about when I used to ride my motorbike. I used to commute by motorbike. And there's a sort of an older biker and not a tear away biker. I always saw my role as a biker as to be like a sheepdog and the cars were all sheep and I was trying to marshal them to keep myself safe and keep them where I wanted them. But another aspect was to try and make sure I got two people to thank me on the journey. It's about a half hour journey each way. And I wanted somebody to raise their hand and say thank you twice on every journey. To show that I'd done something that you may interpret as kind, like letting somebody cross the road or letting a car out of a junction. Because it's all about the reputation. And I think if you could enhance the reputation of motorcyclists, then they might not, they might not get squeezed into corners into dangerous situations so often. And a little kindness I think can go a long way. It's everywhere. I don't know about you, but when I'm a pedestrian, you find that drivers, motorcyclists and cyclists, they never like to let you pass. In fact, actually, you know what? Cars typically stop. If you walk out on the road and there's a bicycle cycling, they always increase their speed. Yeah, yeah. And then they're shouting at you. And it's the same, like when you're in the car, when you're on the bicycle, when you're on the bike, when you're a pedestrian, can you kind of end up hating one of the other? Your role changes. Completely changes. Or I was walking through bank today and people, they don't like to let people go. It's like you almost increase your speed so the other person can't, it's like, it's funny how people think and if people just, you know, chill out a little bit. All of the kindness is part of the antidote to antisocialism, which we could bring us back to that side of things. Yeah, no, it's one of the elements that we've largely lost. They're sort of down to consideration and a wider outlook of not just your own interests, thinking about other people's interests. Think about others. And also, I mean, for honest, kindness isn't completely selfless because you do get a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling. Oh yeah, yeah, no, there are rewards. There are rewards, that's it. What a beautiful place to end, kindness. Yeah, no, I'm with you on that one. We agree, yeah. How, I think we've agreed on what we're doing. I think we have, no, we have, we have, we have. How can people find your book and read it? They just have to go onto Amazon and search for my name and stick the word antisocialism in as one word. It's not actually a word. It's something that, it's not a real word. Something I've taken the hyphen out of. There is a hyphenated version, but yeah, search for my name on Amazon. And it's a book that's published to order. So there's no great warehouse full of these books waiting to be shipped out there. It's a very green way. Very sustainable. I love it. So there's no waste. Brilliant. Well, great to speak to you. Thanks for coming in. It's a pleasure, no? Great to see you. I'm glad we've finally got everything to work. We made it. Thank you. Thanks, Lewis. Bye-bye. Hey, folks, thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe in all the usual places.