 the University of Melbourne. And I'm guessing given that the weather's pretty shitty here, he's probably currently in Melbourne rather than Sussex. No disrespect to the gentleman from Rye, I'm just saying that I imagine he organises his life that way around. And it's called the Experience Machine. And it has, it takes effectively not a completely new theory, because the originator of the theory was really in the 19th century and a guy called Herman von Helmholtz. But the theory is, the theory is that most of what we perceive is actually an internally generated prediction with our eyes, noses, ears and other senses effectively used to correct for what we expected not to generate the data fresh. Now let me explain this, those of you who are into digital photography or anybody with a television for that matter or anybody who uses a computer knows that there are things called jpegs. If you like you can take your digital camera if it's reasonably expensive and you can shoot in raw mode, which means that every pixel is described in painstaking detail. Now raw mode is what you use as a digital photographer if you're planning to do a lot of editing, because you need to have a value for every pixel in order to do really, really effective kind of photoshopping. The reason almost none of us, unless you're a professional or prosumer photographer, the reason none of us shoot in raw mode is that a raw image is literally sort of 50 times larger or 30 times larger in terms of the space it takes up on your phone or your camera than a jpeg. And the reason the jpeg achieves this data compression is that it assigns to each pixel or each pixel in each frame in the case of mpegs in video an expectation value, which is based on what the adjoining pixels are. And if you've had three brown pixels in a row you expect the fourth pixel to be brown. So you just describe that kind of as you'd expect. Very little data needs to be used and you only use the data to describe the pixels that are doing something that wasn't predicted or expected. And that's what digital cameras have arrived at as a data architecture for efficient use of bandwidth. And the theory of Helmholtz, which came before there was such a thing as jpegs obviously because it was the 19th century in Germany, and then later espoused by people like for example William James and a few other people I think also bought into this idea is that the brain has the same data architecture, that we don't actually use the seven megabits or whatever it is that our optic nerve provides to form a picture. What we do is our brain generates an expectation and we use the limited bandwidth within the optic nerve effectively to correct where reality differs from expectation. And so most of what we taste, most of what we smell, most of what we see is generated internally from an expectation and then corrected for if conflicting information emerges. So in other words we use our bandwidth, our perceptual bandwidth to go here is what you weren't expecting, not here's everything. Okay? Does that make sense? Because it makes sense in the design of jpegs and the design of televisions, sky wouldn't work without data compression of imagery. You'd simply need vastly more bandwidth and in the same way our brains wouldn't work if we tried to use the optic nerve effectively to every single or 30 times a second or whatever it is to basically give us a complete up-to-date accurate depiction of reality. Most of what we're seeing is internally generated. And if you wanted to summarize the book in a sentence you could say well the science is in and the marketers were right all along by which I mean that what we expect of something has a fundamentally significant bearing on how we perceive it and how we experience it. And so you know I think it explains things that have often baffled me. It explains the fact that 3D TV never takes off. It explains the fact you want my prediction that Apple's immersive 3D virtual reality thing will never be popular for significant lengths of time because for various reasons it's not how we it's not how we think or experience the world. And actually 3D TV most of the 3Dness that we perceive is actually done internally in the brain. It doesn't require binocular vision to actually do it which is why if you think about it 3D TV if you go and see the you know the the the Parthenon at sunset or you see the Colosseum or you're looking at a beautiful beach if you close one eye you don't suddenly go oh that's shit right oh it was really beautiful just a minute ago now I've closed one eye and now it looks completely crap okay you know that actually yeah we use 3D vision it's obviously essential if you're a cricketer I imagine okay um you know you know it's probably valuable in the evolutionary environment if you're throwing things or trying to grab a berry at close range in the scheme of things in entertainment it just isn't that important. Okay and so it but it also explains why stage magic works because effectively what always amazes me about stage magic I've got a friend Paul Craven who's not only a very good behavioral scientist he's also a brilliant magician he's a member of the magic circle and he makes the point now it's not that surprising that stage magic works in front of an audience of 200 people but what's amazing is that it still works on TV okay when you've got an audience of millions who can pause and rewind as often as they like and nobody can see what it's done and the reason is that what the magician does is he creates an expectation flip from right flip from hand from hand okay you create the expectation and then you disguise the deviation for the expectation because you keep the coin in one hand and pretend to move it to the other one and when you go your hand is miraculously empty you've amazed you've effectively confounded someone's reasonable expectation and once you accept this fact that actually most perception is internally generated uh the case for marketing I think becomes about five times stronger because what you perceive is what you get and it's fascinating because I've just come off a call from the founder uh Lena who founded air up I don't know if anybody has an air up water bottle did anybody hear and effectively is a water bottle that you fill with water either still or sparkling and then if you pull up the little nodule the little capsule of scent it scents the water okay and effectively the reason she developed this extraordinary product so you can effectively use tap water in combination with a small scent pod and basically create taste you can't create 100 percent of the taste of say lemonade or phanta but you can create about 70 percent of it and the reason that works is she basically was studying neuroscience and went to a neuroscientist who said that actually it only works one way around so our smell if the smell originates in our mouth and in the water and then permeate through to the nose that creates the illusion of a taste if you had a pod and stuck it to your nose and breathed in while you drank water um olifaction that comes in through the nostrils does not get processed as if it's taste okay it gets separately processed and allocated to a department of perception called smell but then there's this separate form of olifaction which is mouth up to nose where effectively we process it as part of the taste experience because the tongue only detects what is it five things sweet sour whatever it is something rather an umami I'd never remember what they are bitter sweet something something else and umami okay or monosodium glutamate if you're a fan of chinese food and that just struck me as a brilliant innovation which has come about um in part because people are starting to realize that we need to optimize the world for perception not for objective reality and if we spend our time and if or if ai spends its available bandwidth effectively optimizing for what we can easily measure which is what is rather than for optimizing around how we feel okay this will lead to an extraordinary misdirection of effort and so that book is I think one of the essential you know it's a kind of I would say that theory is kind of foundational in doing what we do because essentially it explains why I think okay I mean you may have read this in my book I think I mentioned in the book if you want to save money on a new car just get your existing car and have it validated okay now not only will you have a cleaner car it'll drive a hell of a lot better it'll feel smoother it'll accelerate better it'll be quieter it'll corner better every aspect of your car will become a bit better when you have your car validated and I had a friend who was an engineer who was driven insane by this because he thought why is it that my car's quieter after I've had it validated why does it feel like a limo rather than the kind of you know a little bit of a banger after and he said he thought he had this bizarre engineering theory that the act of polishing the car tortened the panels on the bodywork which reduced vibration it isn't that it's just your brain going new car therefore I'm going to generate nice new car feeling when I drive it and you know I find those things just endlessly really fascinating I mean you know you know maybe you know but also it frankly explains why we process surprising information differently from expected information which is why perhaps you know creative advertising always has that slightly gratuitous element of okay about it because essentially you know there's one form of attention which is business as usual attention and there's another form of attention which kicks in and generates effectively you know effectively we attach much greater importance to what's surprising that what isn't and that that brings me to things like you know thought insights in customer experience which is that everybody benchmarks around what a hotel should do and by the way you should generally try and minimize nasty surprises in customer experience I think that's an important thing to do but it also suggests that we can do we can achieve extraordinary and actually very very cost effective emotional effects by doing remarkably small things that weren't expected I mean if anybody's here wanting a brief over Christmas the great brief and challenge for behavioral sciences if you're a hotel how do you make the checkout experience feel really great in other words how do you how do you exploit the peak end rule to go oh that's really good you know you know now I did jokingly say the one thing I'd like from a five-star hotel which they never do is a person to go to your room and check you haven't left a sock or a pair of shoes behind or anything like that but that's probably too time-consuming so a friend of mine who stayed at the Manuel cat saison in Oxfordshire they actually because everybody drives there because it's in the middle of nowhere and a lot of people stay the night because obviously they've had a lot to drink and when you leave they give you a box of hand baked biscuits or cookies to the American audience and say here's something for your journey home okay now obviously you can do that if you're the Manuel cat saison and you can afford to do it because the the buggers have spent best part of 1200 quid on a dinner and an overnight stay okay probably not that much but not far off but is there a way no you know I notice things like I don't know if they still do this but selfridges if you pay by credit card they say thank you very much mr. Sutherland okay now that's meaningful it's unbelievably meaningful because nobody else does it okay it's not difficult the name is on the card assuming you're not using a stolen credit card it's generally really flattering and pleasant but for whatever weird reason nobody else does it by the way that's what we were talking about here I owe Gareth an email so thank you enormously the Stilton in particular but all of them absolutely fantastic so Gareth I'm very conscious of the fact that I owe you a huge vote of thanks which is hugely delayed because it ended up in the parcel room of Ogilby for a few days but if anything that only served to improve the Stilton so double thanks to Gareth there sorry about that a second way into a cheese story so that was the experience machine by Andy Clark that we were talking about that it actually reminded me Rory of one of your guests at Nudge Stock and that was Guy Leshzina now he's written a book on the senses I think it's called The Man Who Tasted Words but his films video that he showed during his talk on stage were quite amazing weren't they of people who were asleep but to all extents and purposes as we watched the film it was as if they were awake and you have exactly this phenomenon where I suppose dreams are partly explained by this by the way in the book Andy Clark takes it even further and says there are things we should look at in in people who are neuro non-typical in particular things like ass mergers okay which is to do with the calibration of incoming data versus expectation now I'll give you just a very interesting where I think the reason I'm telling you this is because the theory is really really interesting but the theory also has very very wide applications and there's a really interesting finding in the book where people with a very large number of people with autism okay an extraordinary large number cut the labels out of their clothing because they find things like that really irritating okay and he suggests there's something to be learned here from this which is that you know if you if you don't have autism if you're neurotypical when you put a new piece of clothing on you probably sense that I can sense it now when I think about it the label on the back of my shirt that's touching my neck but after about three seconds of wearing the shirt it goes into expectation value and you no longer sense it that's very very interesting that people with autism are continually irritated by this thing which is where you get this problem of over stimulation for example okay and then then the argument is that something like schizophrenia may happen the other way around where actually what your brain is generating overwhelms your perception of reality to an extent where you start to get voices in your head and so on so it's really it's you know I think this theory it also explains by the way the whole patterns of brain movement where if perception work the way we conventionally think which is top down you'd expect to see a lot of neural activity in one direction and not much in the other as it were and yet if you look at the actual brain activity it's actually dominated by kind of bottom up generated internally expectation corrected by and this has a bearing on robotics for example so movement is you imagine a further a future state that you find desirable like holding a mug and then you move towards the mug constantly error correcting as you go which is why children are effectively learning to move and the process is Bayesian effectively okay I don't want to get too nerdy here okay but what's fascinating there is that it looks like the big advances I met Sir Patrick Vallance at a dinner it was a by the way I had to do an after-dinner speech at the annual Harvey and dinner of the Royal College of Physicians and I must have been still about four days beforehand I was mentally just thinking okay after dinner speech to alerted doctors you know I better tee up a few off the cuff knob gags and make sure it's a bit of a laugh and then about four days beforehand I checked the invitation list which included Chris Whitty and Sir Patrick Vallance and I thought I think I probably need to raise my game here a bit but the really I think it's I think this is fun to what Patrick Vallance was saying is that the big progress in robotic movement because robots find really difficult to do the things that humans find really easy to do opening a door knob for a robot is like a fumbling messy hopeless experience okay and similarly picking up that mug or holding an egg is something it's really really difficult to do and the progress that's been made in robotics is effectively to make the process kind of work backwards effectively very very interesting I mean I would say by the way one of the reasons the book's so good I'm interesting is I've always thought that actually the creative solution in so many cases or the most one of the most useful creative kind of techniques is think about this backwards you know the most creativity most real breakthroughs happen backwards okay and actually maybe maybe this kind of process of expectation followed by correction is actually much more fundamental to the world than the process we prefer to think about which is forward intention and so I'm going to mention you mentioned other books I'm going to mention another business actually which has fascinated me and I had this conversation I don't know very much about Mentec but the guy who is one of the co-founders of this Cambridge biosciences company I was just chatting about this and he said much to my surprise because I thought what I was saying was fairly obvious he said thank you you've just helped me clarify something that's been confusing me for 12 years okay and this company effectively one of the co-founders was the co-discoverer of Viagra which is famous for being a discovery that happened backwards okay now if you look at the history of science nobody was trying to invent steam engines just as nobody was trying to invent red bull okay no one was going we really need a disgusting tasting drink get right okay no one was trying to invent apparently the walls via netta came about because there was a wonky conveyor belt which juddered which caused normal slabs of ice cream to be produced in a kind of scroll work okay so so from Viagra to Penicillin to the walls via netta to graphene to whatever most of this stuff actually happens backwards it's also if you like weirdly the intellectual justification for a kind of conservatism I'm not making a political point here which is someone once described socialism as the mistaken belief you can get something right first time in other words you solve it in theory implemented in practice and actually the extent to which and I won't talk about the bees again because everybody will have heard me say that but the extent to which there's this explore exploits trade-off and that most real progress comes from exposing yourself to surprises not in actually seeking out something that you've envisaged in advance okay I think that's a fundamental kind of question in epistemology but interestingly it's kind of a fundamental problem it's fundamental issue in creativity as well and you know talking to John Cleese that's another book I recommend probably I read it the year before in fact although I've read it since because it's one of those books I reread along with Obvious Adams by the way Robert Uptograph's book Obvious Adams which looks like the hokeyest like 1960 in American kind of get rich quick business book when you first open it but when you actually read it it's it's very it was one of David Ogilvy's favorite books by the way just just to give it a bit more imprimatur if you like but but this this this really interesting question in creativity that one of the reasons creative people are really annoying is they have a different methodology to most people now occasionally okay I give a talk like this typically to junior marketers okay it tends to be more junior marketers and I give such a talk and then I'm told afterwards by five of them not all of them but a few people right back again this was no use to me I want to be told what to do okay I don't want to be told how to think I want you to tell me if if you have to do this then do these five things in this order okay and they get really really frustrated with information which actually requires interpretation they just want instruction they just want an algorithm okay and I always say look if that if your audience is like that go and get somebody else there are loads of people who know more about that than me and you know frankly that's not my forte because my forte is sitting around going I don't know what to do next okay and John Cleese's book um which is called creativity a short and cheerful guy makes the point that real imagination happens from people who effectively procrastinate okay and the reason they procrastinate is not as but is not because they're lazy although they might also be lazy okay the reason they procrastinate is because they're waiting for inspiration to strike they're waiting to get lucky and Cleese describes this experiment which was done with architects and they got a cross section of architects to nominate the most creative architects people who are generally regarded to be brilliant inventive okay and then rather more furtively they got those same architects to nominate 10 really worker day uninteresting boring kind of lackluster architects and they went and looked at how they worked and the absolutely unvarying um pattern that emerged was that the worker day architects started work straight away they got the drawing board out and the bloody ruler and the routine they got that out straight away as soon as they got back they started planning for the thing and the interesting creative architects didn't do they doodled or they wandered around or whatever right and their their time appeared to be totally wasted in the beginning of the process okay and um what they were doing effectively was waiting to get lucky waiting for some surprising information to either arise externally or to emerge in their own brain which would give them effectively a head start okay so in the case of a classic architectural case Frank Lloyd Wright was briefed to build a house uh falling water as it subsequently became near riverrun Pennsylvania if ever you find yourself in western Pennsylvania and go there because it's fantastic okay it's one of the best you've got a book in advance at all but it's very well organized and you'll probably get in if you book the day before but it's great okay and um the original brief was this is our favorite place the family likes to swim in the waterfall so can you build us a house overlooking the waterfall and Wright's you know ticks around for eight days or months or whatever it is I don't know his working patterns and then he suddenly has the inspiration why don't you just give them the rocks why don't you build a house on top of the waterfall okay in other words let's rethink this and it always interests me how you have we have these mental blind spots and we have to wait for them to go away and so this business of procrastination of starting late and waiting to get lucky or waiting for a a lot of getting lucky is actually not actually seeing something new it's sometimes waiting for a blind spot to disappear it's waiting for an assumption to disappear and that takes time and I think it suddenly occurred to me that of course creative people are kind of weird because they are really really annoying if you want something done straight away to your exact specifications they're the they're the worst people in the world if that's what you want but on the other hand if you want us a breakthrough innovation or at least the chance of a breakthrough innovation which solves the problem not incrementally but by an order of magnitude that's exactly what you need to do and so I you know I'm intrigued about how we eventually end up with what is creative AI and how is it different from the standard AI we're starting to see at the moment uh you know um you know well done draper on his couch uh no no well I mean that what was interesting about that was I mean particularly of course the final sequence in the film weighs in an ashram in California and has the inspiration for the cocad which is I keep realizing that the real excitement comes when you in many cases it's actually when you stop see you either start seeing or you stop assuming and that's why a large part of creativity is actually reductive you know I always tell the story by the way um it's another train story but not the usual train story the guy who designed the high speed train anybody in britain here the intercity 125 high speed train was almost produced as a kind of stop gap solution two banging great diesel engines at either end of a train going really fast and it turned out to be in a way one of the most successful things ever done in rail in britain it was a fantastic train for the diesel age they were basically pretty reliable they were bloody fast they did tend to make then there was the stink of the of the brake pads that kind of got into the air conditioning I think they solved that eventually but basically it was a brilliant train very simply put together but when the guy had the specification it included buffers behind the reason it looked unlike any other carrying uh train is it was one of the earliest trains not to have separate carriages the train looked like one long tube and the original brief the original specification required buffers for shunting and the guy who designed the train said uh we actually said why does the specification include buffers and they said it's for shunting are we ever going to shunt this train given there's a diesel at both ends um no right well we don't need buffers then and it's those kind of things which is the you know a specification had got kind of rooted into procurement and what the guy realized was that circumstances had changed and so that assumed requirement for a railway carriage no longer applied I think there's an awful lot that happens with technology which is what no longer needs to happen now we have this technology okay I mean I'm fascinated by the psychology of zoom calls which is why do we still make meetings an hour long okay you know and funny enough we said we suggested this to zoom and they didn't take it up which is you need to create a little format and a name for a 10 minute zoom call okay you know particularly if it's one to one you know maybe an hour is just too tiring maybe people can't commit but you need you need to create a little thing called a zoomet that wasn't our recommended name but you need to create a little thing which is by the way just fancy 10 minutes on zoom yeah okay the elevator pitch equivalent of zoom and we said well the main reason meetings are hour long is if you travel to a meeting or you have to be in a place for a meeting it's discourteous to make someone travel to something and then give them 10 minutes of your time and make them go away you know you feel as if you've been kind of slightly um hard done by it was an absolute pain in the ass when we were based in canary wharf because quite often people will come and see me in canary wharf and they go da da da da this is my work all right I might think this is a really good book I need to put you in touch with the creative director who's currently hired okay now I could do that in 10 minutes but because they traveled out to canary wharf you have to give them an hour of your time because otherwise you looked a bit of an asshole okay and then I suddenly realized you know I suddenly realized there are a load of assumptions here now I've had a load of a few NHS and one one private medical procedure okay and this came from a kind of thinking about zoom which is with a few people we had we met up fairly regularly and I said look this is really easy why don't we just block half an hour on zoom on Monday and half an hour on Thursday and if the Monday meeting it doesn't happen we'll do it on the Thursday okay so we've got a bit of wiggle room because nobody minds having one meeting cancelled it's half an hour back in your day right cancelling a physical meeting is an absolute insult because someone might have planned their entire day around traveling to see you traveling as zoom cancelling a zoom calls you know not really it doesn't inconvenience the other party at all right and then I suddenly thought well there must be a better way for the NHS to do waiting lists my impression of the NHS by the way is that it's actually an extremely good service in terms of the medical care you receive with a very bad user interface okay and by the way the Ogilvy chap called Dishwan Dhomant who's the Ogilvy's head of kind of UX he's actually from the United States okay I said to him what's your impression of the NHS as an American of course as a UX expert and he said exactly the same thing unprompted he said it's a great great service for the terrible user interface and one of the things I said doing the NHS thing is why don't they give me three appointments okay right and say it'll probably be the middle one but if we need to bring you if we can bring you forward because we have a vacancy or a cancellation why don't you block out three days out now I'm having an operation it's a day procedure okay but it's a day operation I can easily not go on holiday and not and agree with my employer that I don't take any strong commitments on three fourth coming okay in order and yet we also have the psychological benefit okay and you wouldn't feel you wouldn't feel oh god now I'm back to the back of the queue again oh god I had to cancel my procedure now I'm back on the waiting list you just go okay I'll default to apartment number two now all I'm saying I'm not saying by the way I'm right and this will require a whole load of economists who specialise in kind of coordination problems to see how you could improve things this way what I just spotted was there's this underlying association sorry there's this underlying assumption that when you make an appointment you just make one and actually you know a great thing would be look we'll block out because free time is wasted if you you know if you're I'm sitting here if you all cancel this I would have been offended if everybody simultaneously had decided to cancel me but what I'm saying is I just go okay we'll do another time that's fine I'll get on with some other stuff and so it really interests me that there are these what happens is we carry over the assumptions from one technological context to another you know I find it really interesting in electric cars because I suddenly realised that you know electric car charging points unlike petrol stations aren't very visible so actually if you're driving in your electric car and you say uh find me charging stations if you're driving through London you're bombarded with there are tons of the bloody things but unlike a BP station they're not on a main thoroughfare and they don't have a massive great light so you know as a consequence what's happening is people go oh I don't know where I charged my car well actually that's a change because petrol stations existed in an age before GPS and their locations predates GPS so they had to be on a high traffic road with high visibility and high advanced visibility so you could decelerate enough to turn off and go and buy your six gallons of five-star and a pork pie from M&S Simply Foods of course that doesn't apply anymore there's no point in taking up what you might call prime retail real estate for an electric car charging point and it isn't very big and you can't see it okay so that's the that's the kind of that's the kind of point I'm making which is that an awful lot of our behaviours come from failing to do this business of correcting for new information we're effectively thinking with a with a kind of prediction and expectation which might have been formed in circumstances different to the ones we find ourselves in I'm in the Insights Rory and I was mentioning there Don Draper we've heard about books that have been important to you in 2023 has that you've had a more of an audio year it seems than actually a visual year but have there been things that have caught your eye films or television or podcasts yes by the way I'll give you a story about this if you're invited to go on a podcast generally go on a podcast okay and the maths I give as an example for that is two things okay one of which is that it's much more efficient spending one hour talking to a hundred people than spending a hundred hours talking to a hundred people one at a time okay simple as that okay we've got 98 people here okay well okay if you subtract me that's 97 now if I wanted to go and have a coffee with all of you it would take three weeks of my entire working life I don't think we're fully conscious of these multiplier effects I always make that case which is the second thing I make the case for and I always have massive arguments with Ogilvy's press people about this okay is the Ogilvy press people it was going you've got to have a strategy you've got to be really efficient with your time you've got to be really ruthless you've got to dedicate your your conferences you've only got to go to the conferences which you know genuinely have large numbers of people who are marketing directors and blah blah blah blah and I get I'm telling you sorry but that's bollocks okay and the reason is that the the mentality to adopt in promoting yourself is one which is opportunistic not which is efficiency focused what you're trying to do is optimize expectation sorry optimal this isn't a seem Talib language optimize your increase your surface area exposure to possible upside optionality now the reason I got invited to do a TED talk was because I gave a talk to Nokia after we just won the Motorola account and the people in the Ogilvy press office were going oh my goodness what if you do this what if you I said look I promise this before we won the Motorola account so I'm going to do it because I promise to do it and you I'm just going to I'll write an email to anybody and say look you know I'm not presenting anything I wouldn't present to you and of course the client's totally unconcerned okay now there was someone there who was from Nokia unsurprisingly because it was a Nokia conference who said we'd like you to speak at Nokia world and I speak at Nokia world which is 2000 people in Rotterdam or somewhere I can't remember where it was the Hague okay and then at Nokia world at the time Chris Anderson from TED was sitting at the back and he came up to me and said I'd like you to do a TED talk that's actually how it works okay that actually the extent to which you can predict and therefore focus on looking for success in a world which is high on opportunity okay now I'll tell you the other story of that I mean I don't know if anybody's else is a fan of Chris Williamson's podcast okay what is the name of that podcast it's called Modern Wisdom and he's actually been so successful with that okay now I've been on twice that the late the later one hasn't come out yet he's been so successful that he's moved to Austin Texas he's actually a Smoggy which I understand is a type of like in the northeast you have Smoggy's monkey hangers and Jordies I don't fully understand that but anyway he's a Smoggy but he's moved to Austin Texas because it's like podcasting central okay now the funny thing is when I agreed to go on his podcast I hadn't it was quite in the early days of his podcast I hadn't got a clue who he was okay so what I what I'm suggesting is that there is this trade-off between effectively there's this trade-off which which I obsess about which is the exploit explore trade-off and that's I won't mention the bees again because you've all heard me talk about the bees but there is this trade-off between exploiting what you already know okay which means that if you happen to know Chris Williams and ask to go on his podcast again or ask him to recommend you to other podcasters in Austin who might like you on the show you don't get in other words there's a trade-off between being long-term lucky and resilient and being short-term efficient and most modern companies are completely blind to that trade-off they think that short-term efficiency and exploitation of what they already know is a proxy for long-term success and it really really isn't and I think that's that that's a what what has happened now in business is we have the procurement finance nexus which makes it impossible for businesses to innovate because finance are busy trying to impress procure I mean the thing that really worries me in the advertising industry I've been on a robin bond podcast talking about this is that the advertising industry is trying to optimize what's profitable okay in terms of billable hours but what's profitable in advertising is not what's valuable okay the things you do which make money are not the things which actually add value it's an oblique business okay the real value comes from sort of insights that arise from the process of producing an advertisement and creativity and things like that most of the money is made doing sort of time-consuming you know programmatic kind of stuff okay and so you have the finance department during that the procurement it's very difficult to innovate because the procurement department are only interested in how much they're paying they're not remotely interested in how much value you're creating because value is indeterminate and impossible to predict in advance whereas costs and cost reduction are certain are certainties and so once you create this loop of kind of left brain Ian McGilchrist left hemisphere thinking it's very very difficult to escape from in other words once you put two left hemisphere people together and you give them a spreadsheet okay you create something which is actually effectively a you know a feedback loop of reductionism and it never goes away and it you know we've I think you know my great concern is it's killing the you know it's killing the advertising industry and to all extents and purposes I think 2023 has been the year of AI chat gpt and the the dry fryer so looking forward can I can I give you this is actually a message of so you mentioned the air fryer one of the things I mentioned in my book I'm gonna know I'm gonna mention a present which if you have a relative or friend who's over let's say 65 or indeed under 65 okay this is the most interesting thing in the world in terms of a failure the standard thing we always talk about is how do we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on luggage okay how come that literally the wheeled suitcase appeared on this earth after we'd actually done the moon landings in 69 and you know let's face it it doesn't require a huge leap of imagination now it happens that I think inline wheels developed for skateboarding and things were actually highly decisive in making really good smooth smooth flowing luggage there was also an element of snobbery which was that you know wheel luggage or luggage trolleys were either you expect to have a porter in the 1940s you would have had a person who carried your luggage and you would have tipped them so there were status considerations and also did wheel luggage make you look a bit elderly okay but here's the weirdest thing okay 98 percent of the world's trays are two handled trays that you carry in front of you like a servant effectively okay and you have a teapot and cups and sauces okay now there is such a thing you can buy as a tray with a handle by which I mean it's got a big handle that comes out of the middle of the tray or two handles and you hold it with one hand okay now that is a far more extreme case of a failure to innovate than the wheel luggage okay because it because when you have two hands on a tray you can't open a door you have to sort of go through doors with your bum first you have to constantly keep the thing level by correcting between your two hands with no work being done with gravity at all okay and the and if you go up or downstairs you can't hold the banisters because you need both hands to hold the fucking tray okay if you go on sites there are a few interesting ones which are like ethnic Moroccan trays which come with a handle so you hold it with one hand gravity keeps it then level because a pot of tea is quite heavy and you walk around opening doors sweeping this tray through everything like a pro you know you're like a french waiter okay you just pick up this thing and you go and here's your tea oh he wouldn't quite do that but you get my point and the gravity keeps it level now the weird thing is the only place you can buy these are on disability websites handle trays I think apps has them but they're manufactured by a company which specializes for disabled people you know who either have root you know problem with a hand or they have problem obviously you know sorry but we should actually burn all existing trays and replace them with these and the reason is if you know anybody as I said over 60 buy them one of these fucking things I bought my parents in law one I bought my father one they're both absolute evangelists for the tray with a sodding handle okay but the reason you should also buy them one is the likelihood that they fall downstairs my father's best friend died falling backwards downstairs while carrying a tray of tea upstairs at the age of about 88 the likelihood that someone has a fall while carrying a tray strikes me as insanely likely so if you wanted I wouldn't be surprised if the tray with a handle if it were made universal added like three months to average average life expectancy and yet for whatever wacko reason most trays don't have a handle okay that's what I mean by you know effectively spotting blind spots and then asking you know and the extent to which we we optimize for what we expect to be thinking oh that's a nice tray and nobody's actually thinking what fucking stupid thing that requires two hands for you to carry a pot of tea and three sauces and cups around sort of answered Raju's question now I was just going to bring Raju in Raju Neera said looking ahead if you had a crystal ball what are two top consumer trends in 2024 I sort of hate to break it to you but I feel it's not going to be the one handled tray but seriously it should be because once you bought one of these things you go shit why did I ever put up with anything else so it is one of those things which I call a bit of a you know it's a one-way door once you've experienced it you never go back um I would like to make that a trend for serious reasons which I think it's genuinely you know after this everybody you need to look out on google trends see if there's a search for trays one handled trays and you remember you remember the behavioural science uh ogle behavioural science practice mantra which is dare to be trivial which is that don't necessarily when solving a problem one of the greatest mistakes is people assume that the scale of the intervention has to be proportionate to the scale of the desired effect and in a complex world like the one we live in and actually to be honest the one we've always lived in um there are butterfly effects everywhere start by hunting butterflies before you then try and have a massive intervention I was quite impressed by the way um um I'll tell you a reason why people from um uh one reason of many why people from uh often immigrant backgrounds are very very successful entrepreneurs okay and it's quite simple which is a lot of them grow up in a shop and if you grow up in a shop or a restaurant it's like a free mba because you get the whole of a business that is just about comprehensible and you understand the interdependent parts of that business what happens now is we produce a load of graduates and they go into a specialized field like procurement where they're optimizing for one thing okay and there's a really really important point which we need to understand that there there are things which are micro rational and macro stupid okay where if you optimize for a narrow measure what you're doing makes complete sense within the sphere of your own particular silo but is actually dumb in terms of the interest of the organization you work for particularly a male problem by the way since I think men it's both a virtue and a weakness of men that men will compete over anything even if there's absolutely no points to it okay right I would I would give it as a female virtue which is there more likely to say are you sure we should be doing this whereas you're just as men will compete over stupid sports or kind of you know place bets on who can get it you know that that male competitive hyper competitive urge is both valuable and a curse I think depending on how it's actually harnessed but this thing about things that we're often doing things that are micro rational and then you look at it systemically and you go actually those two things we're trying to do are in opposition to each other you know they're not they're actually contradictory you know one of the worst things I think you can do is feel that you're efficient when you're busy because the extent to which you're working effectively I mean you know one one really interesting thing with flexible work is the extent to which you know they said oh people are two percent less productive if they work from home well tell them to work five minutes longer they'll take that trade off it's not that big a deal right okay right it's not that that is rocket science but also the extent to which a lot of people I think in we don't really in the office in knowledge economies we don't really measure outputs we measure we measure inputs and I think that's led I think in the open plan visible office it's led to a lot of actually toxic behavior presenteeism being the most obvious one but effectively you know to be honest if you're in a knowledge economy really you should be spending one day of you know seven or eight hours a week just hanging out and chilling and trying to get lucky but you get these people who are basically sort of you know micro focused on meeting some bonus objective I think is I think we've done a terrible thing when we did that I mean literally a terrible thing where you bonus people on a very specific metric um and so you know a lot of what I'm doing is basically you know it's it's uh sublevel Ian McGillchrist it's just the fight against reductionist quantification in everything really and big yeah I mentioned when you joined us Rory more than anyone you are able to speak without prompting and we've all really enjoyed hearing your uh your insights into life today with only a couple of prompts from myself we can we're doing a rapid fire we can do a bit of rapid fire a little bit of rapid okay all right okay that's a challenge so I'll have a look at the chat because there are lots on the chat so there are a few questions last thing you bought and loved how's that for a rapid fire last thing you bought and loved last thing I bought and loved um that's a really interesting question uh actually okay I'll give you another Christmas tip um along with mattress toppers air fryers and Japanese toilets there is an interesting technology which I think is under exploited which is bone conducting headphones now bone connecting headphones by the way if you know anybody over 70 you could buy them some bone conducting headphones because they actually they vibrate through the cheekbones okay and they send the vibrations straight to the inner air now what's often happened in older people is what one of the reasons they're deaf is that the the mechanical bit that connects the ear drum to the inner ear the stirrup and the anvil and all those things has become a bit I'm really fascinating in oldie tech and disabled tech and by the way another great book to read by the way um Helen Edwards from marginal to mainstream you know Helen Edwards if you know her from marketing week she's one of the people along with you know Ritzen people who I kind of venerate in the marketing sphere she's absolutely fantastic and her book from marginal to mainstream which also shares the prediction which I've also made which is that you know in 10 to 20 years 10 to 15 percent of the population might be nomadic in other words don't buy a house buy an electric motorhome because if you've got a big American luxury motorhome and you've got a 200 kilowatt hour battery man you can go off the grid and run you an espresso machine and your telly and you'll have your Elon Musk's you know skylink thing whatever it's called okay right we can actually go off the grid now the toilets the last remaining problem really and we just need a microwave toilet and we're done we can just go off the grid and if you look at an American a huge luxury American motorhome okay costs less than a totally shit flat in London now admittedly it's not going to go up in value but then maybe the flat in London isn't going to go up in value for the next 15 years so it's time to get on the road okay but but um sorry I digress don't get out headphones could be very good if you're elderly and have impaired hearing they're mostly marketed to joggers who are the opposite of the demographic thing typically because you don't lose situational awareness and end up using your massive over-the-ear noise-canceling headphones and run under a bus which can happen okay and you can also weirdly use them in a swimming pool although I don't plan to do that that strikes me as weird okay but there are very the other application for this it strikes me as podcast listening which is actually wandering around the house now okay I'm going to get cancelled for this but bear in mind this is reversible okay it's not sexist okay I occasionally call my Sony over the air WF whatever they are WH-005s my wife cancelling headphones okay they're noise cancelling headphones you can equally call them husband cancelling headphones it's just that they basically they're noise cancelling and for certain things like immersion like music that's really really powerful you know there are times when we want to be immersed I think that this apple goggle thing I don't think fundamentally humans like being visually immersed I think there are loads of times where actually we can just listen to music and immerse ourselves in the music without losing complete vision of what's going on around us okay but I think for podcasts and spoken word uh we don't actually want that level of immersion if you look at digital radios they started as pieces of hi-fi equipment but nobody wants to listen to radio for on a massive powerful speaker you want a little box in the corner of them because it's like a person talking to you now I wouldn't recommend bone bone conducting headphones which are usually made by a company called shocks but there are other competitors I wouldn't recommend it for uh audio files or for music listening but if you're a fan of spoken word stuff I think it's a bit of a breakthrough so that that would be another tech tip along with a tray with a handle fantastic thanks so much Rory um well I don't think we're going to have anything as much as a rapid fire but uh Rory it's been an absolute honor to have you join us here again with 42 courses you're very supportive of 42 courses in general anyone visiting our website will see that Rory is a host and in many of our courses and of course if anyone on the call wants training for their company please reach out to Chris at 42courses.com and also we have a new ad 101 course that has just launched on the website it's absolutely fantastic uh you all as joining us today can use the voucher Don Draper VIP to get a discount on the ad 101 course if you search around you might find it will be valid for discounts on other courses oh someone's just someone's just put themselves up here as Alex Hormozzi's buddy now that's another book I really recommend 100 million dollar offers by Alex Hormozzi he's a big regular on the podcast scene so if you like get into what he says what is interesting I think is you're beginning to find these people who are marketers and I include myself on the fringes of this who actually and I think this is really welcome marketing people from a marketing standpoint starting to pronounce on wider issues other than brand comms and I think I think that's a really important trend and any of you who have an appetite for doing that kind of thing uh you know I make the joke which is only half a joke okay you have a load of economists deciding what the top rate of tax should be in the UK it's currently 40% or 45% above a certain threshold okay now I don't want to be rude but anybody in retail would tell you the top rate of tax should be 39.99 shouldn't it not 40% okay any retailer would have told you that right because what you want is the lowest perceived rate that minimizes the downside effect it has on incentives to work while raising the most revenue okay it's a retail problem it's not an economic problem okay right so and the Alex Hormozzi book by the way he's a really really interesting guy I've connected with him a couple times there's also a book called by a guy who founded a restaurant in New York which is service I think it's called service beyond reason by will something or other and it's about it's about customer experience and it's absolute I've actually quoted it in I'm flattered to say it's but but not for that reason it's a really astonishing book thank you so much anybody anybody in the experience economy go there straight away he's great we'll think of you Bob yeah I'll remember we'll think of you Bob well yeah thank you so much Rory for joining us sharing so many of your insights thank you all so much for joining us on this call it's so great to see you familiar faces familiar names and to see new names as well and have a marvellous Christmas we'll share the recording of this on Monday with everybody and we hope that you all have a very merry Christmas happy new year thank you again Rory and shout out to Amelia Amilia Turode who I've just noticed I've noticed quite a few familiar names here so but all of you have a really really great Christmas and don't work too hard you know thank you thanks everybody