 Do you think there is a crisis in the world and could be an advertising world solved? First of all, if there is a crisis in the world the job is to define it. The second thing I think, which is where I am optimistic, the reason I'm optimistic for the world in a sense, is that really in a way progress happens not so much by the generation of new ideas but by the abandonment of old assumptions. And a few of the things we're beginning to understand now are for example complexity in general. Now if you look at a complex system which is closest to say a meteorological system than it is to a simple mechanical system like a clockwork mechanism such as a watch. It's more complicated to model emphatically. It's far more difficult to change. You can't use simple Newtonian physics in meteorology nor can you use it in economies or in psychology for example. It simply isn't that simple. That's the bad news that actually working out how to fix it is harder. The one piece of good news is that sometimes fairly large problems can be solved by fairly small interventions, butterfly theory if you like. And that's the one area where I'm optimistic. If we start to understand that complex systems are difficult and different from simple systems and that treating economies as if they're like some sort of mechanism involving a couple of cogs and a lever is fundamentally fallacious. Once we start to realize that then first of all we'll stop this business of always trying to have big effects by creating wholesale change. There may be very very small interventions, very small ideas that can have absolutely massive effects. Here in Holland there's a very interesting case which I always regard as just a small example of that where the typical mechanistic view of the world says if you want people to slow down when they're driving down a particular stretch of road you place a speed camera there and that's the kind of logical Newtonian incentives, disincentives, economic model for how you change behavior. To some extent it doesn't work all that well for reasons I won't go into now. What they found somewhere in Holland was with an apparently illogical intervention simply removing the lines painted on the road causes people to slow down instinctively without even being aware that they're doing it. So Buckminster Fuller talked about this idea of trim tab which is the point on a ship or a plane where the smallest movement creates the biggest change and actually on his gravestone it says call me trim tab. That showed an early understanding I think of complexity. This kind of understanding that two things. One, it's not easy, it's not simple and predictable and mechanistic. Therefore we should stop trying to change the world necessarily through grand interventions that cause considerable disruption and we should spend time looking for and incidentally failing in the search for smaller interventions which may achieve greater things with far fewer unintended consequences. So that's where I'm optimistic. First of all we need to accept that actually this is an imperfect science and actually experimentation and failure and modification and so forth. There is much part of the process as having a grand vision. The second thing is to understand that actually it isn't necessary to seek to change the world in order to change it. I'm sure there are people now dead, some people now alive who have significantly changed the world and yet we don't even know their names. That assumption that in order to change the world you have to stage a revolution or achieve massive political power or some enormous sort of upheaval in the way things are ordered and organized. Maybe one of the great misconceptions we're starting to abandon that trim-tab interventions as Bucky would have called them are actually much, much more interesting. In order to make those succeed, first of all politics has got to understand that first of all its own sense of self-aggrandizement often requires it to do massive, high-profile, high-budget interventions. These may not actually be the best use of politicians time and the second thing politicians have got to do is learn to get less embarrassed about failure and say we tried this small thing, it didn't succeed very well, the ill effects were relatively trivial, relax about it. If you look at the business world it really does work through, at its best, Silicon Valley is one example, through stochastic tinkering and experimentation. That's not my phrase, it's Nassim Taleb's I think, stochastic tinkering is how it works. And one of the great things about the business world is that when a new idea comes along, entrepreneurs will try and implement that idea and indeed market that idea in six very different ways and maybe only one of them succeeds. That to some extent is why capitalism works because actually the rewards for trying something different in capitalism are quite high. If everybody else is wrong and you're right, the rewards if you put money in the game for being proven right are really pretty high. You might argue that cultures like politics, cultures like the public sector and academia, there's much more reputational risk involved and actually the price of descent is very high and the potential reward is very, very small. So the great thing about business is if you actually just, there is this extraordinary reward for actually looking at the world differently. You may fail quite a bit but when you succeed it really does pay off and relatively rapidly. I think you know there is quite a lot that academia and politics can learn from how free markets actually work. I don't mean the deluded sort of neoclassical view of the perfectly efficient market. I mean the kind of Schumpeterian view of creative destruction and entrepreneurial activity. The fact that actually this isn't actually an unstable thing in constant desic disequilibrium which is forever just searching for relative advantage over a competing company or a competing idea. To translate that, not that boring bit about the perfectly efficient market what they've done in trying to introduce markets into say the public sector is actually to introduce some of the less attractive and less useful aspects of the public sector into these businesses but if you can actually understand that there's a kind of dynamic competitive market for ideas approaches and indeed for marketing approaches. Here's my most radical suggestion which will seem to you very weird if you believe that value is subjective there's no reason why the next big revolution couldn't be psychological not technological. If we simply better understood what people valued how they behaved and what made people happy that could actually raise the quality of human life just as significantly I would argue far more significantly than some new widget or battery powered device. They may be slightly interconnected. That's the first point. And so far more intelligent effort needs to go into understanding what you might call intangible value not just how to make material stuff. After all, we're materially quite well off in the developed world already our appetite for stuff isn't infinite apart from anything else you run out of storage space. So understanding the value of intangibles and services and so forth I think could lead to some really important innovation and I think that's a dangerous thing about innovation that it tends to be conflated with a particular kind of technological progress whereas actually innovation takes place in all manner of different places in distribution but also in marketing. If you can work out new ways of understanding consumer needs in a way that's much closer to the grain of human nature then business efficiency can significantly improve without necessarily needing to change all that much what it actually makes or supplies. Does that sound too weird? A lot of people look at this and go it's dangerously close to either propaganda or to kind of brave new world where we're drugged into being content with our own circumstances. I'm just saying there's an awful lot of wasted effort. The other, the final question is how many technological problems are really marketing problems or psychological problems in disguise? So I'm quite a keen fan of nicotine not a fashionable point of view I accept the terrible thing with nicotine was the delivery device and the electronic cigarette seems to be a very important invention it's quite a lot of the pleasure of smoking but with perhaps a small percentage of the risk. The problem isn't the technology that's already there and existing the problem is a whole load of social pressures and frames around the fact that it's just embarrassing to smoke electronic cigarettes in public. The driverless car, Google's more or less perfected that the problem with the driverless car is no longer technological in principle it's legislative how do we legislate for this for blame in terms of software that goes slightly wrong and causes a minor accident equally it's also psychological how do you design cars in such a way that gradually gets people to accept that you can be walking down a pavement and a device with no human in it passes you at 30 miles an hour and that's the real challenge of the driverless car it isn't the technology anymore.