 Thank you so much for joining and congratulations. I was trying to guess what coloured shirt you'd be wearing today. I was roughly on the right hue, but missed it slightly. Thank you so much. I think we've ever had so many questions come through for one guest before, so congratulations. Fantastic, my goodness. Sorry about that, by the way. Sorry about all the delay. Don't worry. It's always a hard one to get right. I'll start off with a really fun one. It was actually from a lady who has written a couple of brilliant things to you over the years. I think she's taken your courses and really loved it. It's from a lady called Nina Jervis. She says, what's your favourite brand of gin and why? Oh, I... Yeah, actually, there are a client of ours, so I have to say this, but actually I say it sincerely, which is we have to credit Sipsmith with the fact that they did a lot of the early campaigning work to make it possible for all the other boutique gin distilleries to open. So there was so much sort of, essentially there was so much what you might call legacy legislation dating back to the 18th century on distilling, that it was more or less a bureaucratic nightmare unless you were some monster corporation to open any kind of distillery. And Sipsmith spent some years campaigning. Indeed, I think they ended up being the first distillery to open in London since something like 1790. And actually we owe a debt of thanks to a few people like that. I think it was Gordon Brown we owe the thanks to for the British explosion in micro breweries. Because he reduced the amount of bureaucracy necessary and reduced, I think, the duty required if you opened up a smaller brewery. And in the United States where until about the 1990s, it was probably the worst country in the world to drink beer, certainly as a proportion of GDP, its beer culture was absolutely despicable. It was Jimmy Carter weirdly it was back in the 1970s, where Jimmy Carter changed the legislation because most of their legislation on opening a brewery effectively dated back to the prohibition era. And so they'd ended up with these five monster breweries, which were kind of brewing industrial scale beer. And now, of course, you might argue that the US has gone from the worst country in the world in which to drink beer to the best. Yeah, so amazing how I also just before I answer anything, I love the way that we can ask you pretty much anything and you'll know something about it. It's a great. It's interesting because of course, government doesn't have much incentive to remove legislation because of course the benefits only appear 10 or 15 years later. Yeah, if you remove legislation and make things easier to do, people don't immediately go, hey, let's open a distillery. Okay, it takes sort of 10, 15 years for the the general shift in behavior and the accompanying shift in taste to take effect. But nonetheless, there is a value to that. I think it's really useful. Totally. I think you're a great example. I was going to say is you're a great example of sort of a T shaped person. That kind of idea of knowing a lot, a lot, a lot of things, a lot of things about a lot of things and how that actually happens. If you are being really uncharitable, you'd say that the advertising industry prepares you quite well for being T shaped because you have to learn quite rapidly to bullshit plausibly. If I'm being really unkind and actually, you know, there's a wonderful criticism of advertising and marketing, which was always leveled at Drayton Bird by a business friend of his who said, you advertising people, you go very deeply into the surface of things. It's always a criticism, both he and I always bear in mind, but actually the fact that you might have to be talking about PC sales in the morning and then talking about brewing in the afternoon. And actually it's a great business to be curious in because generally, you know, if you become an actuary, reading an article on the greatest example, four days ago, I love the zoom revolution partly because I just like the absence of wasted time and I like the fact that email has reduced in quantity as a result and so on. But I also like it because from now on, if you host a conference or you host a, you know, any kind of trade fair conference, you haven't, you know, a sales event with invited speakers. If you don't broadcast it live over the internet, you'll kind of look like the Freemasons or the Illuminati. In other words, suddenly everything is public by default. And three days ago, I attended this, literally attended this talk on epidemiology at Duke University in North Carolina. If I'd gone to the Ogilvy Finance Department and said I need to, you know, return ticket to North Carolina so I can attend the conference on ant epidemiology. I think they would have told me to bugger off, to be honest. But of course online, I just go at six o'clock, this thing's kicking off. It's fascinating. So ants have their own equivalent of PPE. So before they have triage, which is they separate ants where there's no chance. From ants, you can help to get better. And basically it's a bit brutal, but if an ant's going to die anyway, they just chuck it out of the colony. But if they have an ant, they think they can save. The PPE is a huge gob of formic acid, which they kind of use to cover their face before they approach the other ant. And then they do this very interesting business of getting themselves deliberately infected, but with only a small dose of whatever the infectious agent is. And so the idea is that by spreading a low level of immunity, you know, by spreading a low level of the disease, you create herd immunity. Now, interestingly, there's a piece by a San Francisco epidemiologist who suggests that masks are a really good idea because they don't quite work. And by what she means that masks don't prevent you necessarily getting infected, but they prevent you getting a really, really large dose. And if you get a very mild dose of the virus, the first of all, the outcomes are much less severe and you probably develop immunity at a relatively low cost. And so now this is something which I don't think has been investigated nearly enough, which is is the severity of the outcome dependent on the initial dose. Because you might, you know, getting a load of people very slightly infected might be actually a partial solution. Yeah, I think I think you raised about that in the spectator. Yeah, it's brilliant. I saw one of the question here, which is probably related to to all of these incredible conferences is from Roger. He says, what was the best piece of knowledge you took from Nudge Stock 2020? Oh, crikey. If we have to follow. I don't know. Maybe it was a lesson learned. Yeah, I was interested in Laurie Santos. I love Laurie Santos, who's an, you know, kind of primatologist who studies apes. And she was quite interesting. I mean, the fact that her talk was the most attended talk at Yale and, you know, the fact that actually talks on how to live life. Are, you know, I think disproportionately becoming valuable. And I suspect a little bit of it is is a necessary reaction to. You might argue consumerist overreach, which is that then, you know, this is not by any way, this is not by the by any way by any scope, a majority of the world's population. But it might be the majority of populations now in the developed world are starting out to ask questions about what's it all about affecting me. By which I mean that generally 50% of people in Britain probably don't really want for material goods or that much. Maybe it's 25%. Maybe it trends older. But nonetheless, that question of what actually, you know, now I have so much choice. What can I spend my money, but more important my time on that really makes a difference. That's great. I also, the thing that really interests me is the discovery I made during the pandemic, which is nearly all business discussion revolves around how much you're paid and how hard you work. And this comes from an assumption in labor economics that effectively people have leisure and they're awarded with, you know, effectively 365 days of leisure at birth. And then you exchange your leisure time for money in the shape of work. And that's why your pay is called compensation, by the way, because it's compensating you for your loss of leisure time. And what we did discover during the pandemic, which I think is really important is I started off by saying, actually, I don't necessarily want to work 30% less than I do. What I really value isn't free time, it's free where and free when. If I can work where I like, and I can work when I like to some degree. So in other words, if I'd rather get up at 10 o'clock in the morning and then work at 10 o'clock at night, if I've got something to write, I don't have to be in the office. I can go home. That has a huge value to me, even though it has no real cost to my employer. Okay. And then Brian Featherstone Hall, who's the great sort of career thinker in Ogilvy, he said, no, no, there's a third one. He said, there's free where, there's free when, and there's free who, which is who you get to work with. Yeah. Which is if you can work with people you like at a time that suits you in a place of your choosing. It's no longer really work. It's probably one of the few reasons why people stay in advertising for so long. It's the other people. Very interesting people. I saw a question here from Gareth Welsh, which is sort of related. He said that you famously rebranded twat to mean folks that go into the office on Tuesday, Wednesday. That wasn't me. I wish it was. Had it been my invention, I would have spent the rest of my life effectively marketing it because it's beautiful. I think it came from the city where people who are nearing retirement would say my ambition is to become a twat Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. And I think, by the way, we will become a nation of twats to a large extent. It's also, now I don't want to make this seem like a real whinge about white collar work. Okay. Because white collar work is cushy. It's not like working on an oil rig. It's not like working in a mine. Okay. But there is one thing about white collar work, which I think is worth noting. Which is once you go to university and you decide that in order since I've been to university, I have to get some sort of office job. The degree of choice you have over when, where and who is basically very low compared to now if you're a blue collar worker and you like we really, really like podcasts or listening to country music and you quite like being a loner. You could become a lorry driver. Right. If you like working weird hours, you can become a taxi driver. If you like a load of matiness and sociability, you know, there are loads of factory jobs where you can have loads of mates and a really good kind of crack. Okay. Actually, office work doesn't, it gives you more money and less grueling labor, but it doesn't give you much control over who, when and where. Yeah. You know, if you're an outdoor worker, you know, interestingly, the guy who services my dad's car back in Wales has got a double first in history from Oxford. And my dad did say to him, you know, it's a bit, you know, you've got a double first in history and you're repairing my car. This is a bit weird. And he goes, yeah, no, no, he said, I tried an office job. I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand being stuck behind the desk. So he works for home tune and drives around and gets a lot of countryside and fresh air and really enjoys fixing people's cars. Brilliant. Brilliant. The actual question that Gareth was going to ask is he said, now, what are your five items that are essential to run a productive home office? He said he can see from your zooms and cameras that you're cutting edge for, he said. To be honest, a lot of that's slightly self-indulgent. But what I would say, I would say that a Zoom account, actually, not necessarily for yourself, but a video call is only as good as the worst participant as you've just seen. You see. So one person who can't handle it. So actually using the most common software increases the quality of the meeting simply because everybody on there knows what they're doing if you use Zoom. And WPP keep ranting on about moving us to Microsoft Teams because they get it for free. And I keep saying, you can move other people. I'm not fucking moving, you know, because for that reason. I think, and I'll just turn off a webcam over here, won't be a second. I think it's a really interesting question, actually. The other big tip I'll give is probably headphones that actually being immersed in the conversation through headphones is much better than having the audio over the TV. So I think the immersive effect of headphones is important. It's probably worth having a professional mic if only for ego purposes, because it actually makes you feel like a broadcaster. And the final tip is get a big, a big 4K TV if you can and use it as a monitor. So whatever size laptop if you try and work, repeat, you know, seriously, my colleagues, I've kept saying to my colleagues, just get a monitor and wonderfully one of the PAs after lockdown went into the office and shipped out all the monitors she could find. To everybody at home, because trying to do that on a laptop screen, particularly if you're my age, your eyesight is getting a bit shaky is really, really tough. So the monitor thing now, interestingly, don't bother. If you just want to watch telly, don't bother getting a 4K TV if you like football, because if there's a lot of motion on there, you can't tell the difference. Okay, because most of the works being done by your brain, if you're watching a camera panning across a soccer field, it's your brain that's constructing the picture. And if you notice when you go into a branch of curries, all the 4K TVs aren't showing soccer matches. They're showing a close up picture of an ant or a flower. And that's because it's with static imagery or text that 4K makes a huge difference. And getting your HDMI connection from your laptop to your 4K telly, you'll never look back. I'm like Lieutenant Ohuru. You know, it's absolutely brilliant. That was a good, good tech advice. This actually comes from Ken Lyons, Ellaria. She said, what's the stupidest thing you've recently heard in the world of marketing? Oh, God, there's a lot of stupidity. The best thing I've heard, by the way, is Bob Hoffman, who when asked to describe the future of marketing in one sentence replied, more of the same, only worse. Which I thought was pretty damn good. But yeah, you hear unbelievable stupidity. The one thing that really annoys me, interestingly, is when people say, oh, but video conferencing, it's not as good as a physical meeting. I say, look, I'm as big an evangelist for this shit as you could imagine. But even I never proposed, we do it five days a week, six months at a time. Okay. You know, I accept that there's a role for meeting people. But, and this is the vital thing, 90% of the meetings you're now attending would never have happened in the physical world. So what you need to be looking at is not how a video call is 5% or 10% worse than a physical meeting. You've got to look at the opportunity cost of demanding that people meet physically, which is most of the most interesting conversations you've had over the last six months wouldn't have happened. Now, okay, in my physical meeting days, I probably attended a meeting where people had come from three or four different continents, four or five times a year. Now it happens four or five times a week. I've just cut. That's why I was late. One guy in Hong Kong, one guy in the United States. Nice. And so the point I'm making is that, look, actually, this freedom for people to form teams without geographical constraints or the constraints of travel time is so important. We should be talking about it much more than we are. Makes no sense. This one's another one. It's interesting. I hear this one a lot actually. I'll try and pronounce the name correctly. It's a Romanian name. It says Silivu, I think. Probably butchered it. And as you said, what's your advice for young professionals in order to sort of best work your way up in an agency or a company? The first thing is get in and if you can get in somewhere good, if you can't get in somewhere bad, because ultimately where you've worked after two or three years, where you've worked and what you've done is more important than what degree you have or all that sort of stuff. So that's one really important thing, I think, which is get in there. Some ways, actually, starting in a small agency has advantages because you develop in your first few years a much broader range of skills than you do if you join a large agency where everybody pigeonholes you and you start to specialize a bit too early. And then try and do something amazing. Don't, you know, try and do one or two amazing things. You know, have a story to tell where you go in and effectively say, I did this, they were going to do this. I suggested that look what happened. And actually, you don't need that much because this is talking about creative people in particular because I never really got, I never got senior account handling to be trusted to hire other account people. But what's your probably looking for? A lot of people absolutely pack their book for the staff. And I often say, look, actually, you kind of now, you don't want to just come in with three things because it makes you look a bit arrogant. I accept the fact that it helps to have quite a bit. But actually, if you've got two, two amazing things that that's the clincher generally. If you can make the creative director think I wouldn't have thought of that or crikey. I've been trying to say something like that for years, but you've said it better than I ever could. I remember actually to two great examples that I had when I was at Ogilvy of people asking for jobs where the people who we often hired were people who kind of stood out and went the extra mile to get in their foot in the door. So we had one person went on to the Lego Google Maps and they built one of our Ogilvy offices in Lego. I mean, it must have taken him hours and hours and hours. And then in the in the in the front of the building he wrote out in Lego bricks, please hire me. And then it was tagged with his email address. I mean, it must have taken him a week or two to build it. And then so he got the interview and he was brilliant and he got the job. And then another genius. The one I love from the UK was a bunch of people who managed to get a placement at Abbott meet Vickers and all they did while they were there was Nick all the writing paper they could find. And then just in case you don't know David Abbott was famous. He's dead now tragically, but he was famous for being the most urbane and skillful copywriter of his day, you know, absolutely incredibly precise man dressed perfectly. Everything about him was kind of beautifully measured and elegant. And they stole all this writing paper. Now, what they did is they wrote to 20 creative directors handwritten and I think it said, dear, let's say they're writing to Jeff Seymour, dear Jeff. I saw these guys book and I thought, fuck me. It's totally brilliant. He said, unfortunately, I haven't got any room at my gaff at the moment. But if you want to hire them, why don't you call their drum on O2O? It was written in a cockney slang. And then it said, yours till the cows come home, Davey Abbott. And I think in the way of Davey, there was a little smiley face, something that David wouldn't have done if you'd put a gun to his head. And of course, it was so brilliantly incongruous as a fraud. How could you not? At the very least, OK, you're going to invite those people in for the lollies. Yeah. Out of sheer chutzpah, you know. And I always thought that was lovely. You know, yours till the cows come home, Davey Abbott. I always say it's the proof that the opposite of a good idea is another good idea. Perfect example. I saw this one was quite funny. You said, Rich Serbetin said, do you think higher tax rate payers should receive a free annual membership card after the pandemic, which entitles them to discounts like Eat Out, Help Out once a month on taxpayer Tuesdays to thank them for funding our public services? Well, it's a good idea. I'm not alone in this. So there's a guy called George Lakoff at Berkeley, who's very much on the American Left. And he always argues that the American Left lose the linguistic wars without noticing. And he argues that you shouldn't use the phrase tax relief because it positions tax as a basically gratuitous burden from which you can be delivered. And he says you should call them social membership dues or something like that, which is in other words, you're paying your fair share towards the maintenance of a decent and civilized society, which makes it possible to enjoy being rich in the first place. Makes sense. But I think the business of actually expressing some gratitude and also making it feel as though your taxes make a difference isn't totally wrongheaded. And actually, it's very interesting question, which is actually, there is an argument, by the way, which is one of the problems of reducing the tax burden conventionally on the rich is they tend to save more rather than spending. And so you really want quantitative easing to go to the poor rather than the rich because they'll spend the money and therefore revive the economy faster. And so there is something really interesting about actually saying that to some degree, if you can look at socially useful forms of expenditure like buying an electric car, it would be an interesting thing to do to say, look, poor people can't buy electric cars because they're mostly new and they're really expensive at the moment. But saying instead of saying there's a £3,000 subsidy on an electric car, you say if you buy an electric car, Mr. Rich guy, higher rate taxpayer will give you a £3,000 tax rebate. That's really interesting. Right. Because he now feels if he doesn't buy an electric car, he's missing out. So getting because there's an argument that rich people aren't totally useless, by the way, in that one of the things they do is they fund the early development of technologies. So televisions or dishwashers would be a perfect example. I know this because this is a really great brag. Okay. My grandparents owned the fourth dishwasher in Wales. He was a doctor and they bought the fourth dishwasher in Wales. Now it cost the price of a small car. And rich people can be quite valuable because they buy things like big flat screen tellies when they're five grand. And they eventually fund the early stage development of a technology until it becomes widespread and widely affordable. Okay. So that, you know, there is a weird debate about this, which is how much wealth inequality do you want? And what you certainly don't want is a world like Brazil where there are really rich people and there are really poor people. But actually having a very topical thing, having a few rich people kicking around your town means you actually end up with a wider choice of restaurants. Now you can't afford to eat in those restaurants as often as they do, but it still means that when you have a birthday or wedding anniversary, you've got 10 restaurants to choose from rather than two. You know, and similarly, you know, you want the poorest people in the population to be reasonably wealthy because then they'll fund the existence of things that you yourself can use. Okay. So I always thought watching Downton Abbey, I always thought if I'd be the markers of Downton, what I would have done is I would have given all the staff three days off. Okay. And I would have given them a 50% pay rise. And everybody said one earth would be the benefit of that because then they go into the local town and eventually a really good pub and an Indian restaurant would open, which would mean I wouldn't have to eat food cooked by the same bloody woman every night of my life. Right. What was the name that cook on Downton Abbey? But I was thinking, you know, you must have thought, God, it's day seven. I could really do with a chicken gel phrasing. You know what I mean? After having Mrs. Miggins or whatever it was for the last six days. And so you want to live in, you know, you don't want social division in wealth. I mean, you know, a degree of variation can be healthy, but a degree, you know, but a total degree of monotony of sort of bipolar wealth is really unhealthy. I don't think anybody looks at this nearly enough. It's an interesting one. It's actually, I'll get into another question. But one thing that brought to mind was have you been to Burley house near Stanford? It's lovely because there must have been so many rich stuff there because the entire town is pretty much was built by the estate and all the people who worked on it. And it's still lovely. And I think they, they, from what I know, they were very famous for sort of dividing their wealth. Stanford Lincoln, Stanford Lincoln show is interesting because it was an incredibly rich town because it was when people went on the Great North Road by carriage, horse drawn carriage. You were going to York or Edinburgh. It was where you stay the night. So it was like terminal five in the 18th century. And it's a magnificent 18th century town. Yeah, fantastic coaching in everything's glorious. Okay. And then they made this fatal mistake, which is the railways came and they said, we don't want the railways. We're too posh for the railways. We serve the carriage train. So they insisted that the railway station was placed sort of three miles away from the town. Okay. Which meant it was really inconvenient for all of them to use the railway. But also their fear of poor people coming into town happened anyway because the bloke started a business with a cart at Stanford railway station saying, pay me a penny. And I, and you can, I'll take you into Stanford and you can get pissed all night in the pub and start a fight. And then I'll take you back in time for the last train. So they actually, they actually shot themselves in the foot as a town. But there is now a station in Stanford. How does that happen? I don't know. I mean, well, I know because we're moving there. You're moving there. You'll find the station is a considerable distance from the town. It's right next to it. It's right next to the George. It's about five minutes. This must be some new metro rail thing. Okay. It goes to peace for a bit. The other question here was who where do you most look for inspiration or who or where do you most look? So I don't know whether this is people or a person or perhaps a magazine or a website. What's your go to? I think the ad industry has become far too naval gazing in that what I think it's lost is it's hinterland. And I've always noticed that the best people in advertising have quite a wide hinterland. In other words, as David Ogilby said, the perfect copywriter. This is before the internet existed. He said a perfect writer is an extensive browser in all kinds of fields. Yeah. And that was the thing he looked for. And I think the great thing is you can inspiration not from within your discipline, but from adjacencies. So, you know, the hinterland, the things that aren't advertising to Jerry Bulmore said the best books about advertising aren't about advertising. And so, you know, things like evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, reading widely. That's why I went to a conference on antepidemiology. Yeah. Because social social insects are quite interesting because they humans are social animals to a partial extent. I mean, they're what's called pro social, not you social. So they're not they're not like ants or termites or something. Yeah. But but then, you know, there are things you can learn from the other. The other tip I give is that marketing in general and human behavior and psychology and everything related to it like biology is a science of exceptions. And we spend all our time trying to look for universal laws. And we're using the wrong scientific tools. Biology learns everything from looking at oddities. It looks for peculiarities. The, you know, the counterintuitive, the unexpected. And then Darwin learned about evolution by looking at the weird things, not the things that, you know, everybody took for granted. And I think that's another thing we do. We're always trying to make advertising into physics and say it's all about purpose. Sometimes purpose isn't a totally irrelevant concept. It's not totally useless, but you shouldn't sit down and say, OK, I notice you're not selling as much of this product as you'd like. Therefore, what you need is a purpose. OK. The person may have a perfect good purpose. They may already have a very healthy motivation for doing what they do, but they've just failed to communicate it. You know. Yeah. I find that I find that a bit kind of weird. You know, why is it always going to be about one thing? You know, that, you know, I mean, it's a bit like if you look at another thing, which is a science of exceptions, of course, is detective fiction. Yeah. Or detective work in the real world. I'm a massive fan of sky crime. You know, I love watching true life crime or indeed fictional crime drama. And it's all about noticing the weird anomaly. It's not about general. And they don't say you start with it, you know, you start with a house to house inquiries. And then when you finish, you do DNA sampling. They do it all. And they cover a wide range of bases. And then when you make a bit of progress, you invest a bit more on where you're making progress. It's a it's what's called a stochastic or iterative process. It's not a it's not a process in terms of a manufacturing process. Makes sense. So did you watch the undoing? Yeah. Yeah. I was slightly disappointed in the ending, actually. Yeah. I watched it last night. Anyway, sorry. I'll move on. Rory Linen. Yeah. Very, very watchable though. Nonetheless. Yeah. I enjoyed the character. He broke the rules in that the bloke who was the obvious contender ended up doing it after all. And so I think that is, yeah, I thought that was a teeny weeny bit. You know, you know, Agatha Christie, of course, you know, reinvented the category in two ways. One of which was Roger Ackroyd, where the murderer was the narrator. Okay. So the actual narrator did it. That's what made her name, the murderer of Roger Ackroyd. And then the second one, of course, was Murder on the Orient Express, where the answer was they all did it. Okay. Yeah. But actually having that, you know, obviously there's great crime fiction where you know who knew who did it all along and you can play that game. But I thought that was a bit weird. Have you watched the movie Knives Out? No. Go on. Sounds like a useful tip. Yeah. If you like Murder Mystery, who'd done it? That'll keep you guessing till the end. Brilliant one to watch Knives Out. It's got Daniel Craig in it. Available on Amazon, I think it is. You can watch it. Anyway. Wow. Wowie. Okay. Yeah. Rory said, Rory Liner and said, how did you come to know Nassim Taleb? And it seems like there's some sort of cross-pollination between a lot of your ideas. Yeah. Well, I think it's mostly pollination in one direction. It's one of the most unlikely friendships. I'm the first to agree with that. I met at the spectator dinner when he came to talk about his book Anti-Fragile. And we just hit it off because we just started what was then an email exchange and occasional phone exchange. And generally one thing that's quite interesting is because I always describe marketing as the, you know, consumer marketing is the Galapagos Islands. I was able to find lots of real world instances of his examples, you know, things that, for example, happen in markets or happen that you wouldn't expect. I'm so sorry. I'm going to go and see who that is. No worries. I'm sorry. No worries. I've got another... What's the time now? I haven't actually got a clock. 2.49. I've got until three, I think. Okay. All right. Let me... I'll just go... Until three. Yeah. Absolutely. Okay. Brilliant. Here we've got... There was a very specific one here, actually, from Heidi Smith. I think you might have met her before. So how do I get lawyers to use technology they don't want to use because it will make them work more efficiently, which will then mean that they can bill less to clients, which will then mean that they don't meet their billable hours, which then means that they don't get their bonuses. Of course, this is a very interesting thing, which is that flexible working might help drive this because you're no longer being watched. And so there is, undoubtedly, in any... I'd love to take that offline and have a Zoom call about that because it's really interesting. So one of the interesting things I have discovered is a time-saving technology under lockdown. And of course, it's a technology you can't really use in an open plan office. It's voice dictation. So I've got this thing here. Now, ignore the hairy top. That's just a wind filter. It's what we would have called in the 90s a dictaphone. Okay. And I started dictating my spectator articles and I discovered very rapidly, you then upload the MP3 file, the resulting MP3 file, gets uploaded to, in my case, otter.ai, otter as in the weird, you know, slippery creature. And then it's an AI-based voice transcription service. Don't try and dictate and look at the words appearing on the screen live because it'll drive you nuts. Okay. Don't do that. Okay. I got in touch with Otter and told them this is a mistake. Live dictation is a mistake because the second you see a stupid word, like it translates something as abvark, which appears, it immediately throws in, you can't say anything else. Okay. So instead take a separate device, a mobile phone will do, dictate an MP3 file, upload it to otter, wait 10 minutes. It comes back with a transcript. Spend your time editing the transcript rather than typing because editing is a high value ad process, typing is a low value ad process. And what you discover very quickly is you can speak about 10 times faster than you can type. I'm a reasonably good typist. I'm far from being a touch typist. But nonetheless, what I discovered is if you speak for six or seven minutes, you've got about 700 words, which means in theory, by the way, who did this? Barbara Cartman, the most prolific author in the English language, I think she sat up in a sort of weird chiffon pink thing in bed surrounded by lace and dictated to a shorthand secretary, which is how she managed to produce so many books. Now you could produce a hardback book in a day if no one would have either the discipline or the degree of fluency. But I'm saying you could produce the number of words required for a hardback book in a single day. It's one of those things where, sorry about this. It's one of those really vital things where nobody at work experiments. I don't fully know why. We weren't experimenting with Zoom. I was because I mandated Zoom Fridays among my team before the pandemic happened. I said, this is stupid. There's some ideal ratio of, I'm just going to see if my wife's there. I don't fully know. Now one great thing about working from home is that if you have a lot of productivity, you get a leisure game. To be honest in the office, you don't. It's not like you can bunk home at four o'clock, is it? Right? So in a sense, in the office, there was no incentive to make yourself more productive. And that voice dictation thing isn't godsend, actually, because the other great thing is that you basically quite often you've got to write a thousand words and you get stuck on the first paragraph. And the great thing about this is once you've got 1200 words on the page, you don't get stuck. In other words, you don't have that tyranny of the blank sheet of paper where you stare at it and go, oh my God, how am I going to start this? You just get started, say anything, mumble, but basically if most of the words you need are already typed up by the algorithm, then you're 70% there in terms of effort. Makes sense. But I love to take that offline because it's a really interesting question, which is the law, the legal system has always been a bit luttered. In the way that government is, I mean, government is still having, you know, you still have a case where the president of the United States, okay, you know, the world's technological superpower, phones people up to congratulate them when they win an election. 20 for God's sake, you know, what are you going to do next? Send them a telegram. I mean, it's just absurd. And so I think there's something, you know, there is something we really need to discuss there, which is the internet to which government was unbelievably face to face. Another user said, I think this is their Instagram handle just said story pics. What do you think the future of email marketing looks like? It's a good one. I mean, I think there's a whole question. I think we'll spend the next three or four years partly improving things like this, but also undoing the damage in digital marketing, which has been caused by bad metrics. And I think, I think one of the problems with email marketing is with performance marketing with digital marketing is we've optimized it around the wrong things. And we've optimized it around, you know, effectively transactional metrics, not emotional metrics. And we need to be really careful about this. By the way, by the way, what I'm not going to say is I hate email marketing and I think it ought to go away. I think that actually there are a significant number of companies, quite major companies who do it far too little. So, you know, I, you know, don't get me wrong. It's not a huge inconvenience if I get an email from British Gas to actually click delete. You know, it's, there's no, not much wastage. I give British Gas a thousand pounds a year to heat my home. I don't regard that as, I don't regard it as absurd that they should seek to communicate to me. And some of it's useful. So no, I mean, I, I think that actually email marketing, there are a few cases where it's done far too frequently. But in most cases, I think a lot of companies could still be doing much more of it. We, it's really interesting when we started, I mean, I hate email spam so much. And so I kind of made a point of never sending too many emails from, from, from 42 courses. And it's really interesting. I would sort of send normally one or two a week now. And it's still by far our most effective marketing that we do. You know, technically it costs whatever 100 or 200 quid a month to, you know, subscribe to an email service and then a bit of time to write them. But it's, it really is remarkable. It takes a while to grow it and you have to be consistent and obviously try and not try and do things that are interesting, but I agree with you. The worst case scenario is someone hits on subscriber or deletes it in a way. There are absurd anomalies. I once was in Houston, Texas and went with the family to see a Houston Astros game at the baseball for those who don't know. And because I booked the tickets online, I think I ended up getting an email from the Astros every single day. Now, of course, if you live in Houston and you're an Astros fan, that's probably not entirely ridiculous. Okay? Because you would have that look. Now, you know, by British standards, I'm more interested in baseball than the average person. But my chance of attending a game is fairly slim for the foreseeable future. And once a day does seem to me, you know, would you, you know, and so giving people some choice over what they receive seems like good manners. But actually, for every company that does it too frequently, which we notice, there are a lot of companies which do it far too rarely. Yeah. Far, far too rarely. You know, and I think that I think someone needs to develop a formula, which is to do with frequency of purchase, you know, frequency of interaction and significance and what is really an acceptable volume. But I mean, you know, it depends on your degree of engagement. You know, I mean car companies do it far too little because people are kind of interested in cars. Okay. But there is a problem, by the way, with why the performance marketing, which I keep citing, which is that if you first of all, you transact and you transact in a high margin product category. I discovered this very bizarrely by accident, which is my daughters were always asked me to buy them replacement tights. And I said, well, let's just an experiment. Let's see if we buy expensive tights. Do they last longer? Because maybe it would make more sense to buy a 10-pound pair of tights or 15-pound pair of tights. And if they last five times as long, I'm happy with that arrangement, you see. And also, if you know they're expensive, you might actually take care of the bloody things. So I can't remember who I went to. It was like one of those online things, Walford or Fogel or something like that. And now I have no idea what the margins are like on those things, but they must be insane. Okay. The profit margins must be enormous. They were getting helmet Newton to shoot the catalogue historically. Yeah. So they were obviously making a fair stack of money. And so the margin must be astonishing. It's good. And for about a month, you never get an advertisement for anything else. And two things, it's high margin and transactional, which means that the ratio of performance advertising I get for high margin things I've bought online, okay, or I've browsed online, close to the point of transaction, relatively amount of advertising I see for Unilever, which is nil, okay, is completely out of whack. And there's something wrong here. So what's happening is that transactional advertising is crowding out display. Makes sense. I don't see any package goods advertising at all. Now I buy the package goods in my household. Anybody who could see my cookies would say I'm a fairly regular Ocado user. And yet, you know, I would be interested, I'm not saying I get a click immediately and order it for delivery or subscribe. But if there's some new flavor variant of a brand I buy, I'm kind of interested. It's not a waste of my time. And yet I see zero of that. Whereas if you go and search for something like funeral plans, which are a one-off high margin purchase, you will see that's for nothing else for weeks. And so it occurs to me that the entire advertising and email marketing ecosystem, over which by the way you have no control yourself, right? So I sympathize. But the whole ecosystem has become kind of ridiculous. I know that we've run out of time. So I don't want to keep you. But did the tights experiment work? Yes, probably. It was very, it was very borderline because they weren't, they weren't immortal, these things. Good. There was, and funnily enough, I learned it because there was a nurse on the radio who was using, you know, because someone was amazed to discover that a nurse bought, because you think as a nurse it's sort of disposable. And the nurse's experience was no, actually it pays, because you've got to wear them sometimes. I don't know what nurses' uniforms are like. And obviously in summers a nurse's uniform involves stockings. But I don't think that's probably what they have to wear as healthcare professionals. I think that may be a very inaccurate take. Rather like that wonderful piece in The Onion where it said that the pornographic film industry makes the job of plumbing seem far more exotic than it really is. But I don't know whether it's a requirement to wear them. It probably is because, you know, for all kinds of reasons. And it was a nurse on the radio and someone covered it and said, okay, well, maybe they know what they're talking about because they've obviously had a long experience of this. And anyway, I think it probably did work. I think the nurse was right, actually. So to finalise in summary, I think we all need to buy some sips-ness gin for a specialist. Watch some Scandinoire. Watch, look at some epidemiology ant conferences. I'll end, by the way, with a very, very funny story which Naseem doesn't even know yet, which is Naseem in his last book, Skin in the Game. It might have been in Antifragile. Now, I think it's Skin in the Game. It advances the theory of minority rule but if there's a small, stubborn and intransigent minority of people who won't do something, they have a disproportionate effect on collective behaviour. It's rather like the fact that, you know, if you have five kids in a school who are Muslim, the whole kitchen goes halal because non-Muslims don't mind eating halal food, whereas Muslims won't eat non-halal food. So the easiest thing to do is just make it halal for everybody, okay? And I told Naseem the point that one of the reasons pizza is very successful. Two things. One of the reasons you always get wine at parties is that 30% of women won't drink beer. So you can't have a mixed-gender party where you only serve beer, okay? Whereas it's assumed that everybody drinks red and white wine. So that becomes the party drink of default, okay? And anyway, we're talking about minority rule and how one person who hates something can mess up a collective decision. And Naseem doesn't know this, but it's given rise to KFC's Australia's build-your-own-bucket. So I'm going to say to Naseem, if ever you feel you're lacking influence in the world, then you can draw reassurance for the fact that indirectly you gave rise to KFC Australia conceiving the build-your-own-bucket because there are bone rejecters and there are kind of wing rejecters and hull rejecters. And so the build-your-own-bucket is a way to enjoy a collective dining experience without being killed by the power of veto. So there you go Naseem. If you're ever doubting your influence... That's wonderful. Look, I'll let you get back to it. Have a marvellous December. Thank you very much for everything you do and stay well and look forward to chatting again soon. Likewise, I'll speak to you before Christmas. I'm sure if I don't speak to you before Christmas, have a really, really wonderful time. Fantastic. All the best. Cheers. Bye-bye. Thanks everyone. Bye.