127 - The Psychology Behind Why We Fall In Love With Luxury Brands | Rory Sutherland

You could spend an awful lot of money trying to improve something that seems important, but which nobody deep down ever cares about. Meanwhile, there are vastly cheaper solutions, which could be game-changing. He's the author of Alchemy, the Dark Heart, and Curious Science of Creative Magic and Brands Business and Life. He's the only guy that I've ever heard swear in a TED talk. Who is this guy? Rory Sutherland. Hello, Hell yeah. One of the saddest things I always notice is businesses that are very, very good businesses, but they fail because they get one perceptual, element-wrote. Finance people fetishize cost-saving and automation. I would argue that frontline service jobs are actually crucial to the future of the economy, because most theories around messaging use what you might call the transmission model of how you get this information from originated to eyeball as inexpensively as possible. What they're not thinking about is what goes on behind the eyeball once that message is received. The show in today's world, the consumers are just overly sensitive. There's a problem we got here, which is that. Quick pause guys, I need to tell you something. It's that time of the year where everyone's on the winter arc hype where they're building their physique, which they plan to reveal at some point in the summer of 2026, but I hate to be the guy that says it. Most of you are going to end up getting fat. You'll be overeating. You'll be following some solver program which isn't actually going to be getting your results. You're going to be improvising on a spot no doubt. You won't be tracking there will be no structure. Just random exercises with minimal progress seen on a week to week basis. Pretty frustrating, right? Well, that's the whole reason why I built the first app. To help busy people like yourself find a system they can actually stick to over a long period of time. We have thousands of transformations from men and women who just plug into the app and get the exact plan they need for their goals. Show up to the gym and just put in the work all for less than an hour of their time. When you get access to over hundreds of programs and hundreds of different meal plans, everything which you could possibly need to get yourself in shape. So if you actually want to stick to something and see results without taking things to the absolute extremities, click the link in the bio. What's going on with the video? We're already welcome to the show. Absolutely joy to be here. Real pleasure. Yeah. I wanted to start off by talking about the world of branding. In particular, one that's quite fascinating for me is how personal branding has become a lot more of a thing compared to the past and how a lot of founders and CEOs are focusing on building their own personal brand. Is this because they're doing it as a vanity thing where they're trying to build their status or are they actually doing it because it helps the business that they found it or a running? I would argue that even when we're doing business with highly automated or online business, that there's still an element to us, which is judging businesses as if they were people. And I'd also argue that in encounters with businesses, the face to face or the human to human tends to trump in terms of your perception of that business. The immediate experience of human interaction tends to outweigh an importance in your mind, other factors. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that just by being really charming face to face, you can have an absolutely crap product, charge an insane amount of money for it. But one of the things I think that will happen is that in businesses as AI becomes more and more prevalent in terms of the interactions we have, those now rarer cases of personal service or personal interaction become actually more precious to us and more decisive in terms of how we think. And so, I mean, it's interesting in a way that a lot of businesses, particularly with family owned businesses, they have their name above the door. In some ways, if I feel that the person behind the business, whether it's a Dyson or a Branson, effectively has reputational skill in the game, I would argue that I can trust that business, I think, rather more than I can one, which is effectively hiding behind a whole third of screens. There's a sort of Potemkin village model of a business where the facade looks lovely, but everything behind it doesn't really exist. And so, I mean, one of the most interesting things that happened is that in the IPA effectiveness awards in 2024, four out of the five gold winners with family owned businesses. And I'm starting to notice that for a whole host of reasons, family owned businesses are better at building brands than PLCs are because they have the time frame, they arguably have the kind of, you know, I suppose they have one eye on posterity, but also they're focused on their customers rather than being focused on their shareholders. And you might argue there are a lot of businesses where the chief executive has a very strong personal brand, but they spend their time building it in the investor and shareholder community, not among the public or their customers or their consumers. Now, I mean, but this whole thing, which is a sort of disintermediation of people in a way, it's massively important in journalism because previously, if you think about it, the newspaper brand had the strengths that got the eyeballs. And then if you're an individual star columnist within it, you would get pretty large rewards, you know, for your effect, for your convening power, your pulling power. But it was already starting to become clear, I think, to rock star journalists that do you actually need the intervening newspaper brand if I can just be a columnist brand in my own right? And yeah, they do need each other, but the balance of power has shifted. Yeah. And so, but no, so I think I think that question, by the way, by the way, it's also worth noting that there's a change in expectation. And by the way, that also applies not just to the relationship say a chief executive would have with the customers, but also with the staff, which is 20, 30 years ago, you know, it wasn't possible effectively for your chief executive to make a 20-minute address to the staff and put it on broadcast TV. Now, in an age of YouTube, and also where not only can that content be either widely or narrowly cast, but also viewed at a time of the viewers' convenience, our expectation of openness has just changed. And consequently, I mean, it used to happen, the form it used to take 20, 30 years ago is you'd have these massive conventions, as where you get loads of staff into a football stadium, or something like that. And, you know, there'd be a kind of big company, Jamboree. Now, you can now do that digitally, and people kind of expect it in a way they didn't expect the the former version. Yeah. Is there any one in particular you think is doing a really good job of it at the moment? Yeah, I think, I think we tend to personify businesses. And I think also that when we judge a business, we tend to in a way what Daniel Kahneman used to call often what we do in our brains is we substitute an easy question for a difficult question. So we create a kind of proxy question. So if you're buying a house, for example, if you're buying a secondhand car, you probably don't know that much about cars. And so the question you ask instead is, do I trust the person selling it? Yes. And it's not a lot of people would say that's an irrational thing to do. It's not entirely because we've got, you know, half a million years of evolved experience in spotting untrustworthy or trustworthy people, whereas we don't have any innate evolved experience in evaluating cars, unless we've got an engineering degree or trained with the RAC or something like that. And so quite often the decisions we make about businesses are, you know, not in other words, the easy question is maybe not, you know, can I completely trust this, but other people likeable and will use likeability as a proxy? Yeah. And so it's something that yeah, if you can do it well, the story I was love about this, which always fascinates me. The wonderful guy called Alex Bachelot, who used to be the marketing director of Royal Mail, and at the time they'd spent an absolute fortune improving their operational efficiency and reliability and so forth, and noticed absolutely no change in consumer attitude. Despite a lot of money spent trying to actually instigate operational improvements. And Alex Bachelot said, I think I know where this is, and he said I have to test his theory. And it turned out that by far the biggest determinant of people's attitude to Royal Mail as a brand came down to one thing only, whether they like their post-e. And so, you know, even if to be honest, the service was a bit sporadic. Post never came on a Wednesday. If the post-e was the kind of person who went, I knew you're on holiday, so I'd pop it in the back porch. You basically thought that was the best service in the history of the world. And equally, you can have a really, really reliable next day by 8am service. But if you post, you was a grumpy bastard, you basically did it like Royal Mail. So that understanding of the extent to which, you know, preferences, particularly with service brands, I think, I think with a service brand, one of the things I repeatedly argue is there should be people in your call center paid six figures. Because the very, very best call center staff that they're typically experienced, they're also unusually talented, have an amazing opportunity to create a, what, there's one American agency calls it a brand quake. In other words, you may take someone who at the moment they ring is actually angry and you can turn them from an angry, likely defector in a single conversation into a brand evangelist or a brand advocate. Now, I need to do, we need more research on this. I mean, I believe it to be kind of anecdotally true. There's certainly a lot of evidence that weirdly a disgruntled customer handled well turns out to be more loyal than if the problem had never occurred in the first place. But understanding what the heuristics and what the kind of, the proxy questions consumers are asking when they decide whether or not to buy your product is really, really important. Because otherwise you could do what Royal Mail did. Meanwhile, there are vastly cheaper solutions. EG, you send your 5% of grumpiest posties off to Charvusky or something. Which could be game-changing. And one of the saddest things I always notice is businesses that are very, very good businesses. But they fail because they get one perceptual element wrong. - Didn't you say something about the Euro Star? How I think the engineers wanted to spend like $6 billion to-- - That was me. - Yeah, sorry. - Yeah, speed it up by 40 minutes. When you were saying they could literally just take a fraction of that money to improve this-- - Well, I came in London, a recession this morning on a network of train. They're horrible. I fucking hate them. The ones where you get three-abressed seats. I mean, you know the people who tag fuck on the outside. That's me, to be honest. I hate them so much. If you go into the toilet and your network are trained and basically there's just obscenity, scroll all over the wall, that's probably me as well. 'Cause I really, really hate them. And the reason I hate them is partly three-abressed seating is just horrible. If you're sitting in the middle, it's sort of perfectly weird. But they don't have any fucking tables. Now I had a whole article to write this morning. I had emails to do. I've got a bloody laptop in my bag that I carry with me. I spent 35 minutes on that train being completely useless, effectively. - Yeah. - Simply, now you can get a budget in a rail company to increase, you know, reduce journey time by 4.7 minutes. As a bloody treasurer, it'll give you a stack of money. Because that's time-saving. But for the sake of just a table, you know, and the odd cup holder, you turn a productive, enjoyable journey into a horrible, useless journey. So it actually didn't waste four minutes of my time. It wasted, you know, 25 minutes of my time. And so that utter failure to understand that the metrics that exist within businesses are often completely misaligned with what the customers of those businesses really care about. And I mean, an awful lot of this, by the way, is, you know, finance people fetishize cost saving and automation. Because it appears to bring cost cuts and they think this will either, you know, go straight on the bottom line or it can be reduced to, you know, it can be used to reduce price. Those people aren't held accountable for the consumers or customers who disappear because they wanted a personal service. And, you know, I would argue that frontline service jobs are actually crucial to the future of the economy because as more and more of the boring stuff gets automated, it's precisely providing that human interface, you know, whether it's problem solving, sometimes it's just simply being seriously charming. Yeah. Which actually is what people are paying for. I mean, if you think about it, okay, a far less market is the stupidest economic conception of the world because you bind direct from the producer but you pay a premium for it. And I suspect there are two reasons for it. One of them is delusional, which is, because you're making six purchases of nine quid. You're not conscious of spending that much money whereas if you go to Tesco and spend $5,000, $54 quid or whatever it is. No, yeah, $54 quid, ooh, that was a bit expensive. Yeah. Part of it, I think, is just delusion. But part of it is we like the theatre and the attention and the interaction because we've evolved for half a million years craving those things. And probably they're grotesquely lacking from our lives in many cases. Yeah. Just that nice little exchange. There's a wonderful Chinese problem. If you find it difficult to smile, do not open a shop. (laughing) And understanding where you really create value. In other words, what it is that people value about you. And so Dyson and Branson are probably the two best examples of this. They're also brands which are obviously not personified by the CEO themselves, but they have a kind of spokesperson. Yeah. I mean, the genius of how and for the Halifax, for example. Mm-hmm. It's the person as an embodiment of the brand. They could never really find anybody who could replace him in a weird kind of way. Yeah. And understanding that in a way, we instinctively will choose to judge the personal because it's a lot easier and we're better at it than judging the technical. Mm-hmm. And it's a brilliant short-cut question. We've got limited time. We've got limited cognitive resources. And we don't have, we can't spend our time every time we buy a coffee machine researching the engineering of each individual machine. So what we effectively do is we go, you know, this person, this sales person, seems basically pretty likable and straight. I think they would suffer some degree of shame from making a dodgy recommendation to me. And therefore, I'm happy to go with what they recommend. And there are certain categories, I think, which are very high trust because we don't know much about the category itself. I'll give you an example. If you went to say richer sounds or you go to a specialty photography shop, the, what you might call the professional expertise of those people is a kind of badge of honor for them. It's part of their identity. Yeah, they're proud. And so someone, I always remember, I don't know how I'd get a camera shot. Some sort of relatives of mine, to be honest, were fairly minted, but in their 70s, went in and were going to buy a kind of 900 pound camera. And the guy who made me ask them a little questions realized that there was no way they were going to make use of even 4% of the capabilities of this camera and downsold them. Now, why on earth would you do this? Commission would suffer, but his effective, some part of his pride and identity is vested in his, you know, in this case, it was his, I should probably jump shops to quite often is, his ability to give the right advice and not to actually misdirect someone. You could also argue that in terms of lifetime value, he may be making a very good decision. Because, you know, there's one thing to make an immediate, you know, maxed out sale. There's another thing to create enough customer satisfaction that they come back to you for your next camera. Yeah, I tell you he was done a very good job. But this is, at least for me anyway, they've completely got me, it's Emirates. 'Cause I know. What was the Jennifer Aniston thing? No, not necessarily the, the Advert Some Cells, but the experience I have every time I fly with them. Yeah. Like it's so good that sometimes, I mean, this is when I've, I mean, fortunately, I've traveled a few times first class. If the flight is less than seven hours, I'm actually annoyed because I want the flight to be longer so I can experience the whole thing where I can eat all the food. Particularly if it's an overnight, you can sleep, you can sleep. The six hours. Then you can have the shower. Yeah. It's like it's a full on amazing experience. Motorhoping. You know, actually, you know, you know, you could have prefabricated housing, which you could basically, Elon's doing this, of course, 'cause he's also got a tiny home business. He's got a solar business. He's got a Starlink business. He's got a battery business. You know, my secret theory about Elon is that in a kind of James Bond villain way, his plan is to tank the housing market by making it possible for a factory just to produce perfectly attractive homes where you could temporarily plong anywhere. Mm-hmm. I think that'd be quite popular. No, no, it should be right. Yeah, I think there's a, you know, I mean, the fact that we still build homes as if it's 1640, you know, from the foundations up, rather than prefabricating them off-site, is like one of the weirdest technological failings. When you think about it, I mean, shipbuilding is modular. Everything else you build in a modular fashion. Mm-hmm. I won't name the venue, but I thought it was really, this was yesterday, one of my favorite cafes. And I chat endlessly to the person who runs a cafe 'cause you learn so much from hospitality about marketing. And her absolute thing is she refuses to serve soup. So it has wonderful kind of brunch food, you know, eggs, benedicts, and good-natured, you know, wonderful stuff. And as you said, why would you serve soup? It attracts pensioners. I mean, yeah. I see what the problem is is that, you know, that they, she said, you know, because then if you get pensions, they stay a long, long time. They don't spend very much money on anything else. They can't go upstairs 'cause they can't manage the stairs. If you put them by the door, they complain that there's a draft. You see, and she said, "I can make twice as much money from the same table "with effectively two sittings of people in their 40." I've seen some hardcore coffee roasters that advertise the fact that they do not serve much. They're like, "Stay away, much of people." This is fantastic, yeah. Yeah, so in other words, it's, you know, in other words, it's, it's, it, it, 'cause I, this is my idea behind Bacon Sandwich, where you wouldn't provide ketchup. You could have brown sauce or nothing. And you'd only serve two drinks, which is Builders Tea or Champagne. And the argument was that sometimes it's, so, actually the person who writes about this brilliantly as Alex Hormozzi, which is speciality enables premiumization to an extent. Partly, it's just he heuristic, you know, if you only serve four things, people absolutely know those four things are gonna be pretty good because otherwise, you wouldn't still be in business. It's like an old burger. It's also proof of sincerity, you see. It's, we're not just a profit maximizing exercise, we believe in what we do. So it's almost like, you know, I'm not, I'm not the world's biggest fan of the Simon Sinek School of, you know, every brand has to have this high-minded purpose. But nonetheless, as a costly signal of, we're committed to being good at this one thing. And we're not gonna broke any distractions, even if in the short term, they may be profitable. Yeah. Yeah, that is, it's kind of like quite a good sign, I think. Yeah. The whole thing fascinates me because it's such a, what I really love is things, I was talking to Greg who runs Octopus Energy. And my theory is, if you could get them to talk together and respect each other, if you got 10 absolutely shit-hot hardcore systems engineers in a room with 10 shit-hot marketers, and you've got enough drink flowing so they can actually establish a rapport, half the world's problems could be solved quite quickly. Yeah. And because an awful lot of problems, I think, are really weird combination of engineering and psychology. And most people, the value of marketing is not what we do, it's how we think. I keep reiterating this because the mistake that marketers have made is they didn't, we did this hand campaign and then we did this and then did, you know, and look, you know, we spent this and we got that. You're using the language of finance to justify your own existence. But the real value of marketing is, it's a bit wanky, it's philosophical. It gives the business an entirely new outlook on the world, which then presents totally new and innovative ways of solving problems. Yeah. Speaking of psychological factors, I've read a few things and seen that there has been a decline in demand for the luxury goods market. What's going on there? There's a theory out there. We ordered a distinguish here and the best people do make this distinction. There's the luxury goods market, you know, probably best exemplified by Hermes or some of these very, very high end often Italian. Well, Hermes seems to be the one that's actually doing okay with the rest of the suffering. Yeah, well, there's also the luxury brands market, which is slightly different. Well, it's very different in that it's more about signalling than it is about the intrinsic, it's all about signalling. But there's discrete signalling with real luxury where only a select target audience will know, you know, what's going on. Yeah, yeah. Best exemplified perhaps by whoever did the costume design for succession. You know, obviously spend a load of time studying kind of the super wrench. It's all sort of maximar a cashmere and it's very understated, you know, other people can tell. Yeah, like Laura Piawna still. Yeah, you've got it exactly. Yeah, not many people do it. And then there's kind of brash luxury. Now there is an argument that one, the luxury brands market as opposed to the luxury goods market, sort of jump the shark a bit. And that they got greedy. There's one theory which says, they always had a policy that you ramped your prices up by sort of 6, 7% a year. I can remember when I first moved to London and bear in mind I was fairly skinned. You could go to Harvey Neckles and buy some clothing at a kind of fairly saying price. Mm-hmm. And you have to be sure you can still, if you rootle around. But all that stuff has got more expensive than I've got richer over the course of my life. We're done with it. And one of the theories is that that works perfectly well at 6% a year stuff until you have four or five percent inflation. Because if you add the two together, people notice. Yes. So you know, 10% inflation compounded. People are going into a shop to buy their next pair of judges shoes and going, what the actual file? So there's a theory that it was a strategy that worked very, very well. The strategy of prememization worked very, very well but it depended on very low inflation. If you wanted to put your prices up by 5, 6, 7% above inflation every year, it helped to have really low inflation. Because people then didn't notice that much. There's also, of course, an interesting thing, which is that the cars in London used to be a major status play in the '80s and '90s. What car you drove was something you talked about, and showed off. Status currencies move. So they might-- I would argue that higher education has become a status currency to a large extent. And then experiences have become-- this is one of my favorite experiments, which was you take an audience of 200, 300 middle class Londoners and you ask them, OK, how many people here have been to Machu Pichu? And undoubtedly, a small little-- that'll be 10, 15 hands count. Then you say, how many of you mean to Lincoln Cathedral? And two people put out their hands and they go, but I was born in Lincoln. I went to university in Lincoln. I don't know a scene. I only remember one person who's made the trip to Lincoln from London to look at Lincoln to the other. Did you get the other-- first of all, you don't get oxygen deprivation. It doesn't require a long-haul flight to Peru. It doesn't require a grueling trip up some bloody mountain. And not dissing the Proviens here, but I mean, architectural Lincoln Cathedral shits on Machu Pichu. Fascinating fact for a Dubai person, by the way, in when they built the Burj-- what would they watch out for? Burj Khalifa. It's called Khalifa, is it? Yeah. It was the Burj Dubai, but then-- That's right. Yeah. The neighbors forced them to really-- No, I would have me bail them out. Bail them out. That was the lovely-- did you ever see Andrew Schultz doing his life-- I've seen a few of his clips. So he's there, David. Is it anyone here from Dubai? How does it feel to be among real money? [LAUGHTER] Anyway, sorry. That guy's a genius, by the way. Absolutely fantastic comedian. But when the Burj was built, when it reached a certain height, when it overtook Patronus towers or whatever else it was. The first time in world history that the tallest building in the world had been in the Middle East since 1311, when the Spire of Lincoln Cathedral overtook the great pyramid in Giza. So this building in 1311 was the tallest building in the world and held that record until the Spire fell down in a lightning strike or something, about 200 years later. It's still-- you walk up the hill. This is sort of all that friendship. This is transcendent stuff. Lincoln Cathedral was just-- and there's a castle right next to it. And Durham was pretty good. But Lincoln Cathedral is next level. And so you get this status thing, which is-- my brother realized it when he was sitting in a hotel room in Singapore, and they had a competition. And the second prize was a fortnight in Bali. And the first prize was a wish in London. [LAUGHS] [LAUGHS] And everybody in London wants to get a Bali. And everybody in Singapore wants to get a London. And you realize it's actually scarce. And he's signaling to some extent, hasn't it, that we go on these long haul holidays, not because they're intrinsically better. I'm 60. Do you want one of the fucking tickets? And dick around with the worst faculty of the-- January, February, March, pissed off to the Canary Islands or Madera. Short haul flight, lovely weather, nice people, nice food. Doesn't have any signaling value. Can't go, oh, we went to Lancerotti. Everybody moves away. But I mean, you can spend $3,000 on a much worse holiday. And so you're absolutely right. That experience is travel being well-traveled. And we did man campaign for Expedia about exactly that, which is travel yourself interesting. That effectively gives you bragging rights. And of course, as travel becomes less and less expensive, the journeys have to become more and more torturous for them to acquire any status gains. Yeah. But that's still really that tip. Just piss off to the canary. If you're British, piss off the canary. It's fun, it's lovely. It's fantastic. Right. Also in its island, there are beaches, Harika, you know, in a tutel-around the place, a bit of an extra lore. It was a good holiday, there's nothing. Well, one of the coolest things I did of recent times, which I don't think I know anybody that has done it was what I went to Japan on order to Tokyo. So a handful of times per year they do the main event for sumo wrestling. And you can't just buy your way in because they give out the tickets like a lottery to people that apply to them. And I think there is some reselling in the grey market where you can pay a premium to get access to this. So I fortunately had a contact who was able to get the tickets, which I paid for, but it wasn't an extortion. But then I was there watching this elite sumo wrestling tournament. And it was one of the coolest things I've ever done. So it isn't, it affected it. This is the interesting thing because of course there are a lot of very rich people and they're globally mobile. So the extent to which expensive things confer status, when a lot of the people who are very rich are actually completely random and often not very cool. This is the problem perhaps for the luxury brands industry. That in other words, you know, in other words, you're in danger of being associated with vulgarity rather than taste. And there is the risk, I think, that some of those brands jump the shark and what you'll see now interestingly blend. Did you come across this bag brand? They've got a shopping region street. And it's basically very, very high end sort of 15,000 pound quality handbaggery. And they're selling for like 500 quid. Now interestingly, LVMH went and snapped them up recently. And I think it's because they perceived it basically as a threat or an opportunity. But you're starting to see these crossmanship led brands, which are less over now. Even the replica is so good now. No, no, no, I know. This is the problem. You see, and then these things become ubiquitous and then you get the wrong user imagery and all those problems start to hurt. And did they just get a bit too greedy, I think, probably yes. You know, I mean, the other thing is you always fall victim to this, you know, this sort of artisan undercurrent, you know, what you might call the farmer's market competition. And there are some, I also think of the interesting thing with Hermes is they've gone to enormous lengths to prevent themselves being taken over. Because I think, you know, because how they're not. It's something to do with corporate governance, the structure, where more or less everything has to be approved by a family member, even if they're a minority shareholder, so that it means that someone who did take them over would really be able to gain a control of interest. It's some sort of not quite a poison pill defense, but I mean, for the most part, they're, yeah, I'm sure they have, you know, they're high end sort of, it's a jewelry where the margins pretty high, but I mean, they're still a absolute, you know, craftman pavilion of the stuff. I don't know if you were watching those people on YouTube who basically take a box cutter as a Stanley knife, as we call it, to, you know, to expensive, not not the Hermes stuff, but, but, you know, 20,000 pound bags, and they basically just cut through it and yet, to be honest, in terms of build quality and leather, there's nothing special here. You know, and this is, you know, you can make this thing for 250 quid. And undoubtedly, they possibly, you know, I think what you will see is you will start to see these more discrete rams. Now, psychologically, there's an element to me, I had a lovely discussion about this with someone at work, which is rams like Versace, which is just, I'm minting that I don't care who knows it. I've argued that the people who wear that are probably the happiest people wearing Versace, or just the reason being that if you look at the people on this, this is gets a bit sort of soft. But the people who have to wear that discrete, you know, I'm just signalling to my fellow billionaires that I'm wearing a vacuna, you know, cardigan, or whatever it may be. Nobody else on the street will know, as far as they're concerned, when I'm sitting in Starbucks, I'm just some random punter, but this tiny group of people who know and are discerning will spot that is, you know, you know, so and so purple label vacuna, what not, right? What problem with that? You're still worrying about what other people think. And I often argue that I always suspect that new, very rich people are probably very happy, because they have all the enjoyment of their wealth without the anxiety of giving any thoughts to how they might be judged. So there's an element there, which is yes, you're a billionaire, you're buying your vacuna cardigan, but deep down, you're still deeply anxious about how you may be perceived. Whereas the person who just goes and buys some bling ass, you know, you know, some item of clothing with machino in it in eight feet high. There's a certain wealth, isn't that, to not caring about the opinions of your fellow man. You know, that almost is equivalent. It's like moving to a low tax regime. Well, you do. I mean, you can move to a low tax regime. You can move to a low rent regime, or you can just acquire a certain independence of thought, where you spend your money entertaining yourself rather than trying to impress others. Yeah. Well, it's one thing I've noticed about being advised you there's always going to be somebody there that has to do. There's no, do you almost, you can't compete. There's just people can you count a sign in Dubai, like go around in a two CV and just pretend not to care about all that stuff. I think there's more people doing that now. You think more people are doing that now? Yeah, just because I remember when I first moved there, there was this period where, you know, I got the watch, you get the car, like you start to buy, you know, some clothes, and then you just like, I just don't care anymore. And then because you can't win. Yeah, for me now, it's like my physique does the talking. You know, I just, it's very minimal. Sometimes I don't even wear a watch anymore. It's just very plain, very simple. Very interesting. I mean, some, I mean, there's the other thing you probably have is that you get a very different patterns of expenditure on luxury goods among men, particularly if you have a culture where everybody's new from somewhere else. Two combinations. There's a wonderful paper about this, which is Why Neiman Marcus launched it effectively was creating Dallas, not in Boston. So there's new money. There's new arrivals who can reinvent themselves and you tend to find there's also a surplus of men because the oil industry would create basically a gender imbalance. And so you tend to get quite a lot of matchau luxury goods behavior when you get those three qualities because in a place like Boston, which is historically old money, everybody knows who you are, where you went to school, all that weird Bostonian snobbish stuff. And so if you turn up there in a massive pair of machino sunglasses, if I wander around in Monmouth where I grew up, you know, town of about 12,000 people recovering from terrible floods, by the way, if anybody's feeling charitable. If I wander around there and kind of machino, I think, yeah, I'm sad. Austin is a bit like that as well. I think, well, is that old money on you? No, I just don't think. It has huge, huge influxes of people. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people who have moved there with a lot of money. Yeah. But there is not a show off culture there, not like in comparison, you know, Miami, which is like, no, no, no, no, I find that quite refreshing in a way just because it's so vacantly honest, you can't dislike it in a way. But also you have that nerd culture, don't you, which is kind of, you know, it's all about, you know, effectively what you've done, not what you are. You're saying, yeah, what you've built, what you've built. Yeah. Yeah. And that's actually quite, also possibly you're overlaying that on Texan culture, which can be, you know, a bit different as a way as well. But I find that fascinating, the fact that in different places, obviously you get luxury goods in cities, because people arrive there from somewhere else, no one knows who they are. They're then anxious about how they present themselves. Yeah. Yeah. If you're some elderly aristocrat in, you know, in a small town in the UK, you can go around dressed like a tramp. That's how old money Americans often behave. You know, you can just go around, you know, basically doing what they're healthy like. And so it's fascinating to see the effect, because it is very similar to singling in nature, like the peacocks tail or, you know, the elk's antlers. It's a similar thing. It's a costly signal. You know, and because part of the problem was if you get into this business where the luxury brands start selling, you can't blame them. You attach your brand to, you know, things like lipsticks, which although very expensive are affordable by a very large way of the population, and you maximize the success of that by making the branding very overt on those products. So it becomes very, very visible. Then there is a danger that your cache over time just becomes diluted. I mean, it's so, you know, obviously, you know, it's been like catwalk fashion. The market for catwalk fashion is minuscule. But you do the catwalk fashion for the halo effect it has on your ready-to-wear sales and on your lipstick sales and your perfume sales and everything else. Obviously, I mean, it's all champagne, to be exact. Also, there's the question of gift giving. People want to give gifts where it's obvious that they've spent some money. And so a lot of those things are vebblin goods. In other words, the expensive nature of them is what confers value on them. And so, but you're absolutely right. There is a danger that what will happen is people will see that because the internet has made all that stuff really, really readily available at any time and at any place to any body. Some of the sort of artificial scarcity of that stuff was geographical. You know, if you hadn't been to Milan or London or wherever, you wouldn't have a Prada bag. Yeah. Well, now you can go on eBay by a Prada bag. And so people will then look for scarcity elsewhere. In other words, and it will be an act of curation or discovery rather than just an act of expenditure. And that, you know, so the psychology is always changing. And that's the interesting thing. Fundamentally human status competition isn't going to go away, which is important, by the way, because attempts to make it go away always fail. However, the currencies and mechanisms people use to signal their status over time are quite malleable. And, you know, they can be prosocial, philanthropy is a status signaling, to the degree. They can be highly prosocial or they can be highly anti-social. In other words, you know, where one person's lot again is another person's lot. And an awful lot of early stage technology is funded actually because it's what becomes utility starts as a luxury good. I mean, electricity in the home. You know, it was probably as much done for reasons of status in the early days as it was for reasons of utility. My grandparents were the fourth family in Wales to own a dishwasher. It's hugely expensive. In their case, they probably did buy it for practical reasons. They weren't very blingy. But dishwashers were probably bought, you know, a lot of early technology was bought to show off. And then, of course, the show off, so providing the early stage funding for the product to become producable at scale and then affordable by many. So, you know, cars were, they must be in a pair where to be honest cars weren't objectively as good as a horse and cart in many respects. But people bought them to show off. And I'm surprised people still do that with the iPhone. Like when they when they manage to get an iPhone before everybody else, they're like, "Well, I've got a theory about that, which is, I don't really understand from a utility point of view why so much effort goes into the camera." And then I realized that if you don't innovate with the camera, there's no visible difference between an iPhone 17 and an iPhone 16 and iPhone 15. So you have to create this narrative around dicking around with the photographic capabilities of the phone to providing excuse to make the phone visibly different on the exterior from its predecessor. So people then can enjoy the signaling value of buying the latest iPhone. Yeah. Because I've always found that a bit weird that actually I suddenly realized, no, no, no, what it is is the camera's own, the only external cue that makes it, unless you're a totally tragic nerd going on, I noticed the, you know, the bezel, the swipe is two millimeters thinner, whatever, you know, but what's that thing called where the camera, the selfie camera goes? And it's a game for it, isn't it? Something slotted, whatever it is. And I suddenly realized that a lot of this camera stuff is probably driven by the fact that God, we have to find a way of making this thing, you know, visibly different. Yeah. Because everything has effectively settled on. We'll get back to the podcast in a second, but first of all, I want to say a massive shout out to Bionic. I have been using their supplements for the past four years. I never knew what supplements I needed to say. I would always go into the pharmacy and buy a load of random bottles and end up popping pills all day every day, not having a clue if I was consuming the vitamins, which I should be consuming at all. But Bionic came to save the day. They are a tailor made supplement company that will put together your own specific formula based on your activity, your gender. I have Bionic Pro where I get the blood test done every three to four months and based on that blood test, I get my own personalized formula. For those people who don't want to do a blood test, I don't have access to that. Then you can go with Bionic Go where you just have to fill in a short questionnaire and based on that questionnaire, you will get your tailored supplements with a surprisingly high degree of accuracy. So stop the guesswork, silence Bionic, and ensure that you remove those deficiencies and build up your immune system. Do you know the most tragedy in the world if I'm being absolutely honest? I'm an Android user. I think in a two, three, four, I personally I think we'll end up with voice or some other interface, we'll replace the smartphone. Probably, though I hate to say, sucks got it right with the spectacles, that there's something really valuable there in terms of a new interface. And sucks being clever as well because a lot of those things don't even have a display. It's basically just voice, camera, headphones. And he's done the old Walkman trick where you deliberately limit the functionality of a new innovation to make it more how I describe it. Make it easier for people to actually understand its affordances, its use case. But do you want me to be able to say, I think the Canadians at Rem were right and the jobs were wrong. I think the loss of the physical keyboard in the affordable phone has actually been a productivity disaster. I think it's unbelievably cute. I think we find it spectacular. I had a blackberry back in the day. I still love the blackberry. You could type twice as fast on blackberry. Even with the genius that Apple did in terms of predictive texting around making the key larger, making the anticipated next keystroke larger on the screen, less anticipated. It's why typing proper names off foreign words is such a fucking living disaster on an iPhone because it's making wrong predictions about what the next letter's going to be. So if you're a creationally, one of those names that starts HR and you're typing on an English language iPhone keyboard, my guess is it's going to be an absolute. I'd say five times. Unless you have fingers like some little talons, a chicken would probably be managed to do it. But it's total stuff. To be honest, I think that was literally a case of display and novelty, that triumphs in over utility. I think there's poor Canadian guys, I think they got it right. I think there should be a physical keyboard. I think that literally we have a population of a billion people wasting ten minutes a day typing ineffectually or failing to write things at length because of the near failure that came around the iPhone. Well, I'll be surprised if it comes around in full circle. Like, even now they're bringing back the flip phones. Well, I mean, I've got one. I've got a folding Samsung. That's an interesting marketing conundrum. Part of the reason I've got this glorious thing, this pocket, which is absolutely wonderful by the way. I love it like a child. But obviously you have to set it for all kinds of reasons of being cool. Sixty years old, am I eyesight shit? Obviously you can't market a phone, a folding phone. Hey, gramps, why don't you get one of these phones? You can actually see what you're fucking doing for a change rather than, you know, because small smartphones, like that old joke about, you know, I can't tell this joke. Can I anymore? The gynecologist who painted his front hall through the letterbox, you know, it's like trying to do an expansive, can I tell that joke? Yeah, no. I think it's all right. You know, it's that old joke. Okay, well, we'll part that one. But it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's actually trying to operate on a ridiculous constraint. Didn't young people a fucking weird actually because when I was a kid, the whole thing in life was how big your tele was. Okay, and yeah, a bigger tele was better than a smaller tele. We all wanted a bigger tele. And that goes back to the 1950s. We know this because, um, okay. Kenneth Williams didn't get his muddy sense of humor, you know, entirely at birth inherited it from his mom. There's a lovely story in the history of the carry on films where Kenneth Williams' mom is basically waiting sort of backstage for the load of friends, um, waiting for her son to come out from, you know, some filming and someone said, well, my friend next door, they've just bought a 40-inch console. And Mrs. Williams said, 40 inches. That'd be enough to console anyone. So, so a 14 inch TV was really cool. and it does really, really exciting, back in the carry on era, and then they got bigger and bigger and bigger. And then we got Marvelous Factory, and by the best things you can buy, if you've got 300 quits, just come by and monitor. They're cheapest thing, and your productivity will go up massively. You can have four windows open at the same time, you can fucking see what you're doing, okay? It's brilliant, big screens, fantastic. And then my kids are sitting there watching a film, he's Hollywood people, watching Netflix. From your fucking deakin, the greatest fucking, you know, cinematographer in the history of the world, he's Roger Deakin's, right? He's there being agonizing over every angle, every detail of lighting, everything, and these traps of watching it on a fucking Latin box, right? I mean, I think in a little ten years, my kids are going to be like, "Oh, have you seen the new version of Avatar? I'm going to watch them on fucking postage stamps." I mean, what the fuck, seriously? Because, to me, as I grew up in an age where you went, "Oh, God, that's that tele." I remember the age of the big, sunny tele, not that screen, yeah. - Yeah, the one that went all the way back. - That was a thing with, was it in way to turn? - A way to, can move it. - Yeah, and you went to someone's house, they had one of those, you go, "Oh, that was really living." (laughs) And then my kids are watching the stuff, and they're just peering at a screen. This is bullshit. - Yeah, it's like, what was I watched recently, when June 2 came out of the cinema? - Oh, right. - I'm masterpiece. Like, that should not be watched. - That should be where I'm at now. - Anywhere else apart from big screens, with proper audio. - By the way, I've also noticed this phenomenon because occasionally I watch a really great film on a plane, and I think it's shit. And I've also watched shit films on planes and thought they were great. And, you know, I think that whole screen thing is tragic actually, in terms of people's enjoyment of film. But no, the great thing about that folding phone is I can actually see what I'm doing. I can type properly, it's a proper keyboard. So, oldies, Samsung won't tell you this, but actually the Galaxy Fold is your salvation, right? Again, it's one of those things, you can't market it that way, you see. - I want to move onto the state of social media and the attention economy. How can brands and companies get the attention of people these days when they've been. - This comes back to the original question, which is one of my happiest facts is that Ogleville is pretty much, I think, one of the largest influencer marketing. Nobody knows this, 'cause they think of us on that agency. It's actually one of the largest influencer marketing agencies in the world, possibly the largest. I see that as incredibly important. So, we're getting back to that business of the personal brand, the personal recommendation. Someone who has reputational skin in the game saying, James Hoffman's saying, "I think you should buy this coffee." Now, you could, I don't know, I mean, he may be completely unbridled, but I have no idea. Now, you could just about pay James Hoffman a stack of money to say that the second best coffee was really good. There's no way that guy's gonna recommend any coffee that's shit. But that's because he has credibility at stake and reputational skin in the game. The problem with a lot of digital advertising is we move from mainstream, costly advertising and conventional media, display advertising where it was consumed by a large audience simultaneously, which had a lot of credibility because you were making a promise in a public space. To a one-to-one high-pertagated world where you were picking off customers one at a time. It was almost like a sort of sniper approach. And by the way, one thing that makes something trustworthy and believable is the fact that you deliver the promise or the claim in a public space where you can be held to a can. In the same way that we make our winning vows in a church in front of 200 people who know us quite well, rather than going to door to door. And so one of the things we thought, what we did when digital media came along is, this is amazing because you can really target it. It can be really efficient. And we forgot to ask the corresponding question, yes, that's what digital media can do. The conventional media couldn't, I grant that. You couldn't have a copy of the Daily Telegraph where every person got a different ad. Some people, you know, all the online you can, but a physical copy. And so we said, oh, isn't this brilliant? So we got obsessed with the efficiency gains. What we didn't ask was the corresponding question of what was it that old media did that new media doesn't do very well. And I would argue that conviction, trust, you know, also prompting social conversation, for example, being part of culture. You know, I don't think digital media is actually very good at those things compared to conventional mass media. Now what's interesting about influencer marketing is it's a form of using digital media in a way that isn't entirely sort of soulless and automated. It is a person telling a story about a thing with a reason to believe. But it's done really well. And the, now, some consumers aren't totally deaf. They recognize that sometimes people are paid to say those things. And they're not necessarily plugging something out of the kinds of their own hearts. But nevertheless, it's much, much closer to intelligent salesmanship. If you take that old, wonderful 1920s, I think it was Alph Lasker, the copyright Alfred Lasker, Lord and Thomas, who defined advertising as salesmanship in print. But it's actually in terms of convincing people in terms of storytelling, in terms of salesmanship, nearly all digital advertising was unbelievably transactional. It didn't have any, it had transactional value. But it didn't really have much, it didn't have that much brand building capability, I don't think. Or at least what brand building capability it had was much slower and less potent than other forms of media. And that's simply because consumers aren't, they aren't merely passive recipients of data they process information and they attach differing value to it, depending on the medium and the means through which it arrives. Do you feel like in today's world, the consumers are just overly sensitive to potential advertising that might be pushing the boundaries in terms of humor. That's a very good second. Yeah, there's a problem we got here, which does worry me, which is that. It's like everybody's offended by all the things that I had to tell the story the other day on a podcast, which is shortly after Robert Maxwell had drowned, the owner of the Daily Mirror, and being revealed to have basically defrauded the Daily Mirror's pension holders of much of their pension. The sun, he'd fallen off his yacht, or probably, he'd jumped, whatever it may be. And the sun ran an ad on the London Underground, which Simplie said, they were in a price war with the Daily Mirror. The mirror, the sun was still at 10 p. The super-souraway ton, sun, was 10 p. The mirror couldn't cope with the price war, put its prices back up. And the sun ad on the London Underground said, the Daily Mirror now costs 30 p. Don't go overboard to buy it. Right, now, when I explained to people in 2025 that that ad ran, and we thought it was funny, and nobody thought of complaining, or saying it was insensitive, or imagine what Gillain must feel, or any of that stuff gets. None of that stuff emerged. London Underground didn't have a problem running that ad. My brother who'd come back from the United States was sitting on the Piccadilly Line Store that ad, and trying to self-crying with laughter, 'cause he'd been living in the US for two years and miss the irreverent humor. I could go and show you 20 or 30 ads, which we thought were funny in 1985, which would practically get your arrest. (laughing) The goal is-- - Well, I'll give you one, a brand of moccasins, which said, "We stole their land, their cattle, and their women, "and then we went back for their shoes." - Right, that ran, and then I didn't. - It was not only that, it is an awards annual. (laughing) - Now, have you seen the ones of Ricky DeVase has been putting on his Instagram for his vodka? - Well, I don't know, he's called Dutch Barn. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think what he's done is he's put up these AI images of the ads he would like to run, but would never get approved. So if you have one that said, "Welcome to London, "don't forget your stab vest," and it's just him just there holding his glass. Please use your headphones when using your phone or iPad, you thick, noisy cut. Another one, you're taking the tube to a job you hate. Have a drink. - Perfect, obviously brilliant, yeah. - And it's this, by the way, advertising we've always played, so, Faye Welden, who is an oval copywriter, always wanted the line, "Vonka makes you drunker quicker," but it was illegal to run any alcohol advertising, and indeed still is, that suggests it makes you drunk. The problem you then have is that there's this thing, by the way, no one, no one where possible should upset or distress people. And particularly when the advertising is displayed in a public space where you have no choice but to see it. I'm not just to be clear about that. However, what you have is a different problem which is confected outrage. So, the analogy I use is you can't run a restaurant, which only serves food to which no one in the world is allergic. So in other words, you could only serve vegan food that contained, obviously, no lactose, but also contained no gluten, which also contained no nuts, which also, that's not a restaurant. That's self-denial on a plate. What we're doing is if you calibrate a message, the newspapers, by the way, the mainstream media, the mainstream media, as right-wing people always call it, in a way, can I have in this because they love nothing more than going fight, fight, fight, fight. They love actually finding a kind of tension or disagreeing. Rage-based? Rage-bating, yeah. You've got to do exactly. So, although they may claim to denigrate workness, they in a weird way profit from it, because you can create these artificial kind of, you know, fight in the pub car park over a sentence or Sydney, has great genes or whatever it may be. Now, just you can't run that restaurant, which no one is allergic, you cannot calibrate humor to the level of the angriest, most humorous person in the run. It's impossible, virtually, in other words, to say anything of interest that couldn't be upsetting to anybody. It's also, you know, you can say very boring things that are not upsetting to anybody, but what's the point of that? You say very unfunny things that don't offend people. Again, great, but it's not funny. And part of the problem is caused by, you know, there's both range-baiting and there's confected outrage. So people signal their sensitivity to some issue by claiming to be offended by things, which probably don't even offend the people who they're claiming are victims of the statement, in many cases. You know, hypersensitivity to this kind of thing. And the thing that worries me is that if businesses effectively become frightened of communicating anything, which could be turned into a kind of tweet storm or a tabloid, consumers are the idiots, actually. You know, American Eagle didn't brilliantly out of that Sydney-Sweeney campaign. You know, it's partly because some people thought that the outrage was bollocks, rightly, I think, in that case. And consumers also realize that alone of these people are basically talking shit, but it does create the CEO's worst nightmare, which is he's asked to appear on the television to defend something. And if that makes people frightened of communicating in a funny or interesting way, because as soon as you do that, someone will immediately raise some red flag or whatever, not really on the basis of genuine offence, but simply because they want to signal their own particular level of pumalessness as a form of virtue. Then it simply makes all communication boring. Yeah. And it also makes it incredibly predictable. And as I said, you know, you can't have a restaurant critic with no sense of taste. And you can't have humor being policed by people who have no sense of humor, which is genuinely what is happening. Even with comedians, I'm sure they've felt there a little bit where they're cracking jokes, then people are complaining about. I'm not. about the. I think said he won't play the college circuit anymore, because you just get too much painful backlash as soon as you get vaguely controversial. And I'm thinking, well, I was at university, I would have torn my eyes out to have the chance to go and see Chris Rock. The idea that these people are so pissy, right, that rather than saying, I cannot believe our luck, Chris Rock is coming to our university town, don't let me. They're actually going, let's find a way to complain about this. It's almost astonishing. I mean, for me, dark humor is funny. Like, sometimes the darker is, it's funny because it's how we're. That's a really complicated one, because. So you get this. One of the worst talks you'll ever have to give is a best man's speech, because half of the audience are 70 and half of the audience are your contemporaries. And what's amusing to you that are the elderly is boring to your contemporaries. What's funny to your contemporaries is shocking to your. Yeah. shocking to the elder cohort. And I mean, the most ingenious solution, by the way, do you know what this one's for? What for a best man's speech? Jordan Peterson solved the problem of his talks being effectively barricaded and disrupted by protesters. Do you know how you do? Hmm. About speaking at about 8/30 in the morning. It turns out that these people aren't all that sincere. Yeah. In other words, they're quite scandalized by what he has to say. And a very, very keen to signal the extent to which they're just stressed by his opinions, but not to the extent of setting an alarm clock, it turns out. And so that's if you like a kind of way of separating the costly signal from the cheap signal. And there's a lot of cheap. Of course, if you think about it, cheap media, enable cheap signaling. Yeah. When you had to. When in order to complain to the times about an article, you had to go and get a piece of paper and write a letter and buy a stamp and post it and then wait, you know, three days for a reply from the editor or whatever it may be. It's very reasonable, other than those circumstances, that, you know, mad or not, those people were exhibiting genuine distress at whatever it involves they'd read. Mm-hmm. Or complaining to off-com or complaining to the BBC. When you can simply be a cheap keyboard warrior without even getting out from your chair, and you can complain about anything, and also you can complain about it intimately because. And people like to join the bandwagon as well, if you see it. And then other people want to join in because it's called a virtue spiral. Yeah. Sometimes it's called a virtue signaling spiral. Things just run out of hand. Also, you can enjoy the benefit of anonymity. But finally, if you think about it, in a normal evolutionary human setting, where we lived in groups of 100, 200, 400 people, whatever it may be. If you kept going on and on and on about something, you lost all your friends. Did you look at this? You boring. The serial complaint. No, you know those people who they walk into the pub and everybody would find a very quick excuse to go somewhere else because all you'd get was this predictable rant. But you could, you can literally do that on Twitter for your entire life, rant about some single issue, searching for, you know, you can be a kind of hobby, bobby community policeman self-appointed, going around looking for things to complain about. Now, that kind of behavior would be considered just socially unacceptable in a pub setting. Digitally, there's nothing you can do to stop it. I use that as a heuristic, by the way, which is if someone has a rant at me on Twitter, I go and look at what they tweet about. That's insane. If what they tweet about is a whole variety of interesting things, occasionally here's a kitten falling off a skateboard and here's me in Tenerife and here's me complaining about this and here's me going on holiday. I go, this is a normal sane person. I probably need to take their complaint seriously because it's quite likely they have been offended. And then there's that other person where you go and look at their feed and every single post they make is about a single narrow issue and you basically this person is basically arranged, I'm going northern completely. So you did see how the case where one of the most eminent philosophers in the UK, AC Grayling, must have spent three years simply tweeting his opposition to Brexit. And then she was driven practically insane by Brexit and you get these bit like Trump derangement syndrome, there was Brexit derangement syndrome. With the best being of all, whatever you're saying, it wasn't that big a deal. It's not like the people who got really upset about it, it spent ages campaigning for higher GDP. They went that passion about a 1% fall in annualised GDP growth beforehand. It was only when it affected their identity or they thought made them all they disliked the people who voted the other way. It was only then that those people got upset. They're ostensibly economic arguments where we're really a bit of a smoke screen. I'm really sorry, what was a deep emotional attachment to not seeming patriotic in a way in a way. But I mean, AC Grayling, if you look at this try to feed, this is literally, there's years worse than this stuff. So question is, if you compile this into a book, you put all those tweets end to end, first of all, please fucking mad. It's just the most bonkers thing I've ever seen in my life. Yet the media, because there's no cost attached, there's no cost both in effort, time, skill or money. to producing a message, it's an absolute paradise for cheap signaling. And, you know, whereas, you know, expensive media where you have to pay, and that, by the way, has a bearing on the efficacy of advertising. Okay. If you took a full page in the telegraph announcing your new car, patentally, people knew you'd spend a lot of money to put that out there. Therefore, you wouldn't be spending that money if the car wasn't worth buying. Yeah. Right? In other words, if this car weren't worth me test driving, it wouldn't be worth them spending £20,000 to tell me about it. If you can basically, you know, basically scatter dross around the place, you know, like confetti, at almost no cost, then what the ad is saying, maybe exactly the same, but what the ad is conveying is totally different. It doesn't convey the same confidence in your product as an expensive message does. So why, actually, interestingly, physical direct mail is an extraordinary, although it seems absurd, the old fashioned, it's an incredibly effective advertising medium because someone's spent £1 to tell me about this. Therefore, at the very least, it's probably worthy of my attention in the same way. Okay. Let's magnify that a bit further. If you receive something in Dubai via FedEx, you're not going to throw it in the bin, and I look, you go, someone patently, you know, splashed the cash to get this to me. At the very least, I need to find out what it is. Whereas a door drop, you can throw away unopened. Yeah. And of course, this processing is going on all the time. It's unconscious. It's, it's, it's untastately. It's, it's, it's felt, but it's not thought, and therefore it's often unspoken. But it has a major bearing on the credibility we attach to advertising messages, which is the cost of their transmission. And that's sometimes why, by the way, using celebrities works, which is, if you've got Tom Cruise on an ad, well, they're two possibilities. Either Tom Cruise really, really loves your product to an insane critique. Okay. Or second best, you've spent a staff and money to get Tom Cruise, which means that your product is basically, you know, if it's worth promoting, it's worth investigating. Yeah. Simple, you know, second order logic. It's not that big a deal. But most, most sort of theories around messaging use what you might call the transmission model of how do you get this information from A to B, you know, from effectively, from originated to eyeball as inexpensively as possible. Yeah. Awesome. I've got to wrap it up there, unfortunately, even though there's more I would love to talk about. We are running out of time. So I just heard. How do you feel about Dubai? Do you want to come home? Do you want to stay there? People ask me this a lot. I feel like I've almost become this unofficial ambassador for the place. If I didn't like it, I wouldn't be there. No, no, I completely buy that. But I think it's a great place to, you find a lot of people go there temporarily. They go there, they do their thing, they build, they network, and then usually after a while, they might go on to the next place. I don't know if it's a place where you'd go there and want to be there forever. Like for me being. Our property price is taking some of the guilt off the gingerbread because how expensive is it to. Because my great question is, everybody's burbling on about the tax rates and having a go at the government. This is income tax. And my argument is that the reason the younger generation are skidged is red not tax. Dominantly. And the problem I've got is that we are an employer who demands that everybody who works for us lives in the most expensive real estate in Europe. And we are at least within commuting distance of it. And consequently, and by the way, there are a whole lot of concatenation of factors like the dual income, household and so on, which are made it more and more centra-petal in terms of people having to live in these very large cities. I mean, going to university and wanting to stay in touch with your friends basically requires you to move to a bloody enormous city. I think in Dubai you get a lot more humility. You do get more shamanidious. Yeah. The quality, like the view, the amenities, it's certainly cheaper and comparison to London. Like if I was to spend the same amount of money which I spend now on a London spot, I would be like, really this is it. It feels confined and. By the way, the other spoken thing, which we want to talk about, is domestic service. Because if you look at it, an enormous amount of technological ingenuity, the washing machine, the dishwasher, right? Nobody ever says this. Because we always talk about the Turing test. I always talk about the vice-roy test, which is to what extent does this technology mean you actually live better than the vice-roy of India? I, someone with access to extraordinary levels of domestic service. And washing machines are just basically a service substitute. Dishwashers similar. They're entertainment devices, computer games, televisions, etc. which are genuine improvement. You have much better access to entertainment. In terms of making your life easier, a waymo is just a sofa. Yeah. And dishwasher is just a housemaid as would have been the case for my grandparents. And all of the stuff is simply making up for living in a high-lapest economy. And nobody ever says that about you, but I'm sure that is actually part of the appeal. Fair? Yeah. Yeah. You can get shit done for you, relatively inexpensively. Yes. And nobody. That's the sort of dirty secret which nobody talks about. Because. Always a very, very interesting philosophical point, which is. both my father's answers to the question. I think it was the same telebs answer to the same question. And also John Gray, the philosopher's answer. What would you do differently if I gave you $10 million to which the answer was. get a chauffer? Yeah. Especially there. Yeah. Because the driving is a bit hairy, is it? Yeah, there's just too many people who move there and the roads can't handle it. But I'm sure they will fix it at some point, because they want to make it the most appealing place ever. Traffic is not appealing. And we've shot ourselves in the foot by making it so difficult to construct new infrastructure. And it takes a long, long time. By the way, that's the real problem. It's not necessarily. You know, it's the time-cost. Yeah. I'll just. Hi, I'll call you in five minutes, okay? Yes, yes, yes, so I've got a scoot now. I'm conscious of that. Maybe a tiny bit late. Right now. Okay, dokey. Right now. Bye-bye. Yeah, good idea. Okay, no problem. Right now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Sorry about this. Just. Oh, yeah. 60-year-old man. Frost date. Measurements. Everywhere. Yeah. Thank you.