Before when we first started, we were just like walking and start
speaking. Everybody's getting like all set
up. Now we've got all the like the
professional kit, we've got like the timing on point, we've got
the walk down, etcetera, etcetera.
Roy it's becoming a little bit more a thing now.
Do you think they'll be a sort of backlash and return to the
low 5 podcast market where everything's kind of recorded on
handheld phones and because it's gone, the the production values
have gone crazy, haven't they? Oh yeah, and The thing is it's
going even crazier because that Netflix above you just announced
and they're doing a collaboration with Spotify to
able to take some of the best podcasts on Spotify and take
them over to Netflix as a test and learn.
So I think a lot of the podcasts are going to now start thinking
about themselves as shows and starting to update game even
more because there's this whole like concept about the fact that
the way that you like differentiate yourself now to
like set design and like mood and art direction and all that
kind of stuff. But I think it's always really
important to make sure that the conversation stays at the center
of everything. And with that being said, I was
really excited about this conversation.
So I was speaking to Rory about this and the team and Rory raved
on about the fact that we need to get Jessica on right?
And I then got obsessed because that's the that's the way that I
am. Whenever people get excited
about somebody, I get excited. I do my research and I was like,
you know what, as somebody that's a bit of a digital native
or social native, I looked at some of your work and I was
really excited about what I found and also like the, what
you've done so far and also the conversations you were having.
But I'm going to let, I'm not going to, I was going to say,
I'm not going to butcher, but then I mind the pun, right?
But I, we always love to let our guests lead that intro so they
can almost like be in charge of their story.
And then we can just talk about some of the bottlenecks you
discovered across your, your journey.
But Jessica, like great to give you the floor, tell our audience
that may not know who you are about yourself, the work you've
been doing, and we can start to dive right into the bottlenecks
as well. Amazing.
Thank you for having me. This is so impressive.
Yeah. So the story has been a very
squiggly career to date. I'm a tech entrepreneur
basically I have been for the best part of 20/20/25 or so
years. So I've been in the business of
building or helping to build platforms that mine attention,
not to put too fine a point on it.
And so I, I rode the Kate tales of a lot of entrepreneurs in my
20s, cutting my teeth and learning and basically following
inspiring visionaries and learning, you know, how to help
take their visions to market. And my role has always been on
the communication side. So storytelling about why this
is going to change the world, why it's so awesome, why
everybody should be buying it or engaging with it.
And I find it quite hilarious. I'm called a woman in tech
because I've got a history degree and I can't read or write
a line of code. I've never have.
But I love nerds. And I guess I, I describe my
superpower as being nerd translating.
So I would get the techies to say what they were so excited
about. And I'd say, what, Right.
What I can hear is, would this be a fair representation of
that? Yeah.
And then my job was always to attract adherence to that
vision, whether that was investors, media clients or the
end consumer in some way or another.
So I've always done a sort of hybrid Comm sales partnership.
In defence of that, Steve Jobs couldn't code either, could he?
I've heard that I've. Heard that I'm in good.
Company. I mean, The Beatles couldn't
read music. It's not necessary actually for
the primary role of a business, you know, necessarily to be
understood by the people who actually uncover the value.
Yeah. Quite interesting.
I mean, I like to think of myself as an amateur behavioural
psychologist, you know, trying to find the trigger point points
of how somebody is going to engage or get excited about
this. And then tapping into that and
finding, firstly working out who those people are going to be and
then finding the right the right way to take that message to
market with them. And you always need a degree of
translation, don't you? Because the thing about the
people with the greatest technological ability typically
is they're principally motivated either by the intrinsic
difficulty of the problem or by the urge to impress each other.
And of course their peer group isn't really representative of
the wider consumer. Absolutely.
And so they'll quite often pursue metrics which in some
ways are either irrelevant to or a difficult to translate into
actual consumer benefits. Absolutely.
And I also think one thing I've ever, I've also learned
throughout my career is that is the power of the generalist.
You know, the generalist that sits at the junction of lots of
different industries. And my scrappy CV where I move
jobs every two years throughout my 20s, you know, actually
really helped because I had a little bit of insight into a lot
of different sectors and industries.
And it meant that I could look at a technology and apply it in
multiple different directions in ways that hadn't been seen
before. And those are often really
powerful roles to play in the cross pollination of different
technologies and industries. There's a weird debate in AI
about this online at the moment, which is some AI people say the
only way to survive as a paid human being is a super
specialist. Yeah.
In other words, you, you, you know, in other words, you're
actually above the abilities of the AI.
Now, that seems to me quite a risky bet.
Oh yeah. The other argument is completely
the opposite, which is to say that bizarrely, generalists, you
know, almost to the point of dilettantes, people with a very,
very wide mixed humanities and tech background.
In fact, they're the most valuable people because they can
cross domain more easily. Yeah, Talk about the fact that I
think we used the analogy of being more Quincy Jones and less
Michael Jackson, right? If you can conduct an orchestra,
that's actually where your skills can almost like come to
light, really. Because can you look at all
these different tools and use it towards almost, it's like a
united goal, right? And I think that there's always
the conversation around like the purist versus the storyteller,
right? And a lot of the times, purists
are almost like in this cycle where they're just on their own
and they're not able to translate the magic that's
happening within that tribe to the rest of the world.
And people like Steve Jobs are able to understand them,
understand the world and become that bridge.
Would you say that's kind of like the role that you were
playing as the generalist within the tech space in the early
days? Absolutely.
That's what I've done in every single role.
That was the only consistency actually, that sort of bridge
role, because I, I went from the film industry to loyalty schemes
to the travel industry to international trade.
You know, it was messy as hell. It was a CV that said
susceptible to unscrupulous, unscriptious recruitment
consultants. That's what it said.
I've kind of had to make sense of it.
And everybody creates their own narrative, right to that extent.
But that was the underlying in a thing that I would say
something, I would translate it and I would I would cross
pollinate to help take take to market.
But I guess I got to a stage. So I had a really real rocket
ship experience in the 20 tens. So with Blipper, I was part of
the founding team that built one of the very first AR platforms
in the world. And it was such an exciting time
because it was the first time and technology had been seen and
we just took off like a rocket. So, you know, from, from, from
the, from the four of us, you know, we, we had ten officers
around the globe. We were Unicorn for a brief
period of time. And it catapulted me onto all of
these stages and into all of these networks.
And everybody wanted to put me up for awards or speaking
because there was so few women in high tech at that stage.
And that was where some of the impostor syndrome came in with
the, I don't understand tech, but I, I understand the creative
applications of this really cool tech.
So that was what I was doing thinking through at that stage.
So here's what the tech can do. What could that mean for the
FMCG industry? You know, what can that mean for
print publishing? What can that mean for outdoor?
What can that mean for industry and educational tools and
platforms? My breadth was the advantage at
that stage because I could think through really creative ideas
and feed those into the client conversations that we were
having. But just to bring us up to date,
I guess, you know, towards around 2017, two, 1018, I also
had three children in four years.
I decided to take a step out of the front seat of the rocket
simply because I couldn't live on a plane anymore.
And I also wanted to enjoy those years.
You know, some wrestles with a lot of that sort of feminist
narrative about, you know, being the girl boss and thinking,
well, actually, what do I actually want?
And you know what, what do I prioritize now at this stage of
my life? And that was when I basically
moved into a portfolio career for sort of four or five years.
So some Angel investing, a lot of consulting and some board
work. I sat on the board of the
government's Equality and Human Rights Commission for four
years, which was eye opening, eye watering in many ways.
But all of this over the last sort of 4-5 years, I suppose
I've been doing a sort of deep dive, almost PhD in looking at
so many of the very dramatic fast moving trends and shifts
that we're seeing in society. From polarisation, which
obviously is huge in the equalities realm, to the rising
rates of anxiety and mental health challenges, to
distraction and attention deficit disorder and what's
happening there. And it struck me that there was
just an underlying technical reason why so many of these were
happening. And it wasn't that tech was the
cause of them all, but what it was without doubt an accelerant,
you know, pouring fuel on the flames of so many of these very
worrying divisive trends that we're seeing.
And I reading, reading, talking, networking, you know, I was
fortunate to have quite some time with Jonathan Haidt, who
wrote the book around the Anxious Generation.
I've met a lot of activists that are doing incredible work within
this area. And I've now got a great network
of incredible people that know a huge amount about the behaviour
or science of what's happening. You know, the, the, the, the,
the impact on children, you know, the impact in schools and
in a lot of regulators that are talking about this.
But what where do I fit? You know, it's like I want to
work on this problem, but how do I bring my skills and background
and you know, the secret sauce of Jess to this challenge.
And that's when we come back to this, you know, how does a
generalist storyteller and an optimistic entrepreneur, how can
I contribute to it? And that's where the idea for
Scroll Aware has evolved, an alliance of incredibly
influential people and brands, those brands and people that do
influence culture coming together and saying we recognize
there's a challenge, that, you know, it's not the phone that's
the problem and it's not technology that's the problem.
You know, I'm a tech entrepreneur.
They are, they are not to blame. It is very specifically the
major issue is the business models that are predicated on
time and attention because there's only one way, way to go
with business models like that, which is to go down into our
basest human instincts, our desire for our insecurities, our
desire for tribalism and to feel right.
You know, the dopamine of, you know, turning our brains off,
you know, and we are now living, I think in in a very, very
extreme version of that where we are living more to be seen to
live and spending, you know, such a huge percentage of our
lives in these platforms. It's it profoundly worries and
depresses me. I think we're in the process of
lobotomizing, you know, ourselves more importantly and
profoundly. A whole generation of young
people who simply don't have, will not have the ability to
concentrate and focus at a time when the problems of the world
are getting profoundly more and more difficult and challenging.
Our attention is all we have. 01 hundred 100% I have so there was
like so many points that I wanted.
To cut from there. Oh yeah, Like literally, I
started with multi hyphenated, right?
You call it a generalist, right? But I think we're going into the
space where the age-old question of who do you want to be when
you grow up or what do you want to do when you grow up?
There's no longer one answer now, right?
Would you say that that was always the case for you or would
you say that you first had a laugh for tech and because of
the exposure and almost like the aha moment that derived from you
being in that space? Did you, did your world open up
and you wanted to experiment and try this scale on different
things or was that always the plan?
Was that just like that entryway, or was that the way
and then the world opened up for you?
There was no plan. I'd love to say I had a plan.
I've always been, I've always seen shiny things at the colour
of my eye, you know, things that just fascinated me and interest
me. And I'm, I, I open doors and
make memories and out of those, you know, some fabulous career
opportunities have arisen and some mistakes, you know, that's
why I refer to it as squiggly God.
I've made some mistakes in my, in my career as well.
But I, I, I'm very, I've never had a great plan basically, And
I think that's something I've, I've often thought is, is a
weakness, but I am are you very gut based decision maker and it
served me well. So I'm not sure I'm going to
shake it up to. To yes, actually, one problem
with over planning is you can't be healthily opportunistic.
And also it makes it very, very difficult to use intuition.
Yeah, because and, and you make the mistake, I think that you
only count as a success those things that you'd in advance,
which is in a sense, you know, you're a hostage to fortune.
Because instead of actually accepting the fact that there
are possibly, you know, 47 different futures for you, you
become fixated with, with only one of them.
And it's it, it's simply, by the way, not how the world works.
And actually, most of what we consider to be, you know, our
career path is really reverse engineered.
You know, it's a, it's a narrative we construct to make
sense of the past, even though it played very little role in
the present. And I, you know, they're
wonderful phrases about this. I like the military one, which
is plans are useless, but planning is essential.
So all military people except that once you engage with the
enemy, nothing is to go to, you know, is going to go to plan.
There are occasions where you're absolutely right to disobey all
the orders because the situation has changed in some unexpected
way. But at the same time, the
preparation part of planning is still useful.
And I think it it, you know, it sounds like a contradictory
phrase, but actually what it captures is the fact that there
are kind of two kinds of planning.
There's healthy preparation, which is a sense knowing enough
to get lucky perhaps. But then there's the obsession
with there is only one, you know, there is only one possible
route to success, which I think is is actually dangerously
narrowing and by the way, creates a bottleneck because you
tend to end up with the same path as everybody else.
Yeah. If you consider the sort of
Blair era, 50% of people must go to university, that was
effectively creating a single narrative for what it meant to
have a good job, which then meant that 50% of the population
tried to succeed in exactly the same way.
So nobody really thought of the 2nd order effects of creating
this particular story. You ever seen that?
It happened in South Africa as well.
So I think in the Nelson Mandela era, there was this whole drive
to get everybody to go to university as well, but then
they didn't create the jobs for the people that once they
finished university. So then he had a lot of people
with degrees, but then there was no opportunities to be able to
actually like capitalize on that.
Like you have a lot of very smart, educated people, but the
opportunities are not ready. I saw that when I lived in
Dubai, for example. There's a lot of almost like the
population is going up, but then they still traffic jams because
the roads have been caught up, right, Which is why it's it's
super interesting. And I say that you mentioned
about the fact that every one of these social platforms are
driving towards time and attention, right?
And you see this with the AI race, right?
Everyone's trying to be first to the AI, almost like mega status,
if you will, but they don't know the impact that's happening on
day-to-day reality, right? It's almost like everyone's in
this tunnel vision and they don't know what they're
breaking. Ironically, the move fast and
break things is effectively the theory that drives that.
There's a, there's a very useful distinction which can be useful
in, for example, investor behaviour, It can be useful in
understanding all kinds of things, which is a lot of
behaviours, a micro rational but macro stupid.
So it's an intelligent thing to do from your own point of view.
Yeah, except at the point when other people start trying to do
exactly the same thing. Yeah.
You know, I would argue in a lot of online performance
advertising is of that kind. It's micro rational, but macro
stupid in the sense that effectively, instead of working
out a way to avoid giving half your revenue to Meta and
alphabet, people are basically so fixated on this channel that
what they're all doing is trying to give slightly less of their
money or, or to give their money in a slightly more efficient
way. And so it's what you might call
that form of hyper competition where it seems rational to
compete, but if you take a step back, you'll, you can simply, we
say, actually the prize isn't worth the price.
Yeah. And I think that that, you know,
there is undoubtedly a human urge.
Obviously, we're highly comparative in our perception.
And the first benchmark we'll use for our own success is other
people. Yeah.
But what you don't realise while you're doing that is you're
effectively allowing someone else to define what it means to
be successful, happy, or whatever it may be.
Yeah, yeah. And I was going to say and and
Jeske talked about that. Well, obviously talked about the
fact that at the start, you're obviously part of this tech
revolution, building this organization drilled into this
and then there was a change moment when you started to
realize the impact. Can you double down into that?
Like what was the bit the catalyst for that realization
and change? I mean, it's, it's, it's pretty
obvious in some ways and boring, but becoming a parent and
thinking about what the world's going to be like for for my
children and observing all of these trends accelerating to
such a huge extent, you know that it's.
Sort of like J Robert Oppenheimer, which is I am
become deaf. You see the first age bomb.
And I imagine he was pretty proud of that moment, but he
suddenly became aware of the consequences.
Yeah. Yeah, it's just that it's a
really worrying world for children to grow up in, you
know, just the, the examples that they see in the world
around them. I think I mean the, the evidence
and the data is there in terms of harms and the specific nature
of, you know, the, the, the risks of the type of content.
I guess what I what's happened to my thinking is I've kind of
tracked up from that because I think enough people are doing
fantastic work on talking about online harms.
I'm more worried about the sheer time, opportunity cost, the
sheer amount of time that is being lost.
I mean, the statistics at the moment say that the average 18
year old is going to is on course to spend 25 years of the
rest of their life in scroll. That terrifies me from the
perspective of my own children and.
Five years of their waking life, yes.
OK, so. After you've taken sleep and
work, going to the toilet, eating the 25.
Years scrolling. Yes, scrolling.
So you know that that's a sort of fentanyl scale problem,
isn't? It it is utterly terrifying.
That's the one problem, the time opportunity cost, because what
else? One question when I talk when
when we think about harms, there's a very good argument to
oppose the legalization of cannabis, which is not that it's
bad for everybody, probably isn't, but there are certain
behaviours. Gambling would be another one.
Alcohol would be 1/3, which are neutral or marginally beneficial
to a lot of people, but catastrophically bad to a
certain minority. You know, I've always thought
this is a slightly weird defence of nicotine, but smoking was
quite bad for quite a lot of people, right?
Whereas alcohol gambling, alcohol gambling and certain
other behaviours strike me as very different, which is there
is a chunk of the population who can handle them perfectly well.
But I imagine if you're long term unemployed and you have a
really heavy cannabis habit, I imagine your chances of getting
out of that through are pretty slim.
And so, yeah, I'm, I'm interested to know what's the
variance in terms of the people where it's a problem.
My own daughters actually, I would have said they navigated
their teenage years now, they're 25 now, but I'd say they're 24
actually. They navigated their teenage
years fairly well. I I wasn't ever alarmed.
I had a Minecraft obsessive daughter for a time and so
forth, but that struck me as not an appalling use of time.
It was reasonably creative and it was social and engaging.
Would I, you know, would I have wished that they were brought up
in a world without that technology?
Probably not. I mean, you know, I, I can.
There was still a downside and there was still an opportunity
cost, undoubtedly. But I was just interested in the
question of, you know, and there, there is a perfectly good
social reason for banning things, which quite a lot of
people like if they're appallingly bad for some.
I was just interested. Well, I I don't agree in bans,
absolutely not. OK, You know I'm pro tech, I'm
pro phones and I am actually pro social.
Well, those school bands of smartphones.
I think bell to bell, what they've done.
For schools is. Brilliant because and
immediately they implement bell to bell, which means from 9:00
to 3:00 in the working day phone off body, you know, not in on on
the child at all. They see the results go up, they
see the politics go down. They see, you know, so much more
stability and happiness. So why not?
And there's some brilliant work that has happened that where
teachers can make that call for themselves within the classroom.
And obviously the the parent in grassroots community is doing
great work in terms of educating parents about potentially
delaying. So no one child is stigmatized
and thinking about what they do on the device.
I guess where I've landed is, you know, it's about balance.
And, you know, there was a there was a slogan that sort of came
to me that has unlocked a lot of the actual structure of what I'm
building now, which is, you know, scholar wears mantra is
less scroll morsel. Now you know it.
Jimmy Carr when we were together referred to it as a bit twee.
But it really resonates because it juxtaposes these two ideas.
Now scroll is very obvious. What scroll is soul is
deliberately ambiguous because each and every one of us will
define that word differently. You know, for for one person, it
might be something really nerdy, you know, Trainspotting or, you
know, bird watching or, you know, building little, you know,
wall figures or something. For somebody else, it's long
form fiction or going for walks or doing fitness and exercise or
time with your girls. For most middle-aged
professional men right now, it's paddle seemingly, you know, more
soul. I, I would describe soul time as
anything that is sort of people place perspective.
And if you look at these two things in opposition, which they
are, you know, you start to think then about building
something, a campaign, an alliance that is motivated on
simply rebalancing. And that's all I believe in the
rebalancing because tech, including social media, should
be a bridge and an enabler for our real lives.
It shouldn't be a destination where we spend our lives.
And that's the tipping point that I think we've reached now,
which is so worrying because it's stopped us spending time in
our own heads with our own thoughts.
We're on this productivity, you know, absorb, absorb, absorb
more, get, you know, hack our way to this.
You know, you can't get, no one goes for a walk now without a
podcast on, you know, I've got to multitask.
I've got to use this time and that pace of life and this hyper
optimization of everything that we're doing.
It's just leaving us overwhelmed.
Everybody is overwhelmed and the scroll to soul dichotomy is
simply saying slow down and make time for the things that calm
you. Yeah, to the things that improve
you. It's mandatory to ask this
question, but is there an AI solution to this?
Which is quite simple, you know, We all know famously that Simon
Cowell doesn't have a mobile phone.
He has people around him with mobile phones.
Ed Sheeran, who effectively Ed Sheeran the same.
They relay what is important. Now.
Most of us can't afford that at the moment, nice as it would be
to have an entourage. I was one of my own mariachi
band. That was my dream.
But the IT it should be possible that you can reverse the
direction of travel so that you have an AI agent which is simply
very versed in filtration and prioritisation.
I'm also vaguely excited by the potential for new formats for
devices. So much as it pains me to admit
it, I think Zuck is right to bet on these meta glasses.
Yeah, which? No, no, here we go.
No, no, Oddly, oddly, provided you can calibrate them to an
acceptable level of interruption.
My view is that it's actually positive, not negative, because
a lot of our compulsive behaviour is driven by fear of
missing something and therefore if you know that if anything
important had happened, my spectacles would have told me
about it so I can now relax and go on a walk.
My argument is that actually a large part of this is a large
part of this is the advertising model, which I think I as an
advertising person, I can't really hold myself fully
responsible. But that old comment that
effectively, if you're not paying for the product, you are
the product. There's a really interesting
debate in subscription publications where most of the
user base pay for the content. Which is to say, we don't have
to go in for all that click bait or nastiness simply because
they've already paid. Our job now is to entertain
them. Their attention is effectively
irrelevant to our business model and consequently we can focus on
doing the proper job of a journalist or the proper job of
an entertainer rather than having to create scandal or
mischief. So, and the third one, when I
said about other formats, my perfect phone would be a Samsung
flip phone where the outer casing was basically, you know,
a feature phone. It was simply a black and white
screen on the outside, which enabled me to do all the really
urgent, you know, very urgent stuff or simply receive calls.
And that you could limit the number of times you could open
it in a day. And so it would turn into a
tablet. And what a lot of what we're
talking about is, is batch processing versus constant
interruption, isn't it? Which is in the good old days
when my computer was upstairs, which is where the ISDN line
came in. So this is getting really
nostalgic. There was literally an ISDN line
upstairs. I had a large computer upstairs,
and I went upstairs and I used the Internet, and then I came
downstairs again. And the great thing about that
is that the place determined the focus.
Yeah. So in the old days and the 1980s
and the working environment, when you're in a meeting room,
you had a meeting. When you're in the photocopy
room, you photocopied. When you're in the pub, you had
a chat. And the smartphone kind of
fucked it all by effectively being.
A toilet. Then you read.
Then you read the newspaper. Yeah, there you No.
In my childhood you read Giles cartoons on the toilet.
Wow, that's a bit of nostal. Everybody, everybody under sort
of 45 is going what the fuck is he talking about?
Or if you're a bit downmarket, George and Lynn from the Sun.
But but the, no, the, the, the point about that is that the
place determine the, the, the performance.
And so you were forced to focus by dint of the specificity of
the place in which you found yourself and the smartphone came
and effectively smashed through that.
Now, it's not all bad. I mean, you know, I would
broadly speaking, say I'm, I'm a bit of a TikTok fan, but maybe
the algorithm has just been kind to me.
I can't, you know, because TikTok strikes me as being the
very, the age-old, you know, 200,000 years old human practice
of people entertaining other people for the sheer pleasure of
doing it. YouTube Premium, I think is one
of the greatest things to have happened in my entire lifetime.
And there are other, there are other channels like Pinterest,
very interestingly, which I don't think the very interesting
statistic about Pinterest is that they found in Pinterest
that people scroll Pinterest at about the third of the speed
that they scroll everything else.
So it is actually a kind of. How would you describe it?
Qualitative scroll. In other words, it's driven by
pleasure, not desperation. Yeah.
It's an enabling, I love Pinterest as well for similar
reasons and I'm actively courting them at the moment to
try and join the alliance because they enable real world
hobbies and pleasures, whether that's interior design or
fashion or fitness or exercise, you know, and this is where it's
really important to make that distinction.
So much of what I scroll, I love, you know, I get a huge
amount of inspiration from it and I because I've curated who I
follow, whose opinions I respect.
And. But then, but then suddenly 3
hours has gone. Yeah.
And I and it's, and it, it's almost like junk disappears
almost as quickly as it's come into my head.
And I think, well, you know what?
How have I just wasted 2 1/2 hours of my life in doing that?
And it's not just that, it's what it's doing to our attention
and our focus. So the two, my two biggest
concerns the time opportunity cost, which is a business model.
It is a business model thing. The attention economy, yes, it
is. And, and it's, it's entirely
that because it's predicated on mining for attention.
It's the attention, it's the time.
And then it's our ability to focus and concentrate.
This is profoundly worrying. And I say this as a faulty
something woman who's grown up without this technology, whose
brain does this now, you know, I've got about 63 open tabs on
my laptop at the moment because I can't finish APDF report
anymore. You know, I'll open up something
and if it's longer than about four pages, I'll start it and
I'll go, oh, I'll come back to it because something's pinged or
I've got to do this. And I'm, I'm multitasking and
I'm, I'm checking everything. And if that's happening to me,
what does it do? Somebody who has managed to
harness their attention to get degrees and read long form
books. And even in a book now I really
struggle. I'm very actively going back to
old literature, yeah, to try and brain train myself back into
focus. Yeah, longer, more in depth
language in old fashioned. No, my interesting AI theory is
that AI could solve the problem by effectively getting rid of
those switching costs. I think in algorithm design it's
called a switching cost. Yeah, that once you switch from
one process to another, yeah, there's fundamentally a cost in
terms of energy, time or manner of kind of mental things.
And it apparently it's true of computers as it is true of
humans. Yeah.
And it strikes me as, for example, now where AI could
help, it is a fucking abomination that my e-mail app
is a different app from my calendar app.
OK, I want a single app that answers the question.
What should I do right now? OK.
Claude's doing that now. The the fact that I have to look
at an e-mail, then look back at a calendar, then go back to the
e-mail because I've forgotten the fucking date, all right,
then go back to a calendar is just simply ludicrous, right?
I mean, now a very classic example of this is we the human
ability consciously to consciously do two things at
once is basically 0. You know, we that that's the
miracle of intuition and all, all of those unconscious
processes is we can actually resolve simultaneously, you
know, incommensurable things to arrive at a decision.
Whereas consciously you can only look at one thing at a time.
And I always think the perfect example of this, I know I bore
people with this, the London Overground where they simply
added it to the tube map. Right Now, if you think about it
as a nice analogy, making a journey from 2 maps, planning a
journey would be almost impossible, right?
Let's imagine you had a rail map and you had a tube map and you
had to refer between the two to work out what mixture of train
and tube you should use to get from, I don't know, Richmond to
Stratford. OK, be a total mother fuck.
Yeah. That's what's happening right
now. If you put the things on one
map, Yeah, then you can in a very short period of time, you
can very rapidly see what needs to be done.
And I think there's this appalling kind of Swiss Army
knife mess, which is the smartphone, which is, it's
effectively, it has 17 different things.
And maybe it's better in China where they seem to have this one
app that does everything. If you're right, there's this
one bloody app in China where you book a taxi, find your wife,
you know, do your. Banking.
Which, OK, OK, you know, so whatever, you know, all within
the space of an afternoon. And but the, the mess of the
Swiss Army knife, which effectively has, you know,
someone said of Swiss Army knife, it has, you know, 17
different implements, none of which is particularly good at
the task in hand. And I'm, I'm convinced that, you
know, what I want my calendar stroke e-mail to do is to block
out time in my calendar to read the e-mail with the most urgent
ones first. Yeah.
And The funny thing about? And it's the same thing.
It's an answer. There are two devices in in an
answer to one question. The fact now that when you log
in to read your gas bill, you then have to do 2 factor
authentication. So the the ludicrous business
where 3 apps are involved in a single task.
And, and this, the reason I'm saying this is it's, it's partly
A rant, but it's partly an analogy for the fact that this
shit isn't very well designed. Actually.
It's not really designed around a human need or objective.
It's designed around a technological capability and it
falls to us to string it all together.
I totally agree and I do think I think the original point was
that could AI help correct some of this stuff and I think it
will. It will make life more efficient
and it will streamline. But that's a different.
I think it's solving for a different.
Those are all different problems than the problems that the
attention. Economy is your fundamental
problem, by the way, the opportunity cost problem and,
and the secondary one. But the opportunity cost, of
course, is all the more important to focus on because
it's in opportunity costs are invisible because we're never
conscious of what it was we could have done.
And, you know, maybe we're even optimized to minimize our
perception of them because we don't like regret very much.
But it's the old phrase. No one ever lay on their
deathbed and said, I wish I'd spent more time in the office.
You know, there's a friend on Instagram or Instagram.
They say it's the same principle, which is when you
look, there is a kind of reframing there.
When you look back on your life, if there was a meter which
showed the percentage of time you spent.
Oh, wasted. Oh yeah, effectively wasted,
which could have been something else.
Well, there was a lovely Polaroid campaign that lit up
New York over the summer which had those.
No one ever will ever wish they'd spent more time.
It's got Another one was AI. They can never help you feel the
sand between your toes, you know, And I think tech has to
get better and it does. It does already make our lives
much, much more efficient. So This is why I'm a lover of
technology and why controversially, apparently in
my circles, my 12 year old has a smartphone because I know safe
tech for kids. So his phone, he's got calls,
texts, his Go Henry card, Google Maps.
It's like a really cool app for kids where you can budget and he
can pay for things. Life 360 so you can track your.
Money he's got Life 360, I haven't got that.
I will look into that. And he's got Spotify because he
loves music, and I really want to empower that.
He's listening to, he's listening to Bottleneck right
now. He.
Is it like? This would be on the.
This would be on the outside of my flip phone.
See those things which are actually useful things, which
let's face it, we all carried with us before we had some, you
know, you know, you might have had a Walkman or whatever back
in the day. But there was, you know, and I,
I think that I think that awful thing which is you have to leave
the house with nothing or with everything is a bloody I.
Totally agree. So his is an enabling phone.
That's the point. And as and when he gets older
and there are apps that he wants, we can have a
conversation by conversation, you know.
Well, if he loves chess, I'll have a problem with him playing
chess. You know, it's great brain
training and it's, it's, you know, it's, it's a nice way or
the Kindle app. If he's, if he likes reading
digitally, I don't have a problem with that.
But the point is he's not going to have a time and attention and
focus app on his device anytime soon until he's old enough to be
able to understand what he's engaging with.
And until he's, he's, he's a little bit more resilient.
But so yes, technology is 1 solution, I guess the solution
and whether it's a solution that might be a bit optimistic to
call it such. But the other thing that I think
is really important is how the culture needs to shift around
our perception of technology. And that's very much what we're
seeking to do with Scroll Aware. You know, the mission in a
nutshell is how do we make analogue cool again?
Because it is cool. It's really cool and Gen.
Z is a really interesting generation to watch right now
because you know there's. There's all the my daughter
asked for a gramophone. Exactly.
I, I have to say, having spent, you know, I was born in 1965.
And finally we reached this wonderful apotheosis of music
where you could carry a small device and listen to anything
she wanted. And she wanted fucking vinyl.
You know, this to me was an act of pure Luddism.
I was, no, I did buy her the bloody thing, but I it was to
me, it was incomprehensible. By the way, I I might add that.
It's because there's this word. Have you heard of it?
Anamia Ammonia and it means I've probably made.
Anime, is it Derkaimian? Anime is a concept in sociology
which is a sort of lack of almost a kind of lack of feel
that no, no, it's not that one, OK.
Ammonia, Greek word, and I believe it means nostalgia for a
world you've never known. Oh, which is lovely and.
So. Deep, yes.
And it's, it's Gen. Z basically saying, hang on, we
missed out on our childhoods. You know they're watching
Friends. I.
See that all this nostalgia is coming back.
Given the music is like the. World before phones.
There was this big video on TikTok of a graduation ceremony
that somebody had filmed the one of these hand cams in in the
late 90s. And all these kids shared it on
TikTok going, Oh my God, I'm so jealous.
I wish that had been my high school because look at them.
They're all walking around chatting, you know, dancing in
the corner, the music. And there was not a single phone
on display. And that's what's driving this,
this move towards nostalgia. Apparently, although the
marketers blame, blame your industry, apparently it's
nostalgia now. We need a new word.
For it, yeah. There's a new word for it.
And you know, 53% of Gen. Z recently said that they
support a social media ban that under sixteens, you know, and
that's literally the generation just below them because they're
saying we lost our childhood. So there's this growing move of
digital defiance unplugged events and and, you know,
concerts that people will go to and parties where the kids
themselves or young people, I should say, you know, obviously
Jen, Jen said a bit older where they're saying no phones, not
having it. You know, we're, we're
reclaiming our brains. And I think that's a really
positive movement to start thinking about this sort of
scroll to soul ratio and really investing in the moments and
your own moments as opposed to watching other people's moments,
you know, and that's what we've lost with the seesaw having gone
so far into scroll. And you know, all I think that
needs to happen is a, a movement towards intentionality, you
know, really thinking stopping, you know, a few scroll free
zones appearing within coffee shops, you know, it becoming
actually really uncool to have your phone out.
I'm doing good. I'm doing it for notes.
When you're out with your girls or when you're having a, a meal,
you know, these are just little shifts that happen, You know, no
family meal. There's a is there an excuse for
the phone to be at the table at all?
If you're out with your girls, you know, or, or with your
friends, if you're in a work meeting where you're seriously
trying to be creative and go deep and focus, put them away.
You know, we need to train our brains into knowing the phone as
the bridge in the enabler versus allowing it to become this
constant distraction at all times.
And I think that's that's a very simple shift.
And you can have a lot of fun with that shift as well, because
there are so many antidotes in the real world that we can sell
and promote. I mean there are good little
tech hacks like make sure your e-mail only pulls the server
every hour. Turn off all notifications apart
from super urgent ones. I mean they should be turned off
by default actually. You know and you know there are
one or two things where it might be useful to have notifications.
Everything else is a complete shit show as far as I'm
concerned. Well, going back to what you
were saying about Gen. Z terminology, the the word NPC
gets used a lot, right? And non playing characters for
those that don't know. And whenever you go on to like
the Tube in London, for example, as soon as I get into the tube,
it gets really quiet and everybody's on their phones and
no one's having a conversation. I I see that there's I did this
experiment to myself. Right, the non playing character
is like the kind of wizard that isn't a person.
Yeah, but it's just generated by the game to sort of stand around
and do with weird wizardy. Thing or in an action film when
the guy's being shot at doesn't die and then everybody else is
dying and it's almost like they're insignificant but
whatever. So so I guess like what you see
there is I do this experiment of myself when I go into an Uber,
right? My experience is completely
different when I go into the Uber and go straight into my
phone or whether I go into the Uber, put my phone away and have
a conversation with the person, right?
That could change the trajectory of the day and the opportunity
and their day, right? And often than not, you actually
build a connection with somebody, right?
And they always talk about the fact that in a world where we
have all the tools to connect us, we've never been more alone
than ever. I think they're calling it the
the lonely epidemic, right? But then going back to what you
said, and I was noting this down about time, attention and focus.
The other thing that people don't actually realize is the
subconscious messaging that's actually going on in your brain.
The amount of times I've seen somebody scroll through TikTok,
I'm listening to the words that are being said and then they'll
be like, oh, we need to go get some food in this place.
And they don't know where the thought came from, right?
And they don't realize that they're priming their brains
with micro messaging that they don't even control.
And that's when things get really, really interesting from
the anxiety that's that's forming to the fact that people
all want and want and want these things.
They don't even know why they want it.
So it's like, so there's like a quadruple factor there, right,
that people are not even paying attention to.
And the, I guess the flywheel or the butterfly effect of this is
going to be catastrophic if you don't.
This is I love the non playing character reference, which I
only heard last week and I thought brilliant.
That's absolutely brilliant and profoundly depressing because
the next great divide within society is going to be between
that that percentage of the population that has learned to
control their time, their focus and their attention and those
that haven't. And it will fall along socio
economic lines as well. You know, it will entrench, I
think a lot of of the inequalities that we're seeing
at the moment. I mean, you only need to look at
something like the smartphone free childhood movement to see,
you know, how professional parents, you know, centric it is
because, you know, those parents are tuning into those sorts of
content. They're reading long form books
by, you know, psychologists and educating themselves about this
stuff in the way that, you know, a single mother that lives in
inner city London doesn't have time to worry about everything
that may or may not be on their child's device or to understand
the neurolinguistic programming that's going on, you know, in,
in terms of what they're reading.
And obviously the the greatest barometer of that is the fact
that the tech entrepreneurs themselves don't allow their own
children to have these platforms, right.
So, you know, our children or those that are effectively being
lobotomized by these technology camp technology platforms are
going to be ruled by the children of the tech
entrepreneurs to foster their attention.
Anyway. It's that far too binary and
extreme of you because of course there's lots of graduation
within it. But unless we recognize, you
know, the risk we're doing, and I actually think talking to
parents and adults about their own weaknesses is a much more
compelling way to have the conversation about children's
habits and behaviours than it is to simply go ban the phone, stop
them having it, take them away, take them away.
It's not the phone, you know, it's, it's the content and the
dopamine and the addictive nature of what's on the phone
that's the problem. And I do believe kids are
growing up in this world, hence them as my son is getting to
grips with each aspect of the Swiss Army knife as and when you
know he needs it to enable his independence.
That's what I use it for. I want him, I believe in free
range parenting. You know, I dropped my 10 and 12
year old off in a town 4 miles away yesterday.
I went good luck, didn't get home and they did, you know,
they, they found a bus climb table they had, no, they didn't
have a debit card. So you know, they couldn't do
it. They had 10 lbs each and they
managed to find their way home and they came home a foot
taller, you know, because our generation doesn't parent like
that anymore. We properly overprotect and
coddle and think there's danger around every corner.
And that was the part of Jonathan's book that Jonathan
Haidt, you know, that never gets talked about.
It's all the phone end that gets talked about.
But the but. Not the other sort of slightly
riskier behaviour. Well, just the fact that we, we
can't just take the phone away without also opening up their,
their physical worlds more, you know, allowing them more
freedom, allowing them to get out and do things.
And they're being spaces for children to do that.
And that's the other problem. And something I would love to
address with Scroll Aware is there's no alternatives to the
phone. The only place for young people
to go to now is, you know, Burger King and McDonald's and
KFC and Wingstop. That's doing really well these
days, you know. And these are all funny ones are
the best. I like wingstops.
Yeah, Yeah. But we.
Need third spaces. You know, we need more
investments in the communities because the communities have
declined the high streets declined searches, you know, on
near nightclubs, they used to be nightclubs are closing like 10%
or something last year closed, clubs are closing.
It's it's tragic. And I would love to see this in
a real, the real lives of people, both your, your staff
and your customers becoming the next CSR agenda for business,
because it will ultimately solve a lot of the problems that CSR
does already. You know, it's looking at
inequality within society. You know, it's looking at mental
health, you know, people's mental health.
It's all related. And if if we can turn
intentional tech use into the next big CSR agenda and start to
see companies investing in the infrastructure of the
communities in which their people and customers live so
that every grassroots football team doesn't have to Scrabble
around for a local pub to sponsor their kits.
Instead, Night comes in or you know, Gym Shark comes in and you
know, L'Oreal comes in and sponsors drama clubs for kids
and you know, sort of anything grass roots in a community.
Let's see business and communities working together to
plug that gap in funding that exists in local.
Communities, it's worth noting you mentioned an opportunity
cost and we don't know what physical real world technologies
would now exist if there wasn't an extraordinary overinvestment
of speculative capital in information technology.
Yeah, actually. Grotesquely, you know, we'd be
flying around in single person drones by now.
But the the extraordinary thing was in a way that there were two
things. There was the opportunity to
capture network effects online combined with the fact that it
was comparatively unregulated. So you could do things very
fast, whereas we try and do something in the real world.
The regulatory and other hurdles are immense.
And so there is a fairpoint which is will we look back in
50-60, seventy years time and go, you know, rather like, you
know, I suppose the Victorians had a period where they were
disproportionately obsessed with railways.
Yeah. You know, will we look at this
and go, actually this was in a sense a completely imbalanced
way to invest our speculative capital?
Oh yeah. And I was.
I was going to say that I have this weird take on AI when we
talked about can AI solve this? I don't think it's going to do
it in a front facing way. I think that every time I see
headlines about jobs being cut because of AI or efficiencies, a
lot of the times it's work that's happening in the digital
space. So I'm thinking that AI is going
to like kick the humans out of the digital space in the digital
jobs and it's going to force us to look back in the real world
and start to innovate where we live.
Because right now the digital space is advancing and getting
better. But the real life world is
almost like getting no love. But eventually you're going to
have this whole generation and you're seeing this with a lot of
young people. The you almost like call them
the, the COVID graduates, right? All of them are finding it very
difficult to get into work. So what are they going to do?
They're going to create in the real world, right?
That's why there's this push for not being in technology.
There's not, you're not, you're not in the matrix, if you will,
right? So you have all these humans
that are living on Earth, but they're all in the matrix
building the matrix, whereas you can't even get from one side of
the US to the other on a train, right?
There's not advancements happening in the real world.
It's almost like we stopped and we're going backwards.
So hopefully what AI will do, because people are getting
pushed out of the Matrix and now into the real world, is going to
force innovation. Or what it's going to do is
you're going to have people that have a vast appreciation for the
arts, for humanity, for how we used to do things.
And then you'll have some people that are like vastly on one end,
the others that are vastly on the other end.
And I think that'll be, I think some, the CEO of NVIDIA said
that the next billionaires are going to be plumbers and
electricians, right? So because those skills are
needed, right? Like you try to get me to change
a pipe, I can't do it, right. But you tell me to build a brand
or do this etcetera, etcetera. I can do that, right?
And the other thing is you talked about the role of brands.
This is why my company and what we do is called community
marketing. Actually the best way for brands
to grow is to the work that the government used to do, right is
create grassroots Centers for people to connect.
And if you think about the Gym Shark store in Regent Street,
the the reason it was built was not to sell more gym clothes.
It was to be the next Starbucks, the next modern 2 Swords, to be
an area where people go to connect and bond over their love
for fitness, right? That used to be that role, used
to be played by someone else. Now brands have to play that
role. Right now, influencers play that
role. People like Mr. Beast play that
role. Because it sounds like that's
now becoming like the spot for anybody that's looking to grow
that business. It's almost a tragedy, though,
that they have to step into that.
Yeah. Because it's just we've lost the
appetite for communal consumption.
Yeah. In other words, that bizarrely,
consumption has become increasingly individual
realistic. I mean, nearly all
infrastructure spending in the United States significantly
stopped in the middle mid 70s. Yeah, Rd. building all the major
projects, you know, nothing much happened after that period.
And, you know, those things are always more, it's always more
time consuming to innovate in the real world because it
requires the agreement of a lot of different disparate
individuals before you can proceed.
And I always remember the the really interesting instance,
which was in terms of, you know, the future is unevenly
distributed. There was a sort of Sunday Times
photograph or something of someone in a court of lower
middle class Chinese household. And they had a sort of 65 inch
flat screen TV and a satellite rigged up in the roof, but they
shat in a hole in the garden. You know, You know, from my
British perspective, I thought slightly on priorities that, you
know, you, you, you prioritise your satellite TV over
sanitation. Then it occurred to me when of
course sanitation came first in the UK there were, you know,
public drain projects long before they were satellite
television. But secondly, you can install a
satellite TV without asking anybody else.
If you want to install public drainage, it requires an
extraordinary amount of cooperation.
You know that's the bottleneck. And so, yeah, the bottleneck
there is that we we undoubtedly progress much faster in things
which can be done individually than in things that require
collective action. And the miracle of 19th century
Britain in a sense, was that, you know, the extraordinary
ability to do things, you know, whether it was a Postal Service,
you know, the, the penny post or the railways, which were
effectively collective achievements for collective
benefit. And there's something there that
I think is, you know, you know, it is, it does worry me in a way
that brands have to play this space because it seemed to
happen from the bottom up. Yeah.
Fifty, 60-70 years ago, you know there was spontaneous
coordinated action with, you know, the free, you know the,
you know, the voluntary cooperation and coordination of
free people being the highest form of efficiency.
And that that talent seems to have deserted us.
Do you think that me and my Cofan have been having this
conversation and actually my dad is the one that first taught me
that the best way to actually develop a country is via a
benevolent dictatorship, right? Because then you have one person
saying we're going to get this done and not look at HS2, right?
Yes, that's something that everybody agreed is the right
thing to do. But because you have to get so
many people bought into it, it almost like stopped.
Literally billions spent before any track is laid.
Yeah. You know, now, if you can trust
that with the speed at which the railways were built or whatever,
yeah. You know, in the 19th century,
it's kind of painful. Terrifying.
And the tube. I was just thinking about the
tube. There's a new tube line coming
out. Quickly they built it and how
long it's taken to do HS2O. There's so much to unwrap in all
of those comments you know have we lost community spirit is your
question why do brands have to come into the into the fold I
mean yes, both can be true right you know I think it's the right
thing for brands to do to bring people together in person I went
to a fabulous event at the outer net brilliant.
It was all about events and Dino Fabian Riggle who was the
founder of Secret Cinema I've heard.
Of secret cinema. He's just setting up a new venue
in in London called Lost, which is designed to be this
labyrinthine place where you kind of get disappear.
You disappear and there's pianos and corridors and you never know
what you're going to get phones away as soon as you come in.
And you're supposed to get lost in this place because it's an
experience. But we live in this age where
brands are thinking or have been, I think today in very
simplistic terms, how do we turn our events into Instagram
content? There's a whole industry of all
of businesses that just build Instagrammable walls now that
you have to stand in front of before you get and holidays.
Every beach now has got one of those swings so that you can
take a picture and put it on your Instagram.
Look, tick, I've been there, done that.
Look at the one awesome life I have.
And I mean, people have said this for ages, but there's a
sheer number of people watching concerts through their phones
when they're in the concerts is it's so depressing, you know,
because they're never going to look back at it.
And the most visionary people. And this is where I, I, I do
feel optimism because I think the tide is turning, you know,
the, the more and more people are saying, no, you know, these
are my memories. I'm capturing them here and we
can take a photo outside if we want to remember the fact that
we're all here together. But you know, phones away.
We're we're present and you see Chris Martin, you know, asking
people, can everyone please, please this one song, put your
phone away and just be here in the moment, you know, live your
memories. Don't just capture them for to
to. Complain about this, by the way,
because they said the whole business of crowd reaction,
which used to be fundamental to your motivation in performing on
stage. In other words, in, you know,
you're no longer playing to an audience, you're playing to
cameras. And it's a completely different
feeling, Yeah. Comedians especially, they
couldn't test new material. Do you see what you mean?
Yeah. And and that was the whole
point, because it could be crap. And they're on camera actually
being crap. And they're like, hang on.
They ban it when you go to a comedian show, like they they
literally put it away. And I also heard that a lot of
the stage design now at concerts is actually built to almost like
look good on the phone because that's the best form of
marketing for the concert itself, right.
So getting people to go there to actually be like promo for the
for the band and then everybody else comes in to be more promo.
No one actually goes there to experience it and be present and
actually enjoy. It was one of these milkshake
chains where the milkshakes were not designed by the chef.
They were basically designed by the marketing director to be
Instagrammable rather than enjoyable because what, how they
looked were more important than how they tasted.
And it is a kind of grotesque distortion.
And it's really, it's a horrible distortion, I think caused by
the fact I, I, you know, I do kind of blame the phone because
I think it is by being portable and by demanding you carry
Everything Everywhere, which ironically is why EE is called
EE. Everything Everywhere is
actually a bit of a pain in the arse that there's a huge
downsize downside to this because our lives were healthily
compartmentalised by reality until that came along, including
the Internet, which was a thing you did at a particular place
and time. And you know, when I was, you
know, when I started work and I suddenly realized my young staff
don't even have any memory of this, which is when you're in
the photocopier room, you photocopied.
And when you're in a meeting room, you had a meeting and when
you're at your desk, you did desk like things.
And then when you went to the pub afterwards, you had pub
conversation and they were all neatly compartmentalized by
reality and kept water tight. And this thing has basically
messed that up. Means it's, you know, that we
forget the fact that we to some extent used place to achieve
focus. Because when I am here, there is
one thing I can do and it, it, it is genuinely upsetting.
I mean, there are other problems as well, which is probably we
talk about the scandalous content that, you know, is
generated in order to get attention.
So it's, you know, wildly attention seeking behaviour.
But there's a there's an opposite problem which is mild.
The mildly controversial has been completely frozen out.
In other words, there are two opinions which make sense to
hold in this world, which is a totally banal, you know,
politically correct, offensive to no one opinion.
And then something which which which effectively earns you no
opprobrium or sense who whatsoever or you can hold an
absolutely outrageous opinion. So if you are mildly left wing
or right wing. Get muted.
The same thing happens in advertising now, which is
there's a census wide report called the Voice of the CMO and
a huge number of CM OS say every time we produce a communication,
we're basically worried about backlash because people will
contrive all kinds of reasons to be offended.
And it they also think it's a massive limitation to creativity
because you can't be mildly provocative anymore.
You can only be boring or scandalous.
And you know, if you look at Avatar, I mean, we mentioned
friends that you know, one of the reasons I think Gen.
Z are watching friends. You couldn't make friends today
for all kinds of reasons, OK, because you know, it'd be
subject to all kinds of censor. Peep Show.
I was watching Peep Show. Another thing my daughter is
watches all the time. I don't think you can make that
now. You know, you couldn't make
faulty towers. No.
And you know, you know, I'm mildly worried about
advertising. I'm actually more worried about
comedy. Yeah.
The fact that it's now I'll. I'll give you an example of an
adverse. My brother had been in
California. It's quite an interesting
timeline, California in so this this chief marketing officer
survey by Census wide mentioned this fundamental fear that we
can't actually be mildly interesting anymore.
There are only two and both unattractive extreme positions.
So my brother had been in California, which was already
politically correct in 1993. It was already kind of consumed
by this kind of anxiety about someone somewhere might be
offended and he was missing kind of British banter.
And he came back and I dated exactly because it would have
been, I guess 1993 or something, shortly after the death of
Robert Maxwell. And he suddenly found himself on
the tube, convulsed in laughter because there was an ad for the
Sun on the tube opposite. And this was during the price
war between the Sun and the Daily Mirror.
And the Sun was still at 10 P and the Daily Mirror was at 30P.
And the ad for the Sun simply said the Daily Mirror now cost
30 P Don't go overboard to buy it.
This was shortly after the proprietor of the Daily Mirror
had basically fallen or jumped off his yacht to his own death.
OK. And my brother had felt so
deprived of this kind of bad inage and mischief in California
that he kind of had this moment of, like, I'm home again.
Yeah, no, it's something. You couldn't do that here now.
Yeah. Yeah.
Nothing. You know, some bereavement
group. In other words, there are a lot
of organisations which effectively confect offence or
outrage for their own purposes. And it's having a majorly
problematic effect, I think, on discourse because what we want
our children to be exposed to is, you know, mildly contentious
opinions. Absolutely.
And what a university should be is, you know, you know, it
shouldn't be Jordan Peterson and, you know, Andrew Tate all
the time. They have their place, I'm sure.
OK. But you should at least expose
people to opinions that are mildly discomforting and yet
that content doesn't. It's very, very difficult to
generate that content because, as I said, you're you're always
drawn towards one of two. Bizarre.
Dreams business model, that's what the attention of business
model is. It's in their business interests
to keep us outraged and or affirmed in our opinions, which
is why the attention economy has to by default set up or a view
of the world as a battle between good and evil people, of course.
And that's what it is. And of course that line runs
through the middle of each and every one of us, you know, and
if you think that you can understand Middle Eastern
politics on the basis of a 3 minute TikTok video, you know
you've got a problem. And yet there's people marching
that have done that, you know, that don't know which river and
don't know which city, you know, and that, but that's just one
example. And it and it's profoundly
worrying. I mean, one of the solutions
that I've I've tapped into is, you know, basically media
literacy and actually doing that work with children to understand
it's complicated stuff right now, the motivations of the
creator, you know, and where you get your content from.
And in the media and advertising world, there was a great debate
that I was at last week about the efficacy of quality media
buy versus social media media buy.
And apparently there's, you know, there's something like 15%
wastage when you buy social media ad spend, you know, and,
and the the effectiveness of, of sitting your adverts next to
quality journalism. And, you know, no.
No context. Context effects conviction
effectively, yeah. And, and the extent to which
the, to some extent, I, I would argue that the digital media
world has been desperate to commoditize everything.
And the metrics of marketing have been to some extent hacked
by the people like Meta and their own homework, their own
homework, OK. And, you know, they've managed
to infect with this idea of efficiency, the whole judgement
of, you know, what effective marketing is and reduced it to a
kind of bizarre competition to throw money at $2 trillion
companies. And I, you know, I think we, we
should hold ourselves responsible for this because I
think it's been, I mean, having said that, OK, the clients
themselves would much prefer to have numerical comparable
metrics than to actually engage in any kind of subjective
decision making. But if the metrics are there,
which they are. Yeah, the I mean.
And the CSR is there, yes. You know, that's when this
becomes a really interesting table that the brand should all
be set. At Well, the other interesting
finding, if you think about it, is that influencer marketing is
extraordinarily effective. And it occurred to me that's
because influencer marketing is to some extent the opposite of
what performance marketing is done.
You know, it lasts for a long time, the effects really endure.
You know, it has real humans and appears within a contextual
setting. And so, you know, it's
everything, which the other form of digital advertising isn't.
So we shouldn't be really surprised by it's success
because it's filling a void I think.
But what's going to be really interesting though, is that Meta
have just announced that they will soon be allowing people to
opt out of ads and allow them to pay £4 a month.
I think it's £3.99 a month to have a YouTube Premium X
experience, right? Right where they don't get any
ads. So what's going to happen back?
On the platform at that point, and this is weird from someone
working in advertising because if they can stop doing that
thing where they go so and so's just posted and I have no idea
from the e-mail whether it's because a child has died or
because their daughter has just baked a cake.
OK, And I am forced to go to Facebook to find out, OK, if
they can actually, you know, get themselves back into the
provision of consumer value and away from this absolutely
maniacal focus on hacking attention, then I'm back in
there. I mean, you know, I pay for
caggy.com, which is a paid for search engine because I no
longer trust Google to be in the business of telling me what I
want to know rather than in the business of telling me what
someone else wants me to know. And I've had enough bad
experiences where you end up paying $60.00 for that Canadian
Ester. You know what, CS, whatever it's
called, the kid, you know, the Canadian equivalent of an Ester.
Yeah. OK.
Well, the top search result is basically a company that sells
you something that should cost 14 Canadian dollars for 60.
Yeah, Well, unsurprisingly, the dishonest actor can outbid the
honest actor, in this case, the Canadian government in
effectively reaching the top of the search rankings.
Now, I'm sorry, if you're a trillion dollar company packed
with Stanford's PhDs, someone should have clocked this.
You know that we are effectively, we have an auction
mechanism which will undoubtedly privilege whoever is the highest
margin or or least honest actor in the marketplace.
You know, now you know, my argument is this is this is, you
know, this isn't rocket science. This is basic economics and
someone should have been alert to this.
And so this inshitification problem is really, really acute,
I think. I think it's going to be
interesting, though, going back to the argument about the fact
that currently influencer marketing is human and paid
media is robotic. Now that paid media's
effectiveness will start to go down, will advertisers put all
their money on creators and turn them robotic?
Because marketers are in everything, right?
The other thing though that worries me, I actually don't
think paying a premium for ads is going to solve a lot of the
problems that we're seeing in the attention economy because
the ads don't kind of, you know, they don't polarize you, they
don't addict you. You know, they don't, they're
not designed to be addictive. That you, you know, how
effective they are as a result. I don't know, some are.
I mean, I bought half my Christmas presents based on
Instagram advertising, but. Has the engagement that you put
in and the increased value that that has for the advertisers,
does that reduce because they're not trying to get you to engage
because? The business model of the
business completely changes if it's a subscription model.
I mean, it's interesting to see the popularity of the paper
publications like The Spectator, The New Statesman, The Week, it
said for The Economist, which are because they're
predominantly read by subscribers, their motivation is
to reward the reader rather than to hack attention because the
attention is already a given. These are the people who
subscribe. They're they're extremely
successful. I mean, I asked Michael Gove,
who edits The Spectator, if you close down every single digital
part of the publication, would you survive?
Oh yeah, yeah. They'd still make money as a
paper publication. And one of the interesting
things is, and this is a a marketing person at the FT who
first made this point, which is if most of our readers are
subscribers, we have to focus much more on effectively because
we can take their attention, you know, attention or at least
their money as a given. OK.
And our, our incentive then is to keep them as subscribers by
being as long term rewarding as possible.
So I would really miss having that on the mat on Saturday.
Whereas if you have an advertiser funded model,
effectively the advertiser isn't really appraised of the mood the
person's in when they're exposed to the message.
And so anything you can do to garner attention is sort of Fair
game. And of course, that will end up
with your race to the bottom. Yeah.
That's interesting. And, you know, you know,
essentially it's sort of you get what you pay for and, you know,
you know, and, you know, I, I would argue that.
And, you know, I think, you know, if we're going to be
really happy about this, a world where we pay for this stuff,
yeah, it's very difficult psychologically to get people to
pay for something they're used to having free.
Yeah. Extremely difficult.
And cynically, I wonder whether having learned the lessons of
attention, why wouldn't they just keep both, You know, if
they've got premium, if if people aren't complaining
themselves about the attention. I mean, and and and let's be
honest, creators do this for themselves.
Be interesting to see, you know, how as as this podcast takes
off, what you learn about algorithmically, you know, what
is the most effective real that you'll put out?
Because I've noticed so many of these creators that I've really
enjoyed become extreme versions of themselves.
It's called content capture, right?
Audience capture and they they play the game now you know,
they've all got the you'll never guess what this what this person
said and you know, the click make click bait is I just think,
oh, what a shame. I loved you because you were so
nuanced and now you're getting on more and more extreme guess
you're, you know, you're playing that click bait game and I've
I'm susceptible to it. I do click on it and I, I just
say I didn't want to click on that.
And it's not actually a good representation of what you were,
what your whole podcast was about in that moment.
It's cynical, but it it's playing the the clicks game.
I was on a podcast where the headline completely
misrepresented my opinion. I know how that was.
I had to get it taken. I've got it taken down because I
said at no point in this podcast did I say anything that was in
any way equivalent to the quote you'd attributed to me.
But it was simply optimized most for, you know, again, anger,
really. Yeah.
And so, so one of the reasons why when I, when I was speaking
to worry about this podcast was exactly that.
We said everything is about, well, we want to know people.
But then we want to be able to have almost like discussions
about things that are actually happening in the world and want
to do it not in a way to kind of like bait people out or to try
to get people to see them as extreme.
We actually want to humanize everybody, right?
It's almost like the space where you get the opportunity to
speak. You're allowed to speak your
mind and we have a human discussion around topics.
I think a lot of the times, especially in this world, as
soon as somebody doesn't align with your opinion, you almost
like shunned them to one side. Whereas really what you should
be able to do, and one thing that I learned really early on
was the fact that I should be able to sit next to somebody
that has a completely different opinion to myself, but I can
hear them out and try to understand why they think that
way. And I think that actually the
human bottleneck that's happening in society right now
is that people don't even give each other the courtesy to do
that. Right.
We, we always did that in pubs. I mean a standard pub table
would have around it people with opinions verging from fanatical
Marxists, you know, to, you know, you know, rabid right
wingers, OK. And they accommodated each other
partly because each of the people, particularly those with
extreme opinions, knew that there was a limit to how much
you could bang on before you became boring.
But of course, when you can effectively one, find a
completely receptive audience or secondly, you can continually
find new people to bore the usual constraints on being a
kind of single issue fanatic, which were simply social censor,
OK, no longer really applied. Another one that interests me
fascinatingly is trolling the people who just go online and
just are just randomly rude with no constructive point to be made
whatsoever. By the way, I I wouldn't see any
objection to taking that content down because it's worthless, OK,
You know, if it's just a gratuitous insult, I don't think
it falls under free speech. It's pointless.
But very interesting thing, in the 18th century in London, the
people who travelled along the river on the riverboats
routinely used to shout abuse at people on the bank, Just random
abuse, OK. And they just had wanker fatso,
whatever it might be. And we know this from Boswell's
Life of Johnson and the reason between us, if you think about
it, you had, in order to do that, to abuse someone without
the risk of consequences, there were very, very few situations.
You know that Monty Python scene, your mother was a
hamster. Well, your father was a hamster
and your mother smells of elderberries.
You can do that because you're in the wall of a castle and no
one can get at you. Okay.
There weren't many situations where taunting was possible
because either you were in a small community where people
knew who you were, so they'd bump into you again and then
beat you up. Or, you know, in a large city,
they could come after you and beat you up.
But if you're in a city of a million people, which was London
in the 18th century, and you're on a boat in the river, there
was no way they could get to you.
So there's this awful, terrifying thing which occurs to
me about human nature, which is it somehow in our nature, in the
rare, when it was rare to be able to abuse people, that was
our natural instinct. Yeah.
There were these rare occasions where you could abuse people
without consequences, and we naturally found that amusing.
And then you end up with, for example, anonymity online.
I mean, there are various people.
I think Scott Galloway makes the point, which is, yeah, you kind
of have the right to free speech but not to do it anonymously,
that they've always been anonymous.
Graffiti was anonymous, you know, vehicle.
But the extent to which people can just drift around
anonymously in this world without any effectively
reputational consequences attached to their actions?
That's a stretch on free speech. Yeah.
And once you get that. You know, in in other words, you
know, yeah, you, yeah, you have an absolutely right to say what
you like, but you do live with the consequences of what you
say. But that ability and the
temptation that then comes comes across effectively just to turn
yourself into a mindless abuse engine.
You know, it's not something we evolved to cope with.
That's what I'm saying. You know, whereas we have
evolved all kinds of mechanisms for dealing with ourselves in
non anonymous groups of 150 people, you know, those are self
policing to a large extent, as are smaller online communities.
Of course you know they're self policing and perfectly amicable.
Yeah. When you look at like platforms,
like LinkedIn for example, there's a billion users on the
platform, but only 1% of the people on the platform actually
engage or post, right? Well, I think it's 40% of the
people actively engaged with posts on LinkedIn, but only 1%
actually create. It's because of that very
reason. Not only is your name there,
your picture there, your jobs there, right?
So you're a little bit more conscious about what it is that
you put out there because there's consequences, right?
It's not like you're driving in New York and you can yell at the
person and then keep driving because everybody's just yelling
at people. Yes, it's almost like you're at
the stop and people know who you are.
And if you really want to say something, it's because you
actually mean it, right? When I go down to East Kent, far
enough away from London, if someone, if you're in it, if
you're driving along next to a row of parked cars and someone
waits for you and you don't give them a wave of thanks, that's a
pretty major social infraction. Yeah.
And so levels of politeness and general sort of concern for each
other undoubtedly seems seem to correlate to degree.
In other words, the likelihood that I'll, I'll tell you
something. I used to travel in first class
by train from 7 Oaks. On the train, OK, you would
never see anybody who boarded at 7 Oaks or Tunbridge or
Tunbridge, well, sitting in a first class seat without a first
class ticket because if they got called out, OK, you know, it was
a matter of social embarrassment.
Someone on the train would know who they were.
Once you got to Orpington or Bromley South or something, all
bets were on OK because you've reached that level of population
density where nobody expected to encounter anybody ever again.
And so, you know, I mean, we're not really designed for worlds.
I include big cities in this. We're not really designed for
worlds in which we don't expect to meet the same people more
than once. Yeah, and it was, it always
struck me as there there was also a friend I had who used to
travel to Petersfield. I think there was one train a
day on Southwestern which didn't stop until Petersfield.
And the people who lived in Petersfield Oblong beyond loved
that train because the level of courtesy and kind of deference
to each other on that train because it didn't stop anywhere
with a high density population was just delightful.
You know, like sort of lives like the Railway Children.
It was a charming old fashioned train atmosphere.
And so, you know, there are, there are, you know, we've
undoubtedly suddenly exposed ourselves to effectively not
just the information environment, but a social
environment to which we're, you know, our evolved brains have
left us completely unprepared. And, you know, and you know,
you're absolutely right to say, I mean, you know, we have to,
you're, you're right also to be healthily ambiguous about this
because I'm always, you know, I always make this point that, you
know, it's very easy to want a Black Hat, white hat,
everything. And if you take some like
Airbnb, well, there are areas where I think Airbnb is actually
wonderful. You know, there's some farmer
who's got some crappy outbuilding, which you can turn
into a source of revenue and people can spend the weekend
there and it's all wonderful. And then you go to Barcelona and
you kind of go, it's more profitable to rent a 2 bedroom
apartment for 9 weekends of the year to Airbnb is than it is to
actually rent it as a full time residence to a local Barcelona.
And you go, that's actually kind of shit, isn't it?
You know, that's actually, and then you go to Barcelona and
effectively all it is, is people Wheeling suitcases through the
streets to go to their various Airbnb's.
As you know, I mean, this is the interesting thing.
Now we've, you know, maybe we can use technology to, you know,
we can ultimately start to self correct.
But I think the problem we've got is that, I mean, weirdly,
although I'm, you know, politically to the right of most
people at my office, they're much more naive in their
enthusiasm for free market capitalism than I am in some
respects. In that, you know, it's
automatically assumed that the perfect purpose of a company is
to reward its shareholders, which I don't accept.
In fact, in fact, I think the companies that pursue that route
aren't actually very good at rewarding their Shell
shareholders in the long term because they tend to neglect
their customers. Who's the most of them and.
So 10/15/20, forty years ago, everybody in television, in
advertising, et cetera, would have moral discussions about the
consequences of what they did. And what free market economics
has created is a kind of very narrow utilitarianism, which
effectively makes it possible to sort of justify more or less any
self interested position you hold.
And David Ogilvy didn't believe he thought that billboards were
immoral. So they're the most prominent
advertising person in the 19, you know, 50s and beyond until
the 70s. And his argument was they broke
the contract with the public because if you advertised on
television or if you advertised in The Washington Post or the
New York Times or whatever, OK, you were funding the surrounding
content. So everybody won the advertiser
benefit. The consumer benefited, the
publication benefited. It was part of a kind of kind of
benign feedback loop, which was, you know, essentially a win win
for all three parties. He argued that the Billboard
benefited the landowner and it might have benefited the
advertiser, but to the detriment of the passers by who had to
cope with an ugly their environment because of the
Billboard. Now, you could actually, I mean,
digital billboards you can make useful, by the way,
technologically, you know, you can have weather forecasts and
cube information in amongst the ads.
So you might argue that a digital billboard could
actually, you know, meet David Gulvey's moral criteria.
Certainly if it's a bus shelter or something, you know, rather
than the middle of an area of outstanding beauty.
But nobody really has. I mean, part of the problem of
the, you know, of sort of neoliberal consensus is that
nobody really has these moral discussions anymore about the
second order consequences of the things they do.
We need a chief philosophy officer, particularly in these
AI companies, you know, the ability to actually think
through the ramifications of where these models would get.
I'd like to give the attention economy the benefit of the doubt
that they didn't intend to become the addiction economy.
The more that this evidence comes out and the more we see
our most base human behaviours monetized, you know, and, and
the, and the proof continues to mount up and up and up as to
what it's doing to loneliness and mental health and anxiety
and sleep deprivation and polarization and you know then.
I think some, I think it's mostly unintentional in a sense,
but what happens with a large company is you compartmentalize
it and everybody is responsible for their own narrow part of the
whole. And when you, when you get a
whole bunch of people optimizing the parts, the whole can turn
toxic. So it is a problem that other
than the CEO and maybe two or three people, there's no one
there who's rewarded for taking the holistic view of what this
business is about and what it does, because everybody else has
their own little weird. I'll give you a lovely example.
Someone who does retail advertising was asked to stop
advertising because it was very successfully selling premium dog
food and they said you've you've just told us it's very anything.
I know, but I'm bonused on margin, not on profit.
And the margin on our own brand dog food is higher than on the
premium dog food as a percentage.
Consequently, I get a bigger bonus if we sell a lot of low
priced, low profit, but high percentage margin own brand dog
food. Whereas if we sell the premium
dog food, every single case is out.
So you literally end up with these utterly stupid forms of
gamification of the system. And it's, it's all a product of
this idea that you have to effectively construct a company
from individual parts. And I've argued about online
retailers for ages that they would sell more, a lot more, if
they gave people a choice of who delivered.
Because people have strong preferences.
Some people have stronger versions.
People like to know sometimes that I'd pay Amazon extra quid
just to put the fucking thing in the post.
If I'm ordering Ausb cable, I don't want a van coming up the
drive, you know, just to deliver.
It's not really Zen as in, you know, postman's coming anyway.
You might as well drop it off. And yet because that decision is
taken by a procurement function within the company, which is
principally motivated by the amount of discount they can
negotiate and would not be rewarded by the fact that you
had 20% more customers as a consequence of this decision,
you end up with this fundamental thing of things that are micro
rational but macro stupid and companies are becoming, and of
course very, very large companies.
Effectively, these individual silos run away with their own
daft metrics. And so a lot of it, you know,
there's someone there who is basically, you know,
incentivized on the basis of attention, who has no concern
whatsoever as part of their job description for the quality of
the attention or the mood the person's in while that attention
is actually being earned. I think the conversation needs
to be had much more seriously. And I think the one part of
society that's not at the table to have that conversation,
bringing it back to why I'm here is, you know, how do we bring
the brands and famous individuals together to have a
seat at the table and say, look, what what can we do about this?
You know, how far are we responsible or can we help drive
a more healthy way of living our lives?
You know, where we sell the benefits of community.
You know, we just fell down that rabbit hole around, you know,
polarization and and the lack of mixing and trolling online.
The antidote to that is people colliding more and making more
eye contact in the real world, you know, and I think that is an
antidote. I think more sport is an
antidote, more art and culture is an antidote, more event is is
an antidote. You know, hobbies.
And the irony is that so many advertisers and brands in the
world are selling embodied real world experiences, right?
You know, they're selling venues.
They're selling. Well, live music is an
extraordinary phenomenon. Yeah, live music, events, food
and drink, hospitality, sporting goods.
Travel and leisure, yeah. These are all products designed
to be enjoyed in company, you know, or in place in the real
world. And yet the brands are spending
60 to 70% of their marketing budget to keep people further
addicted for three to four hours on on in these platforms now.
You could. You could actually, if you
describe the problems of the modern world, excluding things
like war, famine, etcetera, not my area of specialism.
A large part of it is two things.
It's that the cost of property in real estate soaks up too much
of our discretionary income and screens soak up too much of our
discretionary time. You can find a solution to those
two things. Well, I think the point where
the brands are concerned is not to scare them and say stop
spending, stop buying your media there.
No one's an idiot. You know, there's great content
there. It's where the eyeballs are.
There's great engagement, there's great relevancy.
But there is a question to say, we'll come together and let's
talk about what responsible looks like.
Let's talk about, you know, where how we can drive trusted
media and work with them as advertisers.
Perhaps we can start putting end screens, you know, around our
content. They say now get offline and do
or take a break. You know, almost like the.
Drink responsibly. Campaign because everything is
fine in moderation. It's addiction that we need to,
we need to watch for and and create more boundaries and and
and breaks around and. It's just boundaries and breaks.
It's not bands. Is it is it is difficult to
recreate the kind of Jonathan Haidt acceptance of risk in
childhood that your child would come home having fallen out of a
tree. I mean, what was weird is that
when I was about 9 or 10, I'd cycle 8 miles to Monmouth to see
my grandmother. When I was about 15.
My parents couldn't believe that they allowed me to do it.
And that was, you know, the space of about 5 or 6 years that
there were things I did, you know, I used to climb up on the
roof of the house and just sit on the apex roof and climb out
of a skylight and, and barefoot and just climb and just scuttle
all over the roof. OK.
When this was literally when I was like, you know, 8 or 9, my
parents didn't know I was doing it, admittedly, OK, but they
wouldn't have had an absolute heebie jeebie fit if they'd
known I was doing it. But, you know, they was just
accepted that that and, and that seemed to happen.
And we don't quite know why. But of course, it's very
difficult because the level of blame you're exposed to just
what I mean. Previously, if something bad
happened to your kid, the default mode would be sympathy.
Yeah, and now it's blamed. You're a bad parent.
And of course, the fewer people
who allow their children to run around in the streets, the
vastly more at risk those people are.
There's a lot of arguments though that parents are waking
up to the fact that the paedophiles are not on the
street, they're all on the Internet.
You know, the overprotection in the real world versus the under
protection in the online world is absolutely paramount.
And there's statistics like you'd have to leave your child
outdoors on their own for 150,000 years for them to be
abducted. Is that?
Yes, I know, I know. But statistics are no good when
we live in a doom economy and one abduction is wall to wall
coverage for, you know, three months.
And then and and I think it was Jonathan who raised in his
previous book the fact that it started in the 80s because they
would put missing children on milk cartoons.
And you think what a brilliant idea you can publicize.
Children that are missing. But it put the prospect of
children being abducted on every breakfast table in America
overnight and suddenly kids stop being blared out.
And that was around the time that we started to get news
channels where obviously to fill their schedules, they follow
these stories. And you know, so we lived in
this heightened sense of it was called the doom economy.
And that happened even before social media and social media is
now recognized that the doom economy really works so that we
put more and more of the doom into into social media.
So we have this very, very warped sense of the safety of
the world that we live in, whereas the statistics are in
minuscule and negligible and and parenting has changed massively,
you know, but I'm having a lot of conversations with my
generation of parents who do over parent massively about
these these sorts of things and I'm arranging how.
Frightened were you when you dropped your children off what,
5 miles from home with £10 each and told them to work out how to
get their own way home? I was a little, I was a little
anxious, but we've been, I mean, I've been trying more and more
of these experiments because I'm very familiar with the data on
it. And I have to say, the fact that
my eldest has a phone gave me a lot of reassurance.
So this is where the phone actually plays into these
opportunities and trends. To ever find my I.
Knew that he could. And this is what parents are
asking, even on dumb phones. I said we would get a dumb
phone, but we want tracking. Yeah.
And actually, I think that's a good technology.
It's Peace of Mind to know where they are.
And the fact that, you know, he's got to go, Henry means
worst case scenario, he can get on the bus.
Also, by the way, it means you need to ring them up much less.
Yeah, because you just, you can basically interpret where they
are and what they're doing. And if you need to go and fetch
them, you don't have to have 5 coordinating phone calls about
where they happen to be, which was usually all bar one in
Tunbridge Wells in my experience.
But, and actually I think there's also an interesting
point which someone needs to make, which is these kids are
going to leave home, they're going to go to university.
And in my experience, it was their most helicoptered children
who went most catastrophically off the rails.
Because in sense you haven't actually learned boundaries or
you haven't learned a kind of sensible risk tolerance.
And so if at that moment you decide to reject your own
parents risk values rather than just going a bit over the line,
which is a totally healthy and same thing to do, there are
people who just go bonkers. Yeah, I mean, we don't even let
we don't let kids make mistakes as small children.
You know, all these middle class parents shouting across the soft
play. Share Share Johnny, It's.
Like eight place. Proceeds let them be a little
shit because they'll learn the hard way that no one will want
to play with them. We don't have to intervene on
everything. Let them fall off unless there's
going to be a serious head injury.
Let. But soft play itself has
changed, apparently. The way that brains break
because kids don't steal themselves for falls anymore.
You know, rubberized playground. Book.
It was someone's book where they were.
No, I know I'll remember his name in a second, but he won't.
One writer in America was complaining about the fact that
underneath climbing frames there was sort of padding and it was
rubberized. I remember having a climbing
frame in my local village where the ground was concrete, which
actually even at the time struck me as a bit extreme because
there is risk of serious brain injury.
We'd, let's face it, in the ancestral environment, we'd fall
onto grass or leaves or something.
OK. And the congruent, you know, I'm
trying to remember who it was. He wrote about that as a
fascinating writer and he he's very much in vain against this
culture of effectively not giving people the opportunity to
test their own risk tolerances, which means they're, you know,
their instincts for what's sensible and what's crazy don't
really develop properly. I thought he was a bit extreme
in that, but I mean, he's it is very interesting how also it's
worth noting, of course, that let's be honest, to a lazy
parent that you know, the one eyed babysitter is bloody
convenient because because you plump a child with you, you
plump a child with a tablet. Yeah, a tablet.
Basically, you've got 2 hours to yourself, yeah.
Yeah, it's the square. Repair it.
I'm a bit equally terrifying, you know, and I've have found
since opening up this, this, you know, this conversation that
I've become like a priest and a confessional.
You know, the 1st 10 minutes of every meeting I have involves
them saying how horrified they are at seeing these devices
shoved into push chairs and how worried they are about their own
attention and focus and depressed they feel walking
around the world and sitting on a train and everyone's lies down
and their children. Everyone talks about their
children and their risks there. And I used to stop them and say,
yeah, I know that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.
And I thought, no, no, no, no. Let them talk themselves into
the problem area. And I say, I cannot keep having
this. Everybody worrying about this on
a personal basis and not being prepared to jump the chasm into
the professional conversation. And that is what needs to
happen. Now we've got and, and as we're
demonstrating amply, I think within this conversation, we
don't know what the solutions are, but we do know we need to
come together to think and talk responsibly.
Because it's only by coming together that we can have a
voice that can ask these questions, that can sit down in
collaboration with the platforms and say, you know, what can we
do about this and how can we? As the people that do impact
culture so significantly with our fame, with our passion for
what we do, with the eyeballs and the fans that we attract,
whether that's Ben, who you're talking to tomorrow and Jim
Shark and they're they're great. You know, huge number of fans or
it's the it's the influencer that does, you know, St. dance
or whatever it might be. How can we use our influence on
culture to actually say this stuff?
Analogue is cool, you know, and we need to reclaim time for it
because the street dancing is analogue, you know, the content
about it isn't, but the street dancing is.
Don't just watch it, do it, you know, and that, or it's
gardening or it's cooking or it's bird watching.
You know it. We've got to get these things
back into a healthier balance for our own sanity and take some
of this overwhelm out of the world because the businesses
will find this productivity gains in their own people as
well. You know, there's CSR value in
it, but there's also brand and marketing power because this
zeitgeist is shifting, you know, with, you know, Gary Vee saying
that 26 is will be the year of unplugged.
That's his prediction that next year will be, that will be the
biggest trend of 2026 Gen. Z is waking up to.
So there's only opportunity, opportunity, opportunity, but
people need to come together, I think, to have that
conversation. And that's ultimately what I
would love, love to convene in some way in full
acknowledgement. We don't have all the answers,
but it has to be a positive conversation, antidote based,
positive, bringing soul back in as something that's actually
cool to talk about. I've also got a weird one, which
is I think driving lessons should start at school.
No, no, no. I think that I know it sounds
very weird, but I think the car isn't anti.
You know, one of the things that always bothers me is that if
you, the car is an extraordinarily important kind
of rite of passage. Being able to drive, being able
to move around your parents, accepting that you are going
places on your own. And, you know, I think there are
all these kind of weird problems which, you know, we've demonized
the car, but, you know, or, or, you know, other forms, mopeds,
whatever they may be. OK.
But actually, you know, one of the things I think would be
quite beneficial is maybe if we had a kind of 15 year old
vehicle that people could use to get around in France.
I, I can't remember you. You can use a moped.
Yeah, they are bloody dangerous. I'm going to acknowledge that.
But you can use a moped younger than you can drive a car, can't
you? That's one of the reasons why
there are a lot of French people buzzing around on these things.
I mean, something like that. So that they could actually, you
know, people could socialize autonomously for three or four
years earlier than they currently do.
I love this conversation first and foremost, especially as
somebody that's probably like made my my career in digital
space. The more that we're having
conversations like this, the more we're giving brilliant
people like yourself the platform to able to wonderful
this conversation. It's been amazing.
Really opened my mind and really great to have you back.
Anytime I can't, I can't. I don't talk about this enough,
but it's more in the spirit of us all having this conversation
more so I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to.
Everybody thinks about the opportunity cost more of the
time because I think the concentration of conversation is
all about the evils of the thing itself, which doesn't quite
land. Whereas once you mention the
opportunity cost, the other words what you could have been
doing when you were mindlessly scrolling.
Time and attention. Our ability to focus.
Focus, yeah. So important.
We lose that at a peril as a society.
Those, to my mind, are the greatest risks to us as as
humanity. And yes, there's harms, but time
and our attention. It is so precious and what we
give it to dictates the lives that we will have or won't have.
Well, and that, that's perfect. Amazing.
I love that.