Why did you ignore that? And how did you do it? Where was your head at?

Yeah.

So look, I was taught by my parents, rent money is dead money.

We came from a reasonably well-off family.

My mum was a nurse, dad was a doctor.

And so it was just that mentality of, I guess, middle UK effectively, that you'd always buy your own home.

It was poor people that rent and that was the way it was.

How do you and the family kind of go

So in your world, where people are constantly distracted, what actually captures them on all attention?

That is a great question for our time, because we are probably the most distracted we've ever been.

And I, you know, one thing, it's another misconception.

that I hear a lot is that consumers' attention spans are less than those of goldfish.

That is actually not true.

In fact, there's never been any study comparing human attention spans to goldfish.

No one's ever studied the attention of goldfish that I'm aware of.

What do you mean by that? We don't need more hacks.

yeah like so so has this spiritual side of you um which is like so deep right like how has that shown up in like the work that you do with your clients

Man, that's a really good question, Jason.

They all, I think a lot, like anything in life, our guy Hector's recording this, and he does jiu-jitsu, and I think that my, what he would get, and my whole point of this is that- I can get it too.

Yeah, sorry, sorry, I'm sorry.

My whole point of it, I'm trying to make an analogy that might not land, but my whole point of it is I get better at things when I see how they play into my life in general.

So jiu-jitsu is something you do on the mats, but the principles play in your life in general.

There's marketing principles that you can just apply to marketing, but these principles could be used as a husband, a father, a friend, or whatever.

I wonder what your current living question might be.

In that VP role, can you talk to us a little bit about that and maybe help us understand how do we get to Mr. Chris Gray who's standing in front of us or as some people may be running on their treadmill or walking down the road that is in our ear?

Good question, Billy.

I was back in corporate America at an office.

Very successful team.

I wasn't the best from a technical standpoint in what I did.

I just had really good teams.

Always had good cultures, good teams.

Because almost 11 years later, it's still a thing.

Now, Chris, what are some of the most powerful cognitive biases businesses should understand?

You know, cognitive biases are interesting because we all have them.

There is no shame and no one should feel guilty about having cognitive biases.

That's just how our brains are built.

Cognitive biases are simply mental shortcuts that our brains use to keep us, you know, as efficient as possible.

And so we take these mental shortcuts as a way of being able to function in the world.

And I'll give you some examples.

Do you think AI-generated marketing will make persuasion more effective or more hollow And the second one is what are your concerns, you know, about modern advertising and influence systems?

Have there been any other more tangible benefits?

Well, I mean, because of the fact that the whole issue is so kind of so complicated, and now we've been out for a few years, you know, it's always possible to sort of, you know, point to this or that policy that someone personally might like that wasn't possible before or personally might dislike.

You know, the VAT on private school fees, say something like that.

But I mean, there's not really very much point in trying to talk about those benefits in the, in, in, in the abstract.

You know, you, you, you can only talk about it in terms of a cost-benefit analysis.

And on those terms, in economic terms, I mean, there is no, not really any sort of serious room for debate.

The issue which is, which is obviously me- less amenable to quantification, but in some ways is more important, is what have been the geopolitical consequences of it? Now, some of that you could argue is less predictable than the economic consequences because we didn't know at that point about Trump one, let alone Trump two.

What do you think about the Customs Union option? Because that's often talked about, but there are severe problems with it, aren't there?

Chris, what do you think did for him in the end? Was it, was it the public loathing, you know, far in excess of any hatred we've seen before for any previous PM, frankly? Was it the U-turns? Was it the failure to communicate a vision? Was it Peter Mandelson?

It was probably all of those things, wasn't it? But my take on this, I think, would be that Starmer, and not uniquely Starmer and the Labour Party, they've been profoundly destabilized by populism.

And I know we'll talk about Brexit later, but you know, that moment at the referendum for Labour, everyone knows how traumatic that all of that has been for the Conservative Party.

But I don't think it's sufficiently recognized how traumatic it was for the, for the Labour Party.

And I think that is because people on the populist right will always want to say, "We speak for the silent majority," and everyone thinks, "Oh, no, you don't." And then there's a, a vote, and actually, at that moment, it seems as if the answer is yes, you know, um, that they can command a majority.

And I think for Labour, that was deeply traumatizing, 'cause it's basically saying, well, you believe that you speak for the people against the elite, and it's a kind of like an affront if you don't.

And it seems to me that although it certainly didn't start then, and you can see it going back far before that, that that accounts for this kind of neuralgia about constantly trying to appeal to a very outdated and declining part of the Labour electorate, and somehow seeing the new Labour electorate As being not really somehow proper, not being a kind of authentic working class to be represented.

Yeah

That's one of the reasons I was excited to bring you on to talk about this.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is the name of the game, and that is the strategy.

So Google is much like Facebook or YouTube or Instagram, where the goal is to keep people on platform.

And you don't think of Google like that because Google's not a social media platform, really.

It's a, you know, it's a search, an AI, and things like that.

For Facebook, for example, if we have clients or when we have, um, when we're running ads on Facebook, I have two clients.

So how are you helping your clients navigate that process?

Mm.

You know, it, and it's probably one of the simplest things to fix is, you know, especially in today's world with, you know, you've got virtual VAs, virtual bookkeepers.

You know, it's, it doesn't have to be expensive to get somebody in to start managing the books and making sure that the money's where it needs to be.

Because if you're tracking it, I often find that-Construction owners are less likely to just go raid the till when they need cash.

If they're tracking it and taking care of it like a business, not just kind of a personal ATM, then they're gonna be a lot less likely to run themselves into the ground by overspending in a lot of ways.

But [clears throat] the next thing that I'll oftentimes see is that as they start to grow, you know, their reputation starts to precede them.

They start to, you know, get known in their local area or their industry as somebody who does good work.

Ah.