00:00 Did that for four and a half years before joining a startup agency called Social Chain in the early days. I'd go up onto industrial estates and like try and get past the gatekeeper. The 4.6 review on Amazon is something like 45 % more effective than the five-star review. People do not trust the five-star review. It's probably a good time to ask. I heard, and you might shut me down for this and say there's no...

00:28 truth to it but I heard a rumour that social chain had no outbound. Went to the US with all the naivete's that you do. Social chain was really gaining traction in the UK as an outlier for social media marketing and the world's biggest brands knocked on the door every week got to the US, Stephen went over, I went over and we realised that no one cared.

00:55 Where is that next level of disruption in marketing? Where do you see that if you were selling your crystal ball? Artificial intelligence. I think in the future there will be one vehicle in lane for hyper-personalised minority report style advertising content where the world augments around you and it's truly personalised and you're seeing cognitive dissonance at scale, people denying what's in front of them, copywriters saying, yeah, this is not very good.

01:23 I promise you if you use Clawed and put in a good prompt it will write better than 99 % of people on the planet today. Over half of the smartest people in the world that understand AI at a deep technical level said there was a 10 % or greater chance that artificial intelligence will contribute to the annihilation of mankind.

01:50 Today we're joined by the great Oliver Yonchev. Oliver was one of the principal decision makers, one of the founders and one of the leaders at Social Chain, which you may know as Stephen Bartlett's company. He sent the business onto great things, was integral in launching it in the US, and now he's on to doing even bigger things. What did you learn, Jack?

02:14 This conversation was incredible. talk about marketing, the future of marketing, belief systems, resilience, and we got into technology and AI. So if you are a budding marketeer or you're wondering what the future might hold when it comes to business, this is one that you're gonna love.

02:35 Oliver welcome to the podcast. How are you? Yeah, I'm good. I'm feeling good. It's Tuesday. I'm Good good very honored to have you here today I've been following you on socials for a while and we're excited to pick your brains today I'm gonna hit you with a big open question to start so prepare I could have prepared you beforehand and Who are you and what problem do you solve?

03:02 who are you? He went really deep and heavy straight. This is a side point, but I'm going to say it because I think it's relevant. So I remember the first time I was asked that in a formal setting, who are you? And someone pointed out to me that every time I would respond, I would talk about my profession first. I would say, I'm Oliver of X, this is my job.

03:26 And it was a real eye-opener to me how attached I became to my career and professional pursuits. So when you ask me that, who am I and what problem do I solve? I'm not gonna default to what I do professionally because I feel that we're all a little more multifaceted than the thing we do to have money. who am I? I'm a delusional optimist. I'm a failed indie rocker. I know we kind of share that in some capacity.

03:56 And I'm a marketer. love business. I love trying to understand people and marketing is the perfect vehicle vehicle for that. It's the intersection between business and understanding people. And that's what I've chosen to do for profession. And what problems do I solve? There's three areas I'm focused on right now. Using technology to augment marketing and marketing teams. That's one. And the second is.

04:24 marketing more broadly, is helping companies, individuals, brands build a reputation, build a brand and grow. That's kind of the the two pursuits I've chosen. OK, there's I'm probably going to lean into the failed indie rocker. I don't want to touch too much on it, but it's sore. don't think too big. there's probably a couple of different paths you could take from there.

04:52 But in terms like rejection or creativity, guess, what were some of the biggest lessons that you took from that pursuit at younger age that you've applied throughout your life? Yeah, my pursuit into music was never that intentional. I actually wanted to be a football player. And my mother took me to drum lessons when I was about 15. And I kind of got a hook for it. I got an injury when I was going into the kind of semi-pro.

05:22 League at 16, the first time you're about to be paid to play football. And I just had to pick a college degree. I was doing drumming, so I picked music production. And because my peer group and friends, I formed a band there, people I was hanging out with, I kind of disconnected with sport because I'd missed the season altogether and just became obsessed with drumming and music. So it was almost accidental, the path I went on. And as a result, I don't think there was ever that much.

05:51 pressure to make it work. was kind of stumbling my way through acquiring new skills. What music did teach me is performance, pressure. I think creativity is a superpower. I would argue it's a bigger superpower in very stale professions. Everything's creative. If you want to be the best engineer in the world, you probably have to be quite creative. You need to think of new ways to combine.

06:19 inspiration and ideas to get new outcomes. So creativity has always been a kind of thread of my career, but an unintentional one. And it's only in retrospect that I look back and really appreciate what an advantage it's given me when I did, I was in media sales for a few years, running agencies, running marketing teams. Creativity has always been at the foundation of that. So yeah, I'm very grateful for my mini soiree into banging drums.

06:50 Why did the music career come to a stop or is that too personal? It's so, I don't know about personal. We didn't have our Oasis moment, but what we did have, so my brother was the singer and he fell out with the guitarist. We had a record deal. We'd recorded our album. We got number three in the Indie charts. Wow. Released our first single and my brother and the guitarist fell out. Apparently musicians are a bit temperamental. Got egos. Allegedly.

07:18 Who knew that was a thing? They fell out. My brother's seven years older than me. So he was at a time where for me and the other bandmates, we were very young. So we didn't have commitments or responsibilities. It's quite nice getting your kind of cash advance and blowing it and doing all the things you do. You don't need money at that age. My brother was in a slightly different position and just decided that it wasn't for him. And without a lead singer, we just never rekindled.

07:48 So what's the path from there to marketeer? University. I know it's not a popular word in entrepreneurship. In entrepreneurship, you're supposed to say, fuck university. It's a waste of time. But I'd kind of finished music. It was August, I believe. So I didn't have many choices. I looked at clearing and I saw a course that was music and promotion at Huddersfield University.

08:17 So I thought, know what, I know music. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but that made sense to me. got on the course and half the modules were music related, everything from room acoustics to music, music law through to production. And on the other side of the course, there was PR. I did a typography module. It was this really eclectic mix of different things.

08:47 And I started to find myself really enjoying the marketing modules and I didn't know marketing was a career, I didn't know what agencies were. But I started to learn and then following university I went on a graduate program for a large media owner called Bauer Media and that was a jumping off point into a media sales career. Did that for four and a half years before...

09:12 joining a startup agency called Social Chain in the early days and that had a real accelerated trajectory in terms of growth and through that I suppose it was a soft entry into entrepreneurship for me. I really want to lean into that bit obviously we're sales nerds so you left university you're a failed indie rocker you've got this creativity and you find yourself working in sales.

09:40 What was the feeling around that at the time? I'd done quite a lot of it, to be honest. I was doing sales for telecoms part-time when I was in university. I went and sold recruitment advertising on the phone for the Sheffield Star. It a great job. You'd get to design the little thing that went in the paper. This little tool you could design, design the recruitment ads.

10:06 And then I went on to do it in a more formal capacity and I got a lot of sales training. What was really interesting about, I was doing primarily radio sales. And what was really interesting is you're selling inventory, ideas. I would say expensive thin air, right? You're selling audience. So in one respect, it's quite a challenging product to sell. In another respect, it's a really fulfilling one. have to be, there's a thing called the creative led cell, you know?

10:36 And radio, or audio as a medium is a wonderful vehicle for that. If I show you something, that's very literal. If I tell you a story about something, you have theatre of the mind. You paint your own picture, you recreate that image yourself. So as a medium, audio is extremely powerful. So I learned some fundamental tools and I had great mentors, sales mentors. You know, they were very rigid KPIs.

11:02 I remember having to have 15 meetings every single week. know, we'd have, I'd go up onto industrial estates and like try and get past the gatekeeper. So it was a receptionist, you'd walk into some solar company. And the thought, I think if people heard that today in like modern sales, this is not going back that long, but I'd literally physically drive up to a location and speak to them and say, I represent.

11:29 this radio station, I'd love to come to speak to the founder. And I always used to take things like cupcakes. I'd take many bribes. I'd show up. And I became, I kind of learned the art of rejection as a skill of not taking it personally. And I had a fair bit of success because I was very early in using LinkedIn as a vehicle to.

11:57 I suppose, open up doors and opportunities in a sales sense. So yeah, I learned some of the skills of copywriting and how to capture attention. And some of it was taught formally. Many of it you kind of learn through facing lots of rejection, lots of no's, doing uncomfortable things. I speak to a lot of people that are now in marketing that first started in sales. When you were doing that and you were turning up at offices, was there ever the feeling of like,

12:26 I wanna be doing what they're doing. That looks so much more fun. Or were you like, I'm just gonna incorporate marketing into this sales role and make it a bit of a dual weapon? I don't know. I don't think I was ever that intentional. I used to earn a very good living in sales. And that for me at the time, know, I'm early 20s, I my company car. We used to have a very lucrative sales structure.

12:53 you basically had a target and if you went above your target, you got effectively 10 or 15 % of all the bookings that you made. And for a long period, it was uncaps. And because I was new in the organization, my target was low, but I was pretty good at what I did. I would outwork people, I would take more nos than most people. And as a consequence, know, I remember some months I get 18, 20 grand commission checks. I had an 18,000 pound basic, you know.

13:22 And one month I'd earn 18 grand commission, I'd earn 14 grand the next month. I was just earning a lot of money in my early 20s, which actually made my path to marketing, which is an impoverished art, quite a difficult one actually, being very honest. They call it the sales trap, the salary trap. These are real things. I was earning a lot of money as a young man, going from impoverished artist to...

13:48 earning okay as a salesperson to then impoverished marketeer. We're used to it. The circle of life. Yeah, exactly. You mentioned stories, so telling stories. think a lot of brands that listen to this and lot of entrepreneurs that are starting businesses struggle to communicate that brand story. So where would you say is a good place to start? Storytelling is the way

14:17 humans have communicated forever. You know, it's very, it's very hard to connect with numbers. They're very transactional. There's an old adage, I think it was an American president and he was talking in the sense of, he was talking about war. This is a bit of a side point, but I think it drills home the point and he would say, you know, a million deaths is a statistic. One death is a tragedy.

14:46 you kind of and you feel that about stories you humanize everything and I remember through my media training there was two principles that was always really drilled into us one was you listen well three actually one you listen more than you ask you have to be a really good listener because you're picking up on queues number two you're trying to build rapport sales is built on trust you know

15:16 So you're trying to build rapport. you're not only listening, you're viewing, you're observing, you're trying to build trust and form a relationship in however you can. And the third part really about sales is it's all about trying to get an equitable outcome for everyone. There's this, I've always hated the fact that sales has been a dirty word.

15:40 There's a negative connotation. You kind of think of bad actors trying to manipulate people. And I think the sales industry hasn't helped that all the manipulative practices that were taught of, you know, the assumptive clothes, all these kind of techniques, they do feel very manipulative. And sales doesn't need to be that sales can be as simple as listening, really understand what you're selling. And I mean, that's critical. You have to understand.

16:09 And then the key then is the delivery, how you communicate that, that story, how you communicate that. like if I came to you and said, all these features of my product are way better. And like, if you don't trust me, you're not gonna believe me. You don't really care for features. But if I zoomed out and I told you the macro story of what we do, the bigger picture, that's an idea you can connect with. It's very hard to connect with like,

16:34 tangible things that feel passive to us. So that's why story is so important and the art of storytelling is you don't have to overthink it. There's, you know, written communication. I didn't have an appreciation for how valuable being a good writer would be. It's one of the practices I picked up in the last two years. One of my best friends, he started writing books and he said to me the biggest unlock for him was writing.

17:03 He's advised me just like start writing more and I'm mildly dyslexic. So for me, it was uncomfortable writing, but now I take every opportunity to journal, to write. I have ideas, I express, I do lots of LinkedIn content. So I'm always writing and I'm now starting to love the art of writing. And the second then is oral communication. And like anything else, you need reps having conversations like this.

17:30 inevitably helps you. You guys doing a podcast undoubtedly will have helped you. Getting on a stage, speaking to people helps you, doing a panel helps you. All of these forums to communicate is helping you tell better stories. But stories doesn't have to, story doesn't mean stray from the truth. Story means, you know, tell the bigger picture, share the bigger picture, give context to what it is you're saying. Are there rules between?

17:59 Oliver is the salesperson telling a story and then when you're the marketer you've got to sell a tell a story on a mass scale. It's got to appeal to lots of people. I can't be the individual storyteller. Are there rules that cross over? There probably are. If I say as an individual, you need to, that needs to be the closest source of truth to you. Like the way you sell and the way you sell and the way I sell will be very different.

18:28 It's kind of got to be very authentic to you. When you're broadcasting, say, a version of you or your brand or your company, there are other considerations. I'd say it's a little more complex in the sense of, if I say something, you know it's my opinion. If a company says something, it's reflective of the hundred people that work for the company.

18:50 It's reflective of the partners. It's reflective of the suppliers. It's reflective of the clients, the people that buy. So there are so many more stakeholders in marketing communication as opposed to individual communication. So I'd probably say that's the single biggest distinction between the two. You were talking about trust, Oliver, and trust is one of those phrases that kind of gets thrown around when it's like rapport and rapport and things like that. So I guess on a

19:20 On a long-term case, it's probably easier to think about, but on a short-term, so you're thrown into board meetings and you're meeting with exciting companies, how do you build that, what does Oliver do to build that short-term trust?

19:36 Two things for me. I again, I think you have to be You have to try and be yourself. That doesn't mean it's this phenomenon that has gone on in people's careers forever where you have work you and then out of work you and The sooner you can close that gap It doesn't mean that you're gonna act exactly the same When you're with your friends because you behave slightly differently when you're with your family, you know, the room can change

20:06 The way you speak, the way you tell your story may change a little, but fundamentally the story remains the same. So I think in a professional capacity the number one thing you can do over time is get more comfortable in those settings. Me in professional formal setting isn't, I would hope, not too dissimilar to me with my friends.

20:25 There are certainly things I would say with my friends that I wouldn't say with RCFO, right? Like there's certain versions of myself, but I like to think I've closed that gap as I progress through my career. The second thing on building trust is, and it sounds really obvious, but just don't try and sell. There's an irony that the worst way to sell something is to just try and sell it. If I say to you, and it's a psychological principle actually, so if I said to you this is like,

20:54 the best app ever. Honestly, it's 10 out of 10. You'll never find an app better than this app here. You go, okay, if I said to you, actually, this app, it's not great at these things, it's not good over here, it's actually not that great on this, but this one thing over here, it's the best. You trust me more the second time around when I've been open about the flaws, the things it's not good at.

21:22 So whenever I talk about marketing teams, I've been in the business of selling ideas, concepts, campaigns, plans, strategies. These are not tangible things. You're selling intangibles. So it's all predicated on how much you trust my recommendation over other agencies recommendation and so on. Which means I have to be very honest and vulnerable about where I think things will work. My conviction dials up.

21:50 alongside when my conviction dials up, right? I'll be very honest if I think this is high risk, this may not work. And that's how I think you build credibility. It's built on credibility. So the worst salespeople tend to oversell things. They're hyperbolic in their descriptive words. It's just too much. I just don't trust it. It's the, what's the phenomenon? The 4.6 review on Amazon is...

22:16 something like 45 % more effective than the five-star review. People do not trust the five-star review, but they trust that slightly, the imperfection. So when you talk about that then and then being completely honest when it comes to marketing, can you think of any examples from brands or maybe individuals that are doing that incredibly well, they're kind of hitting it with that hard upfront honesty and saying this is what we're not very good at, but also.

22:44 look at us when we do this. Yeah, there's a phenomenon called, have you heard of black box and glass box thinking? It's not the paradox, is it? No. No, it simply means if you look at a corporation, the old way that corporations or brands used to operate is they were black boxes. They were hidden behind the corporate veil. You know, the CEO was an ambiguous figure that you didn't really get to see.

23:12 You didn't get to see their inner workings, they wouldn't speak about their vulnerabilities, they'd hide behind a press release, all of those things. That's a black box. There's actually what was pioneered largely through, I suppose, the internet and the proliferation of accountability. Now you're accountable to people online in a way that you've never been. There's a new way of thinking about organization, which has been a glass box, being transparent.

23:39 talking about your flaws, talking about your commitments. And time and time again, we've seen this with organizations where there's been a rise in the CEO. I'll give you a really good example. Like if you think of Mark Zuckerberg's rebrand, he used to be a black box. didn't, you just assumed he was a robot. The media filled in the narrative for you who Mark Zuckerberg was, because you just saw a robotic guy that was this billionaire.

24:09 that you didn't really trust. And he was robotic and literally the media would write anything. He's now been on a multi-year mission to rebrand himself and you see him at MMA events, see him like walking out with the UFC fighters, you see him e-foiling with an American flag behind him. You know, he's doing interviews on smaller podcasts as well. You're getting to know a version, whether that's the real...

24:34 Mark Zuckerberg or that someone artificially created and as a consequence of that Meta's stock is at an all-time high you know the Meta have gone on a real transformation seen as the tech demon for many years demonized for lots of things now on a much more positive headwind when you when you compare them to their peers and other technology companies and a lot of that has been to do with this

25:01 increased transparency, many people will be skeptical. that's a good example where being a glass box, being transparent can have tremendous impact on the bottom line of a business. And then there are many other examples where you see founder led companies or teams like you see a big phenomenon now where on social media there was a movement where the platform would behave from the point of view of the intern.

25:30 It was like, I'm the intern, I'm going to get fired if I say this, but, and they'd have these like in jokes with the audience. And that was a move towards transparency. Now companies are going a step further where the personalities of the brand are actually the interns, the people, the founders. So again, we're seeing this move to radical transparency that is again, why do people do that? A, it's kind of nicer to be yourself in a public forum than someone you're not. That's cool.

26:00 It's fun, you get to be creative, but most of all it's effective. That's the reason why more and more companies are doing this, because it is tremendously effective. So it sounds like from an audience perspective, if I trust the founder, the CEO, I trust the company, I trust the product, it's like a top down kind of effect that's happening. Yeah, the relationship is symbiotic, as the equity and trust in one rises, so does the equity and trust in others, right? There's a...

26:28 There's a really extensive study that's done every year by Edelman that's called the Trust Barometer. And that looks at every sector across every field and it will determine how trusted an industry is against a whole range of benchmarks. And one of the strongest links and the correlations you will see is between a transparent and trusted leadership is basically equates to a transparent and trusted company. So the distinction there is.

26:55 The link there is validated and really clear to see. So I want to get into the US. So you're someone who took a UK business and planted your flag in to the US and said I'm going to make this work. So what did you learn about that?

27:14 Big question. What did I learn? Well, I went to the US with all the naivete's that you do. So a bit of context setting. Social chain was really gaining traction in the UK as an outlier for social media marketing. And the world's biggest brands knocked on the door every week. The US business had been trading for about nine months and...

27:43 There was this naivety that, of course every big brand in the world wanted to work with the company. Got to the US, Stephen went over, I went over, and we realised that no one cared. No one cared, no one was knocking on the door. And in some respects it was humbling, because you kind of have to get over your ego and go, okay, well this is going to be harder than we thought. And in other respects it was very rewarding, because I'm nostalgic about the start of something.

28:12 And things start to get a little too easy. And this idea that A, you had all this hindsight and retrospect of how would we do it differently in a more competitive market? What are some of our advantages? And because we didn't have the reputation or brand, or it's harder to make a brand that cuts through effectively 50 plus countries, very different dynamic, because we didn't have that, our work had to be better. The teams that we built had to be better. Our creative ideas had to be better.

28:42 And it meant as a consequence of that friction and that hardship, I believe we built a better business in the US as a consequence of that. you know, within 12 months, we were lead agency for TikTok. We were lead agency globally for Uber. This was a small team out of the US. Within two years, it was the most profitable part of the group business. We were driving in the US. Contracts were five times larger in the US than they were in the UK for the exact same work.

29:11 And part of my learning in that is we were based in New York and the US is this really inspiring place where you feel juxtaposed between being insignificant and small, but also feel like you're on top of the world. And New York's just a multiplier of that. It's just a chaotic, energetic city where anything feels possible. And that attracts a certain type of person. We had a very young team. We had like hustlers.

29:39 We had very well-educated, privileged people coming through the business as well. You kind of have to be if you're young and in New York, it's expensive. But it was just this hot pot of ambition bonded by this big omission and this belief that existed within the walls of the company. And it was a really special time for a couple of years. It's probably a good time to ask. I heard, and you might shut me down for this and say there's no truth to it, but I heard a rumor that social chain had no

30:08 like outbound, like obviously we were in an agency that picks up the phone, does a lot of cold calling, things like that. In terms of like, obviously you come from that sales background, in terms of like prospecting, getting in front of TikTok and Uber and all these great brands, what was the day to day of that? Never any outbound ever. The only other thing we did was speak on stages. Steven was prolific around speaking on stage. I did a lot of public speaking myself, although some of the other...

30:38 senior figures were on the speaking scene and content marketing. The basic philosophy is if we projected our ideas into the world, they were original and compelling, the world would come to us. And it worked really well in the UK. And it works when you have a story. The interesting thing about what's, you couldn't replicate this in the same way today. So go back a few years, social media is increasingly important in the world. It's new.

31:07 You have this young business in Manchester that seems a bit like the Illuminati controlling social media pages. It's nefarious. The business stood for everything that convention was. It was like you go from adland, which was cinematic and beautiful and considered and it was an art to memes. Like think of that that juxtaposition there where like lo fi

31:34 really silly in jokes were far more effective than a one million pound ad campaign. So that was a unique time in history to be able to tell that story. So when you are saying as an organisation, have built hundreds of millions of followers, we reach hundreds of millions of people every month because we know how to connect with young people in the world today. That is a compelling story in the world when it's this kind of misunderstood.

32:02 arena where the brand puts the young person in the office in charge of like what seemingly will become their most important channel. So again, the backdrop really matters when you tell your story, it doesn't exist in isolation. It exists in the context of the world at the time, right? So that means that it's not a static thing. It means that maybe at certain times your story is phenomenally relevant and important. Other times it's not.

32:30 So there are other factors when you're thinking to your point around how do you tell a great story. The world connecting with the world around you in a compelling way is so important. So it feels like actually if you were doing outbound and prospecting and things like that, it kind of goes against your story. No, no, you know what? Outbound would have been, it's about choices. Outbound would have been tremendously effective on top of that. The two don't work in isolation.

32:58 You say outbound is as bottom of the funnel as you can get. It's a direct ask to a person. However, if that person seen my ideas and thoughts and I remind them that I'm there at the perfect time, that's a tremendously effective vehicle. We just had the curse of opportunity. Outbound would have been a tremendously effective layer or channel for us or effort or pursuit.

33:26 We just chose not to do it because we had too many opportunities. The strategy of projecting ideas that the world liked was worked. So Social Chain feels like it was one of those businesses that was so disruptive and took people completely by shock in terms of going to totally rethink marketing strategies and marketing spend. Where is that next level of disruption in marketing? Where do you see that if you were?

33:55 So you crystal ball artificial intelligence. And it's interesting artificial intelligence is. Has. Hit our news feeds hit the media agenda in a really material way from the introduction or the public introduction to generative AI. So chat GPT was I would probably say since social media. Way more though.

34:23 than maybe some of the user cases around the blockchain and crypto, et cetera. But it's a technological innovation where I think everybody looked at this and went, wow, this is interesting. I don't think you could use ChatGPT for the first time. It's very easy to forget, like, when you didn't have generative support, how much time you would spend on Google trying to find things or, you know, how difficult, it's easy to kind of lose sight of how tremendously effective

34:53 and interesting that was for everyone. And two things can be true. There can be way too much hype around a technology or an industry, but also you can appreciate that this is going to change everything. And about three years ago, I really went down the rabbit hole of AI. I've spent a career in social media. So a big part of social media are discovery engines, algorithms. These are all AI powered. If you think of

35:22 All our digital worlds today, they are powered by extremely proficient AI algorithms that are built to serve you the perfect video at the perfect time based on your wants, needs and desires. What the generative era offers is an era whereby I can create things in real time that have never existed before that are perfectly personalized to your wants, needs and desires. At a headline level,

35:51 that changes a lot of things and I think there are maybe four areas that will be influenced in a very material way and I'll give you a bit more context if you think social media democratized attention and gave individuals a voice in a way that was gate-kept before attention was gate-kept by media, by publishers, by radio, by TV

36:18 Now individuals had a power and as a consequence of that new business models emerged, creators could now build products, a lot of things changed the connection with audience and so on and so on. If you take the principle that artificial intelligence can massively increase our productivity, meaning an individual can do 10 times more on many tasks than they could before.

36:45 If you appreciate that generative AI means that all friction is removed between language and when I say language I don't just mean the languages that we speak internationally I mean language as formats, language as code, DNA, audio, text, video everything is becoming ubiquitous and multimodal that again removes all friction if you have a good idea

37:12 you can go on, well I'll give you like a today version, you can go on Claude now and create a basic application. If you've never developed before or know nothing about code, you can go build an application based on an idea that you had. You can drop a PDF based on something you've written and created a quiz application. That's very basic, but you can go do that now with a 20 pound a month subscription. You know, to do that before, have to hire a few developers and it'll take them a couple of days.

37:42 Now you can do it in 35 seconds, right? Like that's the truth. And if you don't think that's going to profoundly change every profession, you know, it changes professions, organisations, organisational design, how we work, what we work, what we do, what we don't do in a very material way. Arguably a lot more than the internet did in certain respects in the digitisation of the economy.

38:10 I think this could be, if not greater, certainly equal to the internet. Many argue as powerful as electricity. And when I say many argue, smarter people, Obama said that. So don't take my word for it. The big O. Listen to it. It's interesting, right? There's basically like two schools of thought around AI too. Unlike all things that come to society, you get these two tribal ideas that come out.

38:39 Interesting, think both of these have been on Diverse CEO. Mo Gordat said... Existentialist, This is going to lead us to, we're either living on a beach or we're being hunted down like we're in The Terminator. Jimmy Carr said, it's a covers band. You always need someone at the top who's the most creative person sort of leading the way and it'll be the creativity that leads the way. Where do you stand on those two opposing tribes? So they're probably both right in their own ways.

39:06 So I wouldn't argue with Moe. He's one of the greatest minds on technology that exists. It's interesting whenever conversations with Moe. So he came in as our chief AI officer and I would speak to him and we'd have these deep conversations and it would start with, I'd talk about, where do you think search is going? If we remove discovery, where do we think search? And we'd start talking in a practical way and it'd always end up with we're doomed. I'd be three steps away from being terrified. I'd just go.

39:37 Social media ads mo it's very hard to bring a conversation back when you take it as far but he's such a deep intricate thinker that he thinks in those terms Wait, what Jimmy Carr's saying is I think two things can be true a And it's easy to dismiss what's happening and say that it's trivial based on what you see today you go Okay, that's not great. I can do way better. Yeah, maybe a lot of people can do better mediocrity is kind of

40:07 free now to everyone. all can do mediocre stuff. We can do mediocre writing, mediocre images. We can build mediocre websites. can mediocre video edit. You name it, like mediocre's free. But that curve that we're on and the advancements that we're making across all fields of AI, there are many fields of AI, by the way. We talk about generative AI as kind of the poster child, but there's some amazing progress in predictive AI. You know, if you think of going a step further into robotics.

40:37 and there are many facets and fields within this sector. But when I consider what Jimmy says, I think two things will be true. If all creative arts or much of what we see around it is artificially created, it's created by a computer, you would argue that we will value things that are scarce. We will value human ingenuity more, the craft of human creative.

41:06 And one of the things that I tend to view when I look at the world of creative and entertainment and art and content is I think in the future there will be one vehicle in lane for hyper-personalised minority report style advertising content where the world augments around you and it's truly personalised. In the same way your feeds, your social feeds are different from one another, think our world, certainly our digital world will augment around us in a hyper-personalised way.

41:37 Alongside that, we're going to need things that bond us. Stories, movies, music, where we all have a shared experience. Because that's what makes something special. It's not because it's unique to me, that makes it a bit more relevant, but it's nice to all watch the same Game of Thrones and then be able to speculate and talk about what happens next. So I think...

42:00 will always put great storytelling, great content where we learn, where we feel something, where we're inspired. I think the world will find a place for that stuff. Alongside that though, way more things are going to become commoditized and hyper-personalized to the point then where you go, well, what are the risks in AI? The mo, the risks. There are many. The reality is the technologies need the good nor bad.

42:26 And if you think of every major technological innovation that we've seen in our lifetime, whether that was the internet, the internet was a wonderful thing. It created humanity's knowledge and gave it all of us in phones in our hand, right? There was a lot of unintended consequences that came with the internet that were problems. The same for social media, the same with mobile phones, the same with most things.

42:53 Artificial intelligence and AI has many problems and will create many problems within the world. But it also has the power to do tremendously powerful good things for humanity. And there is no point being overly pessimistic about this stuff. I'd rather be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right. That's the truth. So you spoke around the risks. I don't want to go too much down the pessimistic route, but...

43:22 What are some of them? What should we be, maybe in the short term, what should we be out for? What should we be looking to avoid? So one risk, security risk is a real thing. Image identity can all be manipulated. What's real and what's fake? If you think of every security protocol from facial recognition to voice synthesis, many of these systems exist to protect our banking to,

43:51 our telecoms, things of that nature. When you have technology that can augment all these things, manipulate, recreate all these things, that presents risks. The current security system isn't adequate for what is about to come. That's one part. The next is in a world where it's hard to discern what's real and what's fake, that becomes a very interesting world when we talk about consciousness and communication and political discourse.

44:21 Corporate sabotage I can move markets with some negative news. What if that negative news is not not real? that stuff is is a real real danger and You know wars are started for a lot less than like Negative stories that enter public consciousness. So the propaganda wars if that's a big danger And then alongside that there are smarter people than me talk about

44:51 artificial general intelligence and we may have a future whereby different models, different machines are trying to solve some of humanity's biggest problems. So imagine if you said to a supercomputer that is 10,000 times smarter than you, help me figure out how do we come up with a solution for the climate crisis and it'll...

45:18 do a million calculations and explore a million possibilities and then the one simple solution is well I'll get rid of people. Like that's a possibility if you take morality ethics, if you take those things. So that's where people get worried. There was a study done three years ago now and it was the largest study of its kind at the time and it was from over 720 leading academics and engineers.

45:48 artificial intelligence and the most frightening statistic to come out of that was that over 50 % of them so over half of the smartest people in the world that understand AI at a deep technical level said there was a 10 % or greater chance that artificial intelligence will contribute to the annihilation of mankind. That was verbatim.

46:16 It's the equivalent of saying that half of this room now believes that the 10 % chance that we're going to die when we leave this studio. That's a frightening thought, right? And that was that was only three years ago. And one thing I will say is I continue and I think many people in the field in the space continue to be blown away by the progress. And a lot of the

46:45 debates around what's real, what's truly artificial intelligence. It's all semantics. It comes down to language. There will be a lot of people will debate that generative or large language models are not fundamentally intelligent. They're replicating intelligence because they're using a predictive model to guess the next likely sequence of words that come. So it's not true intelligence. And to me, I go,

47:15 Yes and no, it comes down to your definition. Because my definition of, for example, of creativity is me taking inspiration, knowledge, learnings and combining those experiences and that knowledge in new ways to create new things. And fundamentally, that's what generative models do. So it all comes down to definitions and there are much smarter people than me that will give you a very different take to my perspective. But I do think there's...

47:44 room in the sector for people that have a more naive view and think on a more practical level. And that's kind of the space that I'm trying to occupy. And obviously you've worked with some of the biggest brands, you have a lot of exposure to many different marketeers. I'm sure you see it on social media as well. Do you think in like the greater in terms of marketeers, do you think that people are taking it seriously or do you think that

48:11 so many people are going to get left behind. Oh good no they're trivializing it. You're seeing cognitive dissonance at scale people denying what's in front of them. Copywriters saying yeah this is not very good. I promise you if you use Claude and put in a good prompt it will write better than 99 % of people on the planet today. Chat GPT has an IQ of 158. I can't go find a person with an IQ of 158. I'd have to really really stretch through my phone.

48:40 And the advantage is it can process information and have humanities data within its knowledge base at a far greater scale. And yet it's already smarter on an IQ test. There is just so many things where I go, there are limitations. What AI is good at today is narrow tasks. If I ask Firefly to transcribe a conversation and summarize it, it'll do a pretty good job, right? When you go on

49:10 or a zoom call. If I need translation services I can get them. If I need clips making of a long-form video it's relatively good. If I need an image generating and I give it very prescriptive directions as an art director would I'll get a good outcome. So these things are they're still very narrow. Where the endless possibility comes is something called agentic processes.

49:38 agentic AI agents and you may have heard the term AI agent and what that fundamentally at the base level means is AI tool or AI model speaking to other AI model and let me give you the simple definition if I said to you write an essay right now the process you go through would not be a single shot linear process you wouldn't just write

50:04 and then keep writing and keep writing and keep writing. But that's what we do with prompts. If you think of a prompt right now, you go, ask a question and it gives you a response. That's a single shot response. But the human process is very different. It's layered. You'll go, I'll write and I'll do some research and then I'll think and then I'll reiterate and then I'll rewrite. You can artificially create that by having different agents and different models talking to each other, playing different roles in different tasks and reiterating and creating those feedback loops.

50:33 So this is AI talking to AI and you can emulate outcomes. They did some testing around six months ago where they monitored, basically looked at the intelligence and outcomes of certain older models in an agentic process compared with a single shot more advanced model. And they got the efficacy far greater in older models that weren't as capable when they followed this agentic processing.

51:01 So this is a field that I'm getting really interested in because the difference between, for example, let me give you a good example. Marketing and recruitment. They're usually kind of bundled in the same service-based business. They're very different businesses. Marketing businesses are getting different teams to work together in a harmonious, complementary way to get an outcome. It's interdependent. You need...

51:28 a strategist, a good thinker. need someone who has knowledge of a tool and a platform. You need someone who can copyright. They're different teams working in different ways to get outcomes. Recruitment companies are typically motivating salespeople to deliver single tasks. So if you think of it in that context, for marketing to truly advance in a way with AI in a really material way,

51:55 you need to start to understand the workflows and the dynamics between different skill sets and teams. So today, AI is very capable of doing narrow linear tasks well. Not amazing, but it can do many things well, particularly if it's in the hands of a competent practitioner. Advance the world where you can have a thousand people with different skills and different perspectives all working together on same outcomes.

52:25 suddenly who's going to win? there's a thought that I have that I think organizations and teams of the future will be much smaller, they will be capable of much more, they will have agentic processes inbuilt within their systems, they'll have custom knowledge bases that exist within the organization, and I think companies of the future will look very different. How long it's going to take, because two things are true, technology moves fast, people move slow,

52:55 So I think it's going to maybe be longer, but the possibility or the art of possible will exist in the very near future.

53:05 let's pump the brakes on it a bit because I feel like AI could be one of those things that we bring in for ever. So I suppose one thing that I'm interested in when I hear about your story, so from social chain then go into it to flight story, your definition of success has probably evolved somewhat. So if I asked you right at the start of your career, what is success? And I ask you now, how have those two things changed? You know what, maybe not as much as you think.

53:33 Genuinely, my definition of success was getting really good at what I did. That's been the thread. If I was playing football, I wanted to be really good at football. When I did music, I wanted to be a really good drummer. I just wanted to be good at it. When I did sales, I just wanted to be good at it. It was just, I think you learn passion, or we often conflate hobbies with passion for a craft. And I think through...

54:02 the pursuit of mastery, you can become passionate about anything. Like I'm sure both of you maybe thought in going down sales, there'll be things that you really, really love about sales, but you didn't think that 10 years ago, right? It wasn't ever a thing that you knew you could get a passion for, but it's through the pursuit of mastery and learning your craft. So yeah, my thread hasn't changed as much as you think. I think my financial goals have evolved. I think my...

54:32 perspective on how to work smart has evolved. think when you're young you should just outwork everyone. That's my fundamental belief. Hard work can give you many advantages. I think as I've got older I reflect what you work on and how focused you are in a few areas where you're very strong is probably the right strategy. However, it's very difficult to understand what you're good at when you are young.

54:59 takes time to figure it out. You need to spend years learning, testing, trying, playing, all of these things coming together and you'll look back in retrospect and you can go, you know what, I'm really good at this thing or these handful of things. And the goal then is just do as much of that as you can. And that's what I'm thinking about in my next phase of my career. You know, I've run, I've run big teams, I've built organizations, you know, in three years Flight Story, we hired 130 people in the team. We launched in five countries. We did a lot.

55:30 We invested in companies, we acquired, we merged. We did so many different things and so many experiences in a very short space of time. And just because I was capable of doing many of those tasks doesn't mean I got fulfillment from it or was the right person to do many of those things. So in my next phase, I'm very laser focused on doing less, but across more things. That's kind of my next goal. So is that the area of mastery that you're onto next? Yeah.

55:59 I think so. think it's I'm also I'm looking at where do I have unique advantages? And if I think about my next phase, I go there are few people in probably in the world. I'll be in the top one percent of people that understand agency dynamics because I've been in them a long time. I've run them. I've seen them. There are a few. There are very few things I haven't seen.

56:27 Am I in the top 10 % of marketing practitioners across a general thread from creative to growth to digital to strategy? I'd probably say so, yes. So I go and combine those two things. And do I have a deep enough understanding of technology to know what's possible in a practical sense? I go, okay, so when I think of my next phase, I go, have a good understanding of technology. I've nurtured some skills around communication and how I articulate ideas.

56:56 I have a good understanding of marketing and agencies. The right thing for me is to hone my craft in those things and take unique knowledge of a sector and combine it with maybe a less understood. And I'll give you a bit of an analogy that will help you, that probably would make sense. If you look at most people that build technology companies, they're building in sectors they don't truly understand. So if you're an engineer, you go, right, I'm gonna build a product, a HR platform.

57:26 You're probably not best placed to really empathize and truly understand the problems of HR professionals. Sure, you can ask people, survey them. Sure, you can get them to use your product and collect feedback, but a lived experience is a hell of an advantage. So you would argue that HR professionals are better to build HR technology. The problem is...

57:50 If you've worked in HR your career, the chances of you having a deep understanding of how to go to market and build a great product is very unlikely. So you go, okay, well, you're not gonna go build the best product, but you understand the sector better than anyone else. And that's what I'm thinking about a lot. I'm trying to close that gap between my technical knowledge and my domain knowledge. And I think in the next phase of my career, if I can close that gap, that's where I'll have advantages.

58:19 And when you were speaking about fulfillment and when you look back, I guess, at your whole career, what are the boxes that ticked where you find the most? You mentioned earlier about nostalgia. What are the bits that bring you the most fulfillment? I have to say there's something great about seeing things go from zero to one with people that you like being around.

58:47 that those early stages of a company are fun because they're uncertain. You're basically operating off hope and optimism and unknowns. That's a really nice place to be. And people at the start of things, you you haven't been conditioned to accept no yet. You haven't faced too much rejection.

59:12 It's a really nice period in an organisation, the start of something. And if you haven't ever worked in a start-up, I always advise people at some point in your career you should. They're certainly not for everyone, but they can be the most deeply rewarding places. They can also be incredibly difficult and taxing on you because you wear every hat, there is nowhere to hide, you you won't get support, you don't have direction.

59:39 but for the right type of person, I think you'll garner so much more from being in a startup environment. So for me, early on is always fun. I think building great teams, great products, great services with people that you love to be around, who you would have genuine friendships with, there's nothing greater than a shared experience. That's really fulfilling for me. And then also, like, this is an area that...

01:00:06 and if you've managed teams and you've managed people you'll kind of get this. There's something really nice about seeing people like go on to win. You know if you've mentored someone or you've invested a lot of your time even if you're being paid to do it you still feel good when people go on to unlock their potential or achieve things so that's always really rewarding for me and as I've hired more people and seen them go on to do different things and all of that I get fulfillment and joy from that. So that's something I think about a lot when I...

01:00:35 I go into my next phase where I'll be investing and backing certain teams. How can I do more of that at scale? And Oliver, I'm always interested in the people behind the businesses. I had a conversation recently with Derek Sivers and we were talking about beliefs. I guess when it comes to yourself, what beliefs do you have that you find have been useful in your career, but not necessarily are true?

01:01:05 useful what's been used like delusional optimism the business is really difficult i heard i was at an event where

01:01:18 I was at an event and Gary V basically described entrepreneurship as like walking on clouds and chewing glass. Like spoke to the soul. It was a really nice phrase because I think if you've done your own thing as a freelancer or you've run a business or you're on that journey or you've ever wanted to that's kind of the feeling sometimes it's very difficult. What was the question?

01:01:44 What I know we started with a big sorry. went on a tangent. What beliefs do you have maybe from like childhood or that you've kind of kind of you've taken throughout the years that are useful but not necessarily true? Yeah, the optimism one is really important. I say it's not true because the world isn't always optimistic. It can lead you down paths where you probably waste energy and time.

01:02:13 If you think of optimism as fuel, it really is fuel and optimism is kind of self-fulfilling. It comes down to the belief systems. There's the theory of manifestation. I don't believe in manifestation as some forgazy art. I believe it as if you put intention into something. A foundational belief in anything is probably a good precursor to success. And because entrepreneurship building a business is difficult,

01:02:41 It's an audacious thing. If I said to you, I'm going to create masses amounts of value out of nothing, your statistical odds of making it past this point or getting to the dream state or having these financial returns, they're so low. The same for athletics, the same for being a musician, being an artist. If I told you, no one would start anything. Like you wouldn't do anything. So you have to be delusionally optimistic in many respects. So that to me, that having that.

01:03:10 as part of my constitution from a young age and whether that's nurture, that's neurologically, whether that's genetics I've inherited, who knows? But I've always had that constitution of self belief and that's been fuel and it means I take more risks because the belief that I'll figure it out, there's this belief that sure we'll do this thing, it might work, it might not, we'll go again.

01:03:36 Oliver, I've absolutely loved this conversation. think that's a place to to leave it. If people want to follow you, check you out or see what you're building, I guess, where can they where can they come and find you? Only fans. I should make sense. No, I share a lot of things on LinkedIn. So all of you on LinkedIn. And I do do a podcast called Memes and Machines where I talk with two friends about technology and marketing and just random banter.

01:04:06 Nice. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you gents.