Beyond Busy Episode 101 with Tom Bergin

Graham Allcott 0:05

Welcome to Beyond busy, the show where we ask the bigger questions about work.

My name is Graham Allcott. I'm your host for the show. And on this episode, I'm talking to Tom Bergin. Tom is the author of a book called "Free Lunch Thinking". And we talk amongst other things about around cognitive biases, what you can do about them, why economics is broken. And what happens when you when you get screamed at by Donald Trump. So lots to come on this episode. Also, I really enjoyed Tom's book, the inside story of BP, which you talk about as well, which is all about some of the major decisions that BP made around the oil spill a few years ago, and just loads coming up. Tom was a journalist for Reuters and started his career as an energy broker. So loads of loads of interesting stuff on this episode, it was a really fascinating conversation. So I think you're gonna really enjoy it. Just quickly, before we get into the episode, just want to say thanks to everybody who has been messaging after beyond busy 100, our little series of three episodes, we were originally planning to just do one episode, which is like gonna be a compilation and we just had so many things I wanted to fit in, that we ended up doing it all in three parts. So there's a productivity one, there's a work life balance one, and then there's one about happiness and success, which are kind of like three of our sort of core themes really on this podcast. If you haven't checked them out, then there is everybody from you know, Cal Newport to Josie Long to Gerald Ratner. Everything in between just a really interesting array of guests. And it was a really interesting process may be really thankful for this podcast and for everybody who listens, and you know, makes it possible for me to sit in my shed, and just ramble on, I suppose I'd do it if no one listened, to be honest. But it's just really lovely to get that feedback. And also just to sort of spend a bit of time reflecting and looking back, which I know, I don't do enough. So let's talk about Tom Bergin. So he was a journalist at Reuters and before the market crash in 2006, he works as an energy broker, and a fund manager. And then when he moved to London, he started working in journalism, as you're going to hear, wrote this amazing book, the inside story of BP. And then this new book, Free Lunch Thinking where he basically just lifts the lid on economics, and talks about a lot of the kind of theories within economics that are known to be true or kind of, you know, everyone thinks they're true, and just maybe they're not. We talk about Donald Trump and his encounter with the now former US president, it feels very nice to say not to get too political, but it's a relief to not have to listen to Trump, isn't it? So really interesting conversation. And then we start and we finish it at the end, talking about productivity, and his thoughts on productivity as well. So absolutely loads to pack in.

So let's get straight into this Beyond busy 101 with Tom Bergin. We're recording and I'm loving your, your Microsoft microphone fix before we start as well as not non viewing this.

Tom Bergin 3:22

Yes, we had, we had a, we had a bit of a mishap with the microphone, which I thought I'd sort of sorted out very well. But as it turned out, technology has ever failed. So in the end of the day, sort of some ham fisted machinations had to be engaged in but it actually worked out in case. And as I was saying, earlier, I did a hostile environment course once that, of which I was told that there really were very few jams that that gaffer tape couldn't get you out. And some gaffer tape was able to rescue the microphone and make it much more usable than just that sort of feedback that we get. So

Graham Allcott 4:00

we're kind of reducing that while the audio files called pop, right, where you you pronounce words that begin with P and B, and it kind of has that air effect on the microphone. So we've covered that with some fluff. Tell me about the hostile environment course they've got to start with that. Just drop that in there. It doesn't sound like something that many of us get to do is go into hostile environment course. So I presume you're talking about surviving in hostile environments, not you know, how to create a hostile environment, immigration or something.

Tom Bergin 4:33

It was a workhorse so definitely they were teaching us to be more abusive to one another. No, it was it's something that journalists do, you know, reasonably frequently, certainly, where I work at Reuters. If you're involved in sort of enterprise reporting, investigative work, are you you know, working, you know, overseas, that the it's important that you know, how to take some sort of basic precautions around managing yourself now, it's not hostile environments like a sort of Rambo course it's not teaching you how to survive and grubs and, and roots for six months. It's more about that if you're in, you know, I've been reporting in Iraq, and it's just about sort of trying to read situations and basic precautions that you need to take, I have to say I was amused The first time I did it, I realized that a lot of the things that you're supposed to do, if you are going into our southern environment, are things that I was already doing on my holidays to Spain. I'm quite a cautious person. I like to be prepared and organized. Yeah. So I will always have what happens if I lose my passport? You know, do I have a passport application form. So I would bring that in, you know, photocopies of my passport. So I already did a lot of that stuff. But so a lot of the things that you need to do are quite basic like that. And also on the first day,

Graham Allcott 5:53

I always have a backup of my passport, just saved as pictures on my Dropbox. So I know I could get to an image of my passport if I needed to. But I don't carry a passport form around with me. Is that is that? Am I supposed to do that?

Tom Bergin 6:06

Well, it depends on the situation. Now, if you're going to Spain, not so much. And I don't do that anymore. Now we've got better internet access. But in certainly if you're going to a country where, you know, internet cafes aren't everywhere, or things like, you know, printers not access to printers. So yeah, I mean, one of the things is about the contacts that if you own your telephone, we do have so much on our devices. And, you know, generally we're never too far away from a charging point. If you're in a restaurant, and it's dead, you can always find it to a waiter, and they'll always find a hotel. But, you know, if you're in a country where there are great services like that, and or if you're just simply out of contact, it's one thing that if you're in an area where you're where there's not great mobile signal, your battery's gonna die very quickly, because it's trying to get a signal. And so, you know, you could very easily find yourself in a situation where you don't have contact, or you don't know where you should be, but with the address that you think you're having to, is no longer visible on your phone. So yeah, so sometimes, with the old style, hard copies of things is still pretty important to have with you.

Graham Allcott 7:12

I'm just wondering if there were any other travel hacks that you learned from that I was just thinking, as you're talking there that I was in Washington, DC, a couple of years ago, and I've been sort of out all day. And then I went to a baseball game in the evening, which is, which is how I roll. And my phone died. And of course, I had my backup battery there, but I just forgotten the little lead that goes. And so I realized that I was totally reliant on my phone in this moment. And luckily, I found a nice person in the stadium, who managed to hook me up with a charger but like, literally I was you I wouldn't have had the address of the Uber, I wouldn't have go like I was actually screwed if I didn't get this phone back on sort of thing. Did you pick up any other travel hacks through those extremities

Tom Bergin 7:59

with that example you just gave is a really good example of having lists. Because again, you know, I've been in situations whereby you've got a lot of kit, maybe you've got a tripod, a camera, etc. And you realize you've you've slept, you know, I don't know, maybe a kilometer away from the car, and you've left some really basic thing in the car, maybe some connection. And without that all this other equipment is useless as you found the baseball game. So just organization is really key. And taking the time to do that. And because so many of the things are quite simple, like bringing your leads to the, for your backup battery, but one forgets about them. Because you're sort of Yeah, trying to think about other things. So sometimes it is the small things. So organization can, you know, help you not forget the small things to checklists and things like that are really critical, which I have to say was kind of music to my ears. Because

Graham Allcott 8:55

Yeah, so I have some really good checklists for trips and my packing checklists, but then I don't, I don't follow a checklist on the day when I leave the house without the lead. Right. So I suppose but I suppose if you're going somewhere hostile, then having done the prep, and the planning beforehand is probably even more important as well.

Tom Bergin 9:16

I mean, it certainly is, it could be sort of safety issues on that. But you know, if you flown across the Atlantic to go to an interview, and you find you've gone a few blocks, and it's gonna take you, you know, maybe half an hour to get back, you know, they're back in you've forgotten a key piece of equipment, then that's equally, equally a problem. So yeah, I think that with respect to any kind of reporting, but I think any, anytime you're in a position where you're, you've got a limited opportunity to achieve something. If you haven't gone through a sort of checklist of things, it can be quite easy to miss the piece in the jigsaw. That makes it all perhaps, you know, useless at the end of the day.

Graham Allcott 9:54

Yeah. And so we're going to talk about your work and so you're a journalist, multi award winning journalist and previously had written a book about BP. And so we're going to talk about your new book free lunch thinking, and how economics ruins the economy, which I just found really fascinating really resonated with me on a couple of different levels. But just to sort of go back before I just sort of tell the backstory before so before you became a journalist and work for Reuters and went to Iraq, and spent a lot of time investigating things like corporate tax avoidance, and you know, worker safety and stuff like that. So before you did that you were an oil broker and worked in the oil industry. And then you became the person exposing BP. So was it a kind of poacher turned gamekeeper kind of dynamic? Like, what what was the journey through those different parts of your career?

Tom Bergin 10:48

It's funny, there are certain coincidences that it doesn't feel exactly, I suppose, as you put it, but maybe it was, but basically, I left school and I went to college, I studied business at college, I studied economics, and toasted philosophy, I guess maybe that was a cue to other interests. But I had been interested in journalism. When I was at school, and when I was a teenager, I grown up in Ireland. in the countryside, I never thought that I would be a journalist, it didn't seem like a realistic proposition for a career. And so I went to college, and I studied as I did, I, I left and I got into finance. So the, the energy industry was very much an as called finance, I was a broker. And basically, I was helping oil companies and traders to buy and sell cargoes of oil. And also derivatives based on the most of it, to be honest, is derivatives, but 80% 20% of the market. And, you know, I've previously also worked in fund management. And I guess I was sort of heading towards my late 20s. And I was getting conscious that, you know, what, I wasn't enjoying what I was doing that much. I was also aware that if I wanted to do something about that, it was going to get much more, much more difficult as time went on. So as I, as I was approaching my 30s, I decided to make a change. And as I said, I'd always been interested in journalism, I decided, Well, why not just give it a go. And at the time, I was working in Dublin, I tried to move to London, and, and become a journalist. And I started, like, a lot of people who get into journalism, later in life, they'll often write about things that they have experienced. So it could be if you're a lawyer, you might get involved in legal reporting. And so I had knowledge of derivatives and sort of finance generally. So that was sort of where that that that took me and I started off, I was working for a small publication in the derivatives field. And then I got a job working for Reuters. And that was, I didn't realize it at the time, I was quite prescient, and certainly in the categories of not the things that you feel the best about life, but I got a job writing about credit derivatives, which, at the time, you know, I got, I think, I got the job at Reuters, because nobody else wants to do it. Because credit derivatives in 2001, were considered the most boring thing in the world. And they couldn't possibly be a story in it. If you're writing about finance, you wanted to write about mergers and acquisitions, you know, exciting deals, the technology, citing things that are happening, you know, credit derivatives, nobody could have imagined that there might be a story in that. And so that was a sort of charity. That was my first job with Reuters. And I indeed, moved on from that, I guess, the, you know, I didn't see the fullness of the story I write about that. In the book that I had, it was an area of finance that sort of puzzled me a bit. And I wrote about some of the risks that I saw on that, but I certainly didn't fully predict the disaster that will lead to, and then I went on to write about the things that Reuters, but one of the big things, big areas that I spent several years writing about was the oil industry. And maybe that did have a connection to some of my previous work. I've got to say, I enjoy the writing about the oil industry. Like I think a lot of people who work in it, and write about it is fascinating. It covers so many different areas of relevance to people's lives. But first of all, just in the basic financial terms, few industries are as big, you know, at any point in time in the world. You know, most of the biggest things anybody's building, in terms of costs are going to be oil projects, 10s of billions of dollars, many of them, and it obviously touches on the environment. You know, the biggest problems we have in the world, politics, international relations, diplomacy, all these things come into it. So it's a fascinating industry. And it tends to have, I think, you know, often some quite colorful characters in it. Particularly because Have you think about, at the end of the day, a lot of it still comes down to finding oil and taking big risks to do that. So some of the people who are naturally attuned to that and good at that will, will be interested in colorful characters. So that was really took me on then to writing my first book, which was about dp, which really came after they're in a series of accidents, which culminated in the Deepwater Horizon in 2010.

Graham Allcott 15:28

And that's obviously a book that I'm sure there's a lot of people who were working at BP at the time that were not that happy that you were writing it. So there's this sort of, I mean, I suppose that's the sort of combative nature to journalism, generally, but writing a whole book in that sort of way. Describe what was what was the sort of the personal experience of that, like, were you getting angry emails from people? Are you having to deal with a lot of fallout from it? Like, what was the what was the? What was the sort of personal aspects of that?

Tom Bergin 15:58

Well, I mean, it was surprising to me, one of the things with that book was, you know, first of all, when there had been an unmitigated disaster, nobody could question that the explosion on the oil rig. You know, many people did a vast environmental disaster. And then the question was, you know, what was the cause of that, and who was to blame. And naturally, as you probably imagine, in many organizations, people want to blame other people. So So first of all, it's not necessarily a unified position that people would have. And then if you have a change of guard, give you some of the newer people are happy to say, Well, that was kind of their fault. And we're different now. So in a way, it was quite surprising. So some, so the reaction wasn't actually, as you described, that some people at BP really welcomed the book, and were really happy with it, even if they didn't, might have been some people who didn't cooperate. And then other people won't feel that that wasn't, you know, that they weren't, you know, they were blamed in incorrectly. That's, that's the nature of it. But the the basis of that book was really using my connections, I knew a lot of people in the books called spills and spin the inside story of BP. And, and that was what it was meant to be. It was about the inside story of BP. At the time, I had been reading a lot, I'd been writing a lot myself, I've been reading a lot, particularly invite people maybe weren't that familiar with, you know, business, generally, the least Least of all the company and saying, you know, this disaster happened, same reason that the previous disasters happened, which was this company is addicted to cost cutting, because it just puts, you know, human life is secondary to profit. And, and they do that, you know, the implicit thing would because they're bad people. And that just seemed a little bit simplistic. Because it was begs the question, what were you but why would the only be bad people at that company? You know, why? Why would that, you know, have that prediction. So one of the things I was thinking about doing was trying to talk to people say you're fighting to do these things, you know, why did you make that decision, and also to understand the series of decisions that led to this outcome. So I guess the real premise to the book was to look at the DNA and the steps that led to a series of accidents that people should have taken cognizance of and change their ways. And one of them was really came down to a decision roundabout 1990, to change the structure of a comp of the company. It's one of these things is quite arcane, and and easily missed, but how you structure yourself in the business actually can have a huge impact on how people behave. I mean, in a way, that's unsurprising to business people, because that's why they structured themselves. But you do create a series of incentives. And those incentives can lead to good outcomes, increase productivity, people can have the right goals and the right rewards, to encourage them to achieve those. But also you can lead to some perverse incentives. So for example, in BP, the decision to create individual oil fields or refineries, as as a strategic business units, independent profit centers, and then to overlay that with a series of metrics and measurements, which which only measure things like for example, it was an oil platform, you were measured on output, and price, you know, so you want to get as much production as cheaply as possible. And then that's in a context where people moved around every two years. Well, the problem there is what you what you do theories, you don't invest in your facility, all you do is you just ramp up production, keep the costs down, and then the next person comes along to take over that facility. They've got a problem. And that compounds itself, but that's really a sort of strategic and it's a structural thing, but that over time, you know, in that particular case, certainly that you know, built up and that was you know, when you talk to people, the company afterwards change that structure it was it was a unique structure in the industry. Indeed, it was a business model that McKinsey had taken to shell and said, Hey, you know, you guys should structure yourself like this, it worked really well for GE, General Electric. And shell said, No, I don't think that's going to work for us in our industry, you know, we need to learn from each other in different units. So sometimes some of those arcane things can make make a very big difference. And they're sort of easily missed, I guess, if you don't really get into the weeds of, of the decisions at the company.

Graham Allcott 20:29

So that structure, did it also promote more of a culture of sort of competition between the different strategic business units. So they're not they're not learning lessons from each other and collaborating and cooperating in ways that help the company they're trying to maximize their little silo of results? Is that is that essentially what was happening?

Tom Bergin 20:51

Absolutely. And you know, that's, that's what shel said to McKinsey in the late 1970s. And in the 1980s, when McKinsey came back again, the idea of the shell.

Graham Allcott 21:02

Yeah.

Tom Bergin 21:02

They said, No, you know, we're an engineering business. And what happens is, a lot of times we have we have a problem that comes up, it doesn't come up that often. So it may be is a very rare reservoir set of circumstances. But so that that that individual units not going to benefit from the learning from that experience, but we've got many individual business units, so they need to learn across those. And what I'm referring to what are the only two things like the Deepwater Horizon, which is described as a low frequency, high impact event. And it's difficult to learn about to learn from these, if you're not recording near misses, if you're not recording something that's a bit like this in one distant place, and sharing that knowledge with another one. If everyone operates as an atomized business, then that those benefits don't don't arise. And that pretty much contributed to the problem. That's IPP.

Graham Allcott 21:58

So a lot of what you're talking about there, particularly that whole section around, you know, questioning the narrative that it must be evil people who are working in BP and you know, reckless people making this happen. And so a lot of this is as it feels like a theme that runs through freelance thinking as well, which is you talking about how certain sort of prevailing theories or the prevailing wind goes in a certain direction, and everyone kind of follows it? And I think, you know, it sort of strikes me that everybody can be quite malleable, right? So if you hear something often enough, you start to just presume that it must be true. And really, in the book, if you take apart a few of these sort of very well worn economic theories, right?

Tom Bergin 22:50

Absolutely. You know, we can be predisposed. I mean, one of the books called free lunch thinking, because we're often predisposed to things that are free to free lunches, if someone presents us with, with an easy answer, that's going to be attractive to us. Also, if certain things fit with a theme in some way intuitive to us, that can be appealing. So one of the things I talk about is the way in which we respond to tax rates, personal income taxes, do we does it encourage people to work harder, I think all of us intuitively feel that that's the case. Because we feel more motivated. That's the idea. But just because it feels intuitive doesn't actually mean it's true. And one of the things that's interesting in economics is actually the professionals actually are susceptible to these inherent biases, as ordinary people are people who are meant to cut through the noise to ignore political biases, or easy answers that they, you know, can be as susceptible as anyone else to the prevailing wind at any point in time.

Graham Allcott 23:55

So I really smiled when I opened up the book. And the first thing I saw was the Laffer curve. And I have to tell you my story about the Laffer curve, so I did economics a level, and I was really bad at it, actually, that's another story. But my economics teacher taught us the Laffer curve, and I'll get you to explain in a minute for those people who didn't do a level economics and haven't come across it exactly what it is. But I was taught this thing as just fact, you know, this is just this is just how things are the Laffer curve, this is, this is what you need to know going out into the world. And actually the Laffer curve is quite a controversial theory that was kind of originated in like 1970s kind of free market, right wing think tanks and has sort of become adopted by politicians, but it really made me actually question like when I found out a few years, as like, it was like a few years ago, I found this out. That this is just you know, not facts. Actually, you know, I should have been taught that it was one of many ways to, to look at taxation in the economy. But it really made me question. Just the the idea of objective truth had quite a profound effect. And it feels like you're kind of doing that in this book. So do you want to just explain what the Laffer curve is? And then let's debunk it a little bit.

Tom Bergin 25:23

Absolutely. So, yes, I mean, I suppose firstly, with the book, I mean, this is what I consider is the the the spills and spin was a expositor of BP trying to lift the bonnet on a company. I guess what this book is it's trying to lift the bonnet on economics and investigate economics. And look if it functions as it says it does. And the Laffer curve is, is an example of this is one of the things that have been examined. I gotta say one of the one of the things I enjoyed most about researching the book was traveling to the United States to meet Arthur Laffer and to spend a lot of time he's a phenomenally vibrant person. I mean, he spent at least eight hours trying to convince me about the Laffer curve.

Graham Allcott 26:09

You sat with him for eight hours.

Tom Bergin 26:10

Yeah, we had dinner on a Sunday night. We had a long, long dinner over, you know, chicken going and whiskey. And then the next day, we sat down for for several hours more in his office.

Graham Allcott 26:24

And Arthur Laffer is did you say he's 80?

Tom Bergin 26:27

Yeah, he's 80.

Graham Allcott 26:28

He's like, retired and

Tom Bergin 26:30

No, not a chance. No, Arthur Laffer last year got the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump.

Graham Allcott 26:37

And wow,

Tom Bergin 26:37

He still consults a lot. When I was there in the office, he was getting calls in, you know, booking private jets here and there to speak.

Graham Allcott 26:45

Wow, okay. He's still really active. And, ya know,

Tom Bergin 26:48

he's a, he lives in Nashville. And which he explained to me, and as I read in the book was because he has lower tax rates than where he used to live, which was in California. And he's yes, he's incredible. You can really see when you meet him, you know, part of the reason why his philosophy has been so successful, because he's, he's engaging, he's fun. But he's got a vast amount of energy as well, as I said, you know, he was literally eight hours, maybe more, and, you know, wonderful recall of figures. You really just listen, and you've got to kind of go away and recompute things, but and you

Graham Allcott 27:26

describe him as mischievous, I think in the Pokemon. Yeah,

Tom Bergin 27:29

he is. He's got he's got a sense of humor, you know, he'll he'll say something to really? No, of course. So he's so I can say he's great fun. But I've got to say the, you know, after listening to everything and going away again, I, I can't say that I was any more convinced than the about the Laffer curve. And I mean, just in terms of Laffer curve, so I should explain, after speaking so much better than what what it is. And one of the things that the book explained is, I think a lot of people maybe who are listening to this podcast, you people may remember the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. And that was, I think, possibly my first introduction to the Laffer curve, where you have an economics teacher in high school, who's droning away and boring his students to death. And he draws the Laffer curve. Does anybody know what that is? Is? anyone anyone? And it's that sort of famous kind of phrase that it's remembered for? But it is that thing that was being taught in schools and the idea was that you start off I'm trying to think if you kind of look behind me almost like the the the the the on the on the webcam, you can see it there's a there's a curve of a planet. And so if you can picture a you something like a U. And the idea is that as you raise tax rates, sort of inverted U really is the way it's usually drawn or the way that Arthur Laffer Drew, it was like the nose of a of a 747. And that that meant that if you if you picture a line coming out on a graph, and it goes out sort of basically the distance between the x and y axis, what that suggests is that as you raise tax rates, you increase your revenue so that basically, first of all, if your tax rate is zero, you get no revenue. That's a mathematical definition. That must be true. No, no zero tax rate 0% tax, no tax be lifted up 10%, you get some more revenue, 20%, maybe more revenue. The argument of the Laffer curve is at certain point there's a there's an inflection and the graph begins to tack backwards, all the way up to where taxes are at 100%. And at 100% tax rate, no one's going to work. So so the revenues again will be zero. So that's the the the idea to it. And as Arthur Laffer says himself, he didn't invent the concept that others have mentioned it in the past. Certainly popularized his vibrancy, and he's, you know, he's referenced color, etc. How people really see this or, you know, accept this idea. The The issue is where's this inflection point? So in a way, we could all accept 0%, there would be no tax. You know, 100%, there'll be no tax revenue as well. The question is, where is this inflection point now, Laffer decided roundabout, the early 1970s, the United States was in the top end of this curve, it was in the end where tax rates were so high, that the actual revenue being raised by these taxes was lower than it would have been if the rates were lower. So you think about that, you know, before the inflection point, you have tax rates, raising a certain amount, but above the inflection point, the same amount of revenue is being raised, but at a higher tax rate.

Graham Allcott 30:53

And this is so this is so attractive, you know, particularly if you're a mid to high level earner, right? It's like, oh, cool, so I can get a tax reduction, and the country will be better off. So it's like it's a win win thing?

Tom Bergin 31:08

Absolutely. I mean, I just to put it into perspective. So this is not some arcane economic ideas, not just in in high school movies. But it is, it became the adopted wisdom of the Republican Party in the United States. And here in the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, and many other people have professed great faith in the Laffer curve. Last year, as recently as last year about Boris Johnson spoke at length about the Laffer curve. So this has influenced policy. And the idea is, you know, I'm making these are one of the interesting things about Arthur Laffer and others who, you know, follow the Laffer curve, they often don't mention numbers, so I'm going to just throw some, mix them up, almost. But if you pictured it, the argument would be if you believe in the Laffer curve, and actually, maybe I'll give this specific example, because the UK tax authority, hm, hm Treasury have actually looked at this. And they've kind of come to the conclusion that the, if you had a tax rate of by 50%, marginal tax rate, on average, and marginal one, on top earners, that you'd raise probably as much at 50%, as you might do at about 42%, zoellick's or give or take. So that would mean that maybe it's 60%, you know, again, that the revenues will be coming downward. So maybe it's 60, and 40, would be about the same amount. And so obviously, if you're for an individual, you're saying, Wow, I could pay 40% tax, rather than 60. And the government would be just as well off, I mean, everybody would like that. I mean, unless you want to punitively tax, other people earn more money than you. But if your ambition wasn't to be punitive, then everybody should be happy with the idea that a lower tax rate raises just as much money for the Exchequer. And as I say, it's become policy in lots of places, it has led to a massive reduction in income tax rates around the world, in many countries. The only problem with it is that there's no evidence for it when it's been tried, it hasn't worked out as planned. And when you also, and this is one of the things I spend a lot of time in the book is when you when you sort of try and break it down into the mechanism of it, and look about the chain of events that are meant to allow this wonderful situation to arise for lower tax rates lead to higher revenues, and none of the bits in the machine seem to be connected. And he doesn't lead to B equals c equals a D, what? You know, it's just know those bits are connected. So that's, that's usually this is one of these things that we've come to believe, because we're being offered a free lunch get more for less without any additional effort.

Graham Allcott 33:48

And it's always so the phrase that's often used without one is Voodoo economics, right? Like it's this kind of magic system that sort of, you know, creates this creates this happiness and wealth out of nothing.

Tom Bergin 34:03

Absolutely.

Graham Allcott 34:04

I guess leads me on to the Jensen claim, which has another chapter in the book. And so essentially, this idea that, you know, when you pay people more, they become more productive, they work harder, and everyone's incentivized by money. And you took a lot you tell some great stories in the book. I think everyone's heard the stories about Kodak and Kodak's view of Netflix and, you know, blockbusters view of Netflix and these kind of various stories of corporations enjoying the moment but not looking at the future. But the stuff about Kodak in the book where you talk about them, forcing many of their managers to own certain levels of stock in the companies that everyone felt as invested as the shareholders and, and so on. I just thought was really interesting, but should we just talk more generally about this idea of the Jensen claim and Why if you pay us all more, we'll definitely work harder, right? That's how it works.

Tom Bergin 35:03

That's the idea if you know how to get people to think like shareholders, I guess all of this goes back to like a lot of things in the book in the 1970s was a was a period of huge upheaval for the Western world, you had the oil crisis, that manifested itself part in which slower growth, you also have, you know, inflation got out of hand. These really were the results of some long seated problems, but they really show people's confidence in both political management and general economic management. And so people were thinking what's gone wrong here. And one of the things was they, you know, people came up with the Laffer curve, and that was a federal government's got too big government's the problem. You had also some economists who focused on business, and they're often called managerial economics, economists. And they thought, well, maybe also, there are some problems in companies. And maybe the way in which managers behave are incentivized isn't really consistent with economic theory, and what we know must be true, you know, in the laws, according to the laws of economics. And one thing they looked at what it's called the agency problem is this issue as to, you know, how managers behave. And the you know, in simple economic terms, a manager, if you just follow the basic laws of economics, the manager should always follow their own self interest, because every economic agent does that. And the agency problem is for you say, okay, but the, the interest of the manager is to get as much money as possible, the interest of the shareholder is to get the best return as possible. And in a way, they're not necessarily aligned. And in the 19, late 1970s, people thought, well, maybe the reason that the economy's doing badly, and the stock market had been pretty much dead, you know, for much of this period. One of the one of the problems is because maybe managers aren't incentivized to behave in a way that enhances shareholder value. So how do we get them to behave in a way that maximizes shareholder value, which should contribute to the future success of the company, which in turn should help the overall economy and everybody should be better off? So the, you know, the aim was, was a reasonable what, what they came up with was this decide that this agency problem was a really big problem, they decided, yeah, it's got to be, we have a situation where companies don't really provide sufficient incentives to managers to enhance value for shareholders. And they said that the reason was because basically, share managers got paid a pretty fat salary. And that was largely not variable. It was based, usually it was a bonus, but they were gonna get a salary anyway. So they, the idea was, you know, they're not really given the right incentives to perform, so they don't perform. That was the logic. And it's quite a harsh logic, if you think about it, because what you're citing is that the chief executives, and senior managers are actually quite lean and lazy. That's, that's the implication. They're saying. So if we could change it to a situation to put the shareholders and managers on an equal footing, then everyone would be better off. So the idea was very much equity linked pay. And if you paid managers with more money and more equity linked remuneration, they would seek to grow the company. And this theory led to the massive explosion in the adoption of share linked pay, first of all United States, but then in Kingdom, particularly, and also the places later in Europe, through the 1990s. And then that linkage was itself what led to the massive explosion in executive pay. And I show this in the book, you can see the charts, it's quite good.

Graham Allcott 38:56

That chart is crazy, by the way, where it's like, here's the footsie and here's his average share, price, you know, just going up slowly, I'm trying to try to describe this for for audio, but you know, so the value of shares is going up quite slowly. And then in the 90s, it just massively spikes that this other line, which is CEO pay, and just the gap between those two things is is absolutely it's staggering to see it written down like that.

Tom Bergin 39:30

Yeah, and you know, that the at the outset, everyone said, Oh, this is great. The stock market's going up. So is so is executive pay, so it must be working. That was the idea. And Kodak is an example of a company that I cite. Kodak was really interesting. And again, it was one of the interesting things of researching the book was to go to Rochester, in upstate New York, for Kodak was founded and the Kodak building, the original one is still there, and it's still an imposing site. Quite for Lorne at the moment,

Graham Allcott 40:01

And just it's just an empty service, Kodak and then also Xerox has a has a big.

Tom Bergin 40:07

deal. This is the this is a yes. It's really interesting. And and Jensen, of course, Michael Jensen, who was main proponent of this theory started out in the University of Rochester. so fascinating place. Yes, the city in upstate New York. And you go there, you've got these two companies that Kodak was interesting, because it didn't actually have share base pay, it didn't have much bonus whatsoever, right off this latest 1980. And so in a way this was a company, you can say, Oh, it's the biggest deviation from what we consider to be economically logical remuneration policies. And so then it really got into this idea of share base pay in the 1980s. And in the 1990s. And there was some, you know, recovery in the 1990s, we saw many Canadians were struggling for the company. And there was some revival. But the and, and one of the people that they brought in and led through the 1990s was somebody come from Motorola, who had been really successful, they're doing great things at Motorola, he came to, he came to Kodak. And he decided one of the decisions he made was to double down on, on print on film. And the idea was that we make huge profits out of this, we really, you know, we lost our way in the 1980s, to diversify into other things. But this is our, our main profit center,

Graham Allcott 41:33

this is our bread and butter, let's just crank down into that, which, on the face of it, if your job is to increase shareholder value, is probably the correct thing to do. Right. That's That's how he's incentivized, isn't it?

Tom Bergin 41:46

Well, in a manner of speaking, I mean, as the chief executive, you're, you're, you're incentivized not just to enhance value today, but probably much more. So to enhance value in the longer term, chief executives are meant to think about strategy, take the company, they're not the CFO, or the CEO. And they are supposed to chart the course. And, you know, share prices today will reflect the future outcome of a company. I mean, think about all companies, you know, as soon as your price changes and how we feel about the future oil price, the future, the price of the company will change. So really his job. I think, looking back, it's an uncontroversial view to say that his job really in the 1990s should have been to make good decisions about the future of Kodak, the kind of businesses that it should be looking back. And this is, you know, the benefit of hindsight, but at least that means it's accurate. The key problem was that he didn't see how quickly digital would destroy the print, camera business of film business. And this gets to the issue that no matter how much you pay somebody, no matter what you link it to, you can link it to the share price, you can link it to Whitehorse, Windsor, the Grand National or link it to the price of gold, wherever you want to link it to. These things don't, it's hard to see how they make you better decision maker. And that's that's the key issue. As I say, they, the man that was put in charge in the 1990s wasn't lazy, and he wasn't incompetent. He proved his worth and Motorola, he made good decisions there. He ended up being paid massively more at Kodak. Nonetheless, that additional money, and the fact that it was tied to share prices, that that didn't make him a better decision maker. So that was sort of one of the flaws in that, you know, realistically quite simplistic idea that if you pay somebody more, you're going to get a better outcome. It doesn't really explain why you make somebody a better decision maker. And hence, the flaw in thinking.

Graham Allcott 43:53

Yeah, and there's another bit in the book where you took, you took about a john Paul Sartre story. And like someone asks, john Paul Sartre, for advice, I can't remember details, but it was like john Paul Sartre says, I'm not going to give you advice. And then the person says, Well, I'll go and ask my priest and my and, and somebody else, and then it's like, well, the priest is always going to tell you what a priest would say. And so you're basically making the point that if you ask an economist, what the answer is, or what the you know, the the secret to success is they're always going to come back with an economics based money based answer. But it is way more complicated, isn't it like and you talk about football is in the book and and you know, when you think about football is Yeah, they're paid a lot of money and yes, they have bonuses, but do you think they're motivated by the bonus, or do you think they're motivated by the fact that scoring a goal, which they they would get a bonus for is gonna, it's gonna, you know, enhance their career, make them look good, it's gonna impress whoever you know, whoever their friends and, you know, romantic acquaintances are that or whatever You know, like there's that such kudasai that we all get from parts of our work when we have success that are not financial, but just really matter to our identity and that sense of self. Right?

Tom Bergin 45:12

Absolutely. I mean, with the book, a lot of the the cases, a lot of the things that I look at are based on my reporting experience, and you mentioned there the footballing one. And one of the the reporting projects that I was involved in, in recent years was the football leagues project, which basically were by their Spiegel in Germany came into the possession of, of a lot of information behind the scenes information about football clubs. And one of the things we were looking at was a tax planning by footballers. And that's.

Graham Allcott 45:42

Main thing that leaked out all the information about like, man, city and financial facts, and all that, that those dare Spiegel stories a few years ago.

Tom Bergin 45:51

Yeah. So yeah, so basically, Reuters is one of the so there was so much information that their speaker couldn't manage alone. So they invited us organizations from all around Europe to participate. And we participated from the UK slash us. And there were other newspapers from Belgium and everywhere else. So we all got together and went through this information. But one of the things that stuck in my mind, I remember reading it at the time and thinking, you know, as a financial journalist, and it's only written about executive pay over the years, that the way in which that, yes, as you said, you know, the footballers got bonuses if they scored goals. So you know, your striker, your job is to score goals, it's pretty clear or to assist. Yeah, and both of those activities were incentivized, they received an incentive. But two things struck me one was the incentives were incredibly minor. It was typically less than 10% of someone's total remuneration for minor.

Graham Allcott 46:48

Minor compared to the annual salary not minor compared to

Tom Bergin 46:54

Minor in relative terms. And secondly, they were frequently kept. So we said, If you score 30 goals, that's it, you hit the hit hit the maximum. So I think both of those factors show to you that the football club certainly don't think that paying a football or more per goal will get you with our new, more goals, or Yeah, we're defending. And I think that that, again, shows this, this flaw in the theory. And it goes back to another thing, one of the things that I quote in the book was john Maynard Keynes giving a eulogy for its former teacher, Marshall, who's one, similarly famous economist, he said, you know, the job of the economist is to, to understand, you know, all the nature of humanity, you know, all the things that drive people, and then to reflect those in, in their economic models. But the truth is, very few aspects of human decision making are reflected in economic models. You go back there to the sort one, then that's the case is that, you know, you ask an economist, you get a price based answer. And indeed, many economists have also, you know, an eminent ones, both on, you know, people who would be perceived to be of the right of economics, like, you know, Ronald Coase, who was one of the Chicago School, he lamented the way in which that economics had become essentially, a price theory, you know, it was all only focused on price. And this idea that human beings behave and respond in a mechanistic way to price incentives, you pay someone more, you get better, you get better pay, you increase the price of something people will buy the commensurate, fewer of that product. And the problem is that it ignores so much of human nature, it can possibly lead to the right answers,

Graham Allcott 48:41

We have to talk about one other thing to do with human nature, and I can't finish the interview without mentioning Donald Trump. So Donald Trump called you up and calls you a jerk.

Tom Bergin 48:51

Among other things, yes.

Graham Allcott 48:55

What was interesting was 70 people have had half an hour phone call encounters with Donald Trump, and this year, written a whole book about it. And you literally sidestep it in about three sentences. It's like what like, I really want more so. So yeah. Tell me more about how that came about.

Tom Bergin 49:14

Sure. So well, I work as I said, as a financial journalist. And so one of the things I've looked at over the years in recent years is bumping Donald Trump's finances. And one of the stories they did in 2016 is he was running for the presidency. He was at this point in time the presumptive nominee, Republican nominee. And so we were looking at Donald Trump's finances and many people were looking at the angle, you know, Donald Trump is a very difficult business person, he doesn't pay people. He's a nasty person. And I was thinking, well, maybe there's another story, which is maybe he just simply not as good a businessman as he claims to be. That would be and which would be more relevant given his whole pitch to the electorate was you should elect me because I am a great business person. Obviously, we had a series of bankruptcies which argued against that. But then he said, Well, I give it I did really well out of those. So that shows that I'm a good businessman, you know? Okay, so that's again, being a tough businessman. So defensible. I was saying, well, maybe he just doesn't make money in the way that he does. So I looked at the area that he invested most of his capital over the previous 20 years or so, which was golf. So Donald Trump is known as a real estate developer. But if you really look at those things like Trump Tower, these really go back to the 1970s, after the 1980s, and certainly the early 90s, at the very latest, he really wasn't that active in New York real estate. He wasn't doing many big real estate deals,

Graham Allcott 50:39

Most of his real estate deals now are licensing deals, right? where people actually pay money to have the Trump name on a building in different parts of the world, because it kind of adds some curiosity and curiosity and gets people through the door.

Tom Bergin 50:52

Absolutely. And so that's it's, I don't denigrate that deal. As he said to himself, that's great. I, you know, I don't have to put any money down, I just get the cash. And indeed, you know, we've seen some of the recent reporting, The New York Times got his tax returns, that that is a lot of money, as he himself had indicated. And so that's not to denigrate that, but that's a celebrity business. And that's something that's, that's really predicated off him being an actor. But in terms of as well, most people would consider like a normal business, the business that a celebrity was meant to be based off, it was mainly by going out and buying golf courses and hotels and doing them up and trying to add value that way. And I was looking at this and say, well, it doesn't seem to me when I looked at more and more, and I dug down literally into every plot that is bought and sold in North America and around Europe as well, that that he had added value. Quite the contrary, it looked to me, based on his own statements, it spent over $1.1 billion on a golf portfolio that I calculated was after land sales, and all that things factored in, was worth about half that amount. So Wow. You know, it was it was a massive exercise in, in value destruction. Now, naturally, before we, you know, publish a story like that, we go to the individuals that question and say, you know, here are your calculations, here are the facts that we have to please tell us where we're wrong here. And that, so I sent it off a spreadsheet, and then you know, I mean, it was really not long, it was like, by eight hours, 10 hours later, I had Donald Trump screaming down the phone to me telling me that I was an idiot. And, you know, you know, repeatedly, you know, that I didn't understand the real business logic of all of this, which was he was saying, actually, that my thinking that these were golf courses was misplaced. They're really development deals. He was planning to build lots of houses on places like Turnberry, which again, didn't seem likely because, contrary to his insistence, he didn't actually have the rights to build houses on these properties. But that was quite quite quite an interesting experience. But one of the many journalists have gotten the hairdryer, hairdryer statements from Donald Trump.

Graham Allcott 53:01

So this is back in 2016. Yep. And, of course, we all knew a lot less about Donald Trump in 2016, than we do now. So I'm just curious, when you got off the phone to him? What did you feel like you'd learn about him? And his character in the way he thinks?

Tom Bergin 53:21

Well, the first thing I learned was that he had a, an interesting approach to facts. Because, you know, it was there were so many things that he said that just simply were not true. So one was he said, You know, I have no debt. I have no debt on these courses. Hmm. And I think Well, I do actually have in front of me, your, your declaration. It's an official document, what you've actually published and said, Look, there's a, there's 100 million odd debt against Doral in Florida, you know, I've got a series of these things. So, you know, he would play like, he could build houses in his golf course in on the Potomac in Washington, DC. And I was like, No, I think that's Yeah, isn't that underwater? Isn't that sort of on the floodplain? It's not like, No, no, I can do that, because I got the right thing, you know, so there are these easily verifiable untruths that he just, you know, one after the other, which is, which is not not that common and people expect financial investment or financial journalists to be incredibly cynical, think everyone's a liar, etc. And the simple truth is that actually, most people don't lie to you that often. And the reason is, because it's quite dangerous because your credibility can be ruined, no shown to be and it really looks very bad in a story if someone has said something and then it's proven to be untrue. And then they have to kind of come back on that ad. Isn't it doesn't help a situation I've been in situations where you know, things of approach court action and the fact that you can see that someone has contradicted themselves. You feel a lot, a lot more calm. about your case, you know how good you are?

Graham Allcott 55:02

Yeah, a lot of people fear, shame and embarrassment and losing faith, right? They're very sort of prominent emotions in the way people think about stuff. But it feels like Donald Trump doesn't know what it was, it was constant. And I think that that constancy is also interesting, because I think that maybe in some way facilitated, because, you know, again, you know, with him,

Tom Bergin 55:21

I thought was interesting is he, you know, he has a huge energy. And as I say, you know, at that point in time that he had clearly so many demands upon his time, you know, that he is not getting a lot of sleep, you know, he's got the time to pick up the call the phone and scream, you know, for 20 25 minutes, you know, at somebody about, you know, something that's, that is beyond my rate that he doesn't, doesn't want to be perceived to be true. So, you know, there is that huge energy, which I think explains a lot of success. But also, we're getting away with on truths that could, you know, really damn another person, another thing comes along, that needs to be verified. So you've kind of potentially forgotten about that thing that was said 10 minutes ago, or, you know, you think I'm gonna have time to check that I'm just gonna deal with this next thing. And also, then finally, perhaps, that so many things that are said that are not accurate, that people then start to think, well, maybe accuracy is not this, this important thing, you know, maybe facts, or maybe everything is a degree of perspective. So I think that it's strangely, he doesn't, hasn't suffered the consequences of saying things that aren't true that other people have done for that reason.

Graham Allcott 56:38

And I guess, also, just the nature of his career, he's probably been surrounded by lots of people who will indulge some of those untruths and indulge the fantasies. And, you know, that's the thing that has actually translated quite well through to his political career, like, surprisingly, so but it I mean, it really shouldn't. Right,

Tom Bergin 57:02

Well, um, yeah, as a journalist, you know, truth and facts are important. And it's difficult to think, in the world, how we can solve problems. I mean, Rex Tillerson, who is the Secretary of State for Donald Trump, who I'd come across in my previous job as an oil reporter. You know, a tough guy, you know, not, not any kind of Lily, livered liberal, you know, gave a speech that after he left office, and he was one of the people, or the few people who left and didn't talk about, you know, his treatment or complain or anything. But he did say in his speech, we're not going to solve the problems of America, by, you know, Rose tinted views of the truth, you know, we really needed to try and solve problems based on facts. And it is quite worrisome that if you look at things like climate change, or any of the economic problems that we have, and climate change would certainly be an economic problem to do if we look at those, and we just just ignore things, we don't want to be true, or we pretend things are true, that aren't like that you can cut tax rates and still have higher revenues. You're not really going to solve any of the problems. So that's, I think, the worrying thing about the past four years in the United States, it does seem to feed into a broader narrative that we're seeing in many places, which is that you're allowed to believe what you want to believe and facts are a matter of perspective. Because at the end of the day, they're, they're usually not. And the scientific consensus is not just another opinion. That's something that we can decide. Sometimes we'll accept the scientific consensus. Other times we won't, and that we will differentiate between the two, other than just on what we like the sound of

Graham Allcott 58:54

Yeah, we got to celebrate facts. And we've also got to do away with this idea that having one scientist who represents the scientific consensus on climate change on a BBC program, and then having a climate change denier crazy person on the balance is somehow the way to represent these things, right? Because and often, I think the other thing that happens is that a lot of scientists who've been talking recently about, for example, COVID vaccines, because they're so careful to only articulate Pure Truth. They sound a bit more cagey than the crazy person who has the conspiracy theory who just believes so wholeheartedly have uncovered the truth and everyone else needs to wake up and I think we kind of really need to get back to a celebration of truth and facts and and the importance of nuance in the way we discuss work and politics and everything else right

Tom Bergin 59:53

there. Absolutely. You mentioned that the issue about who appears on TV and studies have been done with just showing that the spotlight Market pundits that frequently appear on TV have got a worse strike rate than than average. And it's that issue of a lack of doubt, a lack of doubt makes so many great company, you know, you're in a bar with somebody and you're discussing an issue of the day, you really want to have a drink. Yeah, you know, but on the other hand, it's not particularly something I'll tell you about this guy. And similarly with TV, and so sometimes the experts that we like to listen to are quite forthright. And even if they're not supporting an idea that we already had, we might find their idea quite attractive. So the, you know, we can he's talking a lot of sense, you know, but no, it's just loud, nothing has been repeated. So, that that is that that is the problem that how we can sort of look through that and maybe become a little bit less emotional. I mean, one of the things I enjoy working for Reuters is that we have a professional audience. And what that means is they, they, largely, they pay for our service, because they need it. They're not looking to be entertained. So there could be financial markets, people like traders, and it could be a news organizations who want to take the facts. And some of those news organizations might not be without bias, but they can't put their perspective on an on a news story, if it's already got a news story. So they want objective news. So we want the, you know, we have a commercial imperative for hard facts. And, you know, it does, so that's our business model, we're not going to get paid. And we don't do that. And it's it sort of reinforces this idea, to me, at least that, you know, it shows that these things do exist, because we can't sell them if it's not fact. And that's it that there is some there is a market for that. But unfortunately, in the broader discourse, sometimes that that that sort of is lost. And you see that the product that people desire is, is often something quite different.

Graham Allcott 1:02:02

So I just wanted to finish by focusing on productivity. And, you know, what I love about this podcast is we really get to explore a lot of ideas around how different people define success and, and happiness, and you know, the relationship of the work that we do in productivity to the bigger picture. And I think your book really speaks to that a lot. But just bringing it back to productivity as a theme. So having investigated economics, do you? Is there anything in economics that you think can really help us to be more productive? Or is the opposite true, we should just ignore it, I'm just interested in how your own productivity may have been impacted by the work that you've done around investigating economics?

Tom Bergin 1:02:51

Well, you know, the book largely looks at areas where economics has said that we, you know, we can do certain things and become more productive productive as a result, we can have faster growth. And where I show the book is that that's not the case in those examples. But I think first, but the idea of looking for things that make us more productive, which, and I think talking back to Ronald Coase, his Nobel Prize winner, who, who complained about the wrong direction, you think that there is a right direction, that we can focus on things, but that can make life better can make us work smarter as a society, not, not necessarily as individuals and maybe as individuals, but as a society, we can be more productive. But it does mean we need to sort of move away from some of the easier answers and maybe sometimes more intuitive answers than we followed in the past. So I think that in some ways, by, you know, at least having this exercise of, you know, this area of thought, which is economics, which is meant to be about how we grow the economy, that it can, you know, there is there is a sort of a grounding there that can be built, there are plenty of people there who have interesting ideas, you know, I talk about Paul Romer and how he, his his ideas about ideas, you know, talking about the growth is really predicated upon ideas. And then if you think about that correctly, you can see what what we really need to do is encourage ideas. So that, you know, simply incentivizing people through price signals to buy more or less of something, or provide more or less of something, is not necessarily the best way to growth, to encourage more ideas that if ideas are a building block of growth. So I think that the plenty of people and Ronald Coase himself, you know, had lots of ideas about transaction costs. So economics can frequently come up with really interesting ideas. Sometimes those ideas are not as prescriptive as some of the existing business models that have driven economic decision making over recent decades. So there's a I think one of the problems in economics is sometimes their best days. Ideas are not the ideas that the the the body of study wants to propagate. Because if you offer somebody a black box that tells you exactly what policies to do, you will be invited to the to the table to consult for cancer. But if you're somebody that's more like a philosopher, so it doesn't know what you need to think about is the way in which we include people in society that can get a bit more wishy washy. And, you know, you might,

Graham Allcott 1:05:25

This might work but on the other hand, not in this, you know, there are exceptions and Yeah, exactly. It's so that might, you might not have the same influence. So that's one of the one of the one of the difficulties of economics is maybe not to be afraid of, of not constantly being the person that's, you know, called on to provide the answers. And in terms of how you think about your own productivity, and how, as some of the ideas from the book helped or hindered you? Do you identify yourself as someone who is motivated by money or tax cuts, or any of the things that you took?

Tom Bergin 1:05:59

Well, I mean, I'm very motivated. I'm pro about productivity. Yeah, I do think about the loss. So in terms of success, I mean, I work in an industry, I guess that it doesn't necessarily, it doesn't really measure that success. in financial terms, I say that from having come from finance, is an industry that did see that being quite different. But in terms of productivity, it's also an industry is quite difficult to define productivity, because they could say, okay, it's a book, or it's some stories, but how you get to that, like, what are the bits and pieces that lead to a good investigative story, or an original book or, you know, that is harder to define, and, you know, define in the work that you need to do. So the key is, is to try to find that. And so for me, productivity is very much about trying to break down a somewhat abstract idea, or objective into clearly as much as possible, clearly defined activities. So making it making it simpler, breaking it down. And then you can do also do those things, at your leisure in the way that you want want to do it. But it's, it's really my job, I spent a lot of time doing it for some time, working with maybe younger reporters, and, and helping them, you know, develop story ideas or advanced projects they're working on. And it is disappointing sometimes to find, you have a meeting with somebody, and then come back six months later, and the project hasn't advanced that much. They still think this is a fascinating year area. That's a great story in this, but we're not any closer to having a story. And that's, you know, through I mean, a way that's definitionally a lack of lack of productivity, but I think it's a lack of the process. So if you're in something that's that's that, that is not as defined as say broking or, you know, totting up the value of other pension funds, you need to sort of clearly defined, you know, tasks as much as possible.

Graham Allcott 1:08:10

Yeah. And that's quite subjective, isn't it, I find that with my own work, as well as that sometimes, you know, I can get an email from somebody where they're saying something along the lines of this has changed my life. And it's amazing. And I think, sometimes that's worth more than me doing a keynote for 100 people, where people are slightly interested in a few things, I have to say, Oh, aveeno so sometimes there is a subjectivity to all of that isn't there and books often do well, or less well, based on you know, catching a Zeitgeist and being in the right place at the right time. And, and so timing plays a role, right? And subjectivity plays a role and it's, it can be difficult to, to pin these things down. I definitely relate to that.

Tom Bergin 1:08:55

Absolutely. I mean, luck is, you know, is a big feature many things. And you mentioned timing, you know, equally good work at a different time, couldn't have the same resonance you know, I wrote a story about Starbucks tax avoidance in 2012 that was at a time of the depth of internet financial crisis you know, the government's are cash strapped and people are facing higher taxes I mean, at a point in time like that people would be more upset about corporations avoiding tax than you know, the height of the boom so a story becomes gets gets gets more play. Yeah, I mean, much about what we achieved in life we don't like to think about it that way is is is a function of good fortune. Potentially good timing, but even our our talents, you know, some people that maybe you find it easier to work harder to concentrate than others in itself, and maybe perhaps, look,

Graham Allcott 1:09:48

yeah, well, the books fascinating and I've kept you longer than I said it would get. Let's just tell people where they can get hold of the book and where they can connect with you and anything else you want. Wonderful.

Tom Bergin 1:10:01

Well, the book is available from bookshops. It's also available online. It's available at Amazon Waterstones, all the your local bookshop will be connected also to, to online purchase mechanisms. And you can connect with me via my Twitter, social media, your Facebook, and also my website, Tom Bergen dotnet, where you can also find out the places that you can get the book and learn more about the background of the book and also to about myself, and my other day job as a reporter

Graham Allcott 1:10:34

great. I will put links all of that in the show notes that get me on busy, calm, but Tom has been great. Thanks for hanging out.

Tom Bergin 1:10:40

Thanks, Graham. I really enjoyed it.

Graham Allcott 1:10:41

I just want to say a special thank you to Riz, who is part of our team, and was the person responsible for all of the compilation of beyond busy Episode 100. So just want to say thank you to Riz. Again, for all of your hard work on that Riz ended up working through a weekend. And you know, by the time we got to Monday, she was still going to get everything finished in time. So just want to say props to Riz we gave her a good four day weekend, the week after. But yeah, just the dedication and time that was put into those episodes, I think really shines through in them. So thank you. Thanks also to Emilie and Mark Steadman, my producer for the show. And thanks also to Think Productive, who are our sponsors for the show, and also want to just thank Penguin for setting up the interview with Tom Bergin as well. If you are finding it difficult to get through this very bleak, British winter, I'm recording this on a day where the sky could not look more kind of white and gray and it's really cold and it just feels very miserable at the moment. Then every Sunday, I send out this thing called rev up for the week. It's a single email that lands in your inbox and it has a single productive or positive idea for the week ahead. So if you want to sign up for that, just go to Grahamallcott.com. And my surname is double L and double t so Grahamallcott.com. And then from there, you can sign up to Rev Up for the Week. And I'll send you my little perky emails once a week on a Sunday at 4:05pm. UK time is when it goes out. I don't know why it's four or five just is just a time that I decided one time and now it's kind of become tradition. So 4:05pm that's when that one goes out. As always, the show notes and everything else are at get beyond busy.com. And if you haven't checked them out, I'd love you to check out the three bonus episodes that we released last week for beyond busy 100 with everyone from Lorraine Pascale to Josie Long to Cal Newport you know so many interesting people that we profiled as part of that series, and you're definitely gonna find a surprise and interesting conversation as part of that beyond busy 100 series. So go check them out. We'll be back as always, next week with another in depth conversation asking the bigger questions about work. So until then, I hope you're managing to get through the winter. I hope you're feeling okay. Have you been kind to yourself. I'll see you next week.

Take care.

Bye for now.