Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / How Branding Replaced Facts in Politics

Transcript

How Branding Replaced Facts in Politics · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Here's an uncomfortable question for you.
• 0:09
  What exactly unites Donald Trump and Barack Obama?
• 0:14
  Pepsi and Coca-Cola?
• 0:16
  The far right and the far left?
• 0:18
  The answer, as you will learn today, is that they are all brilliant at branding.
• 0:23
  They're brilliant at defining themselves.
• 0:25
  They have a clear narrative.
• 0:27
  They can tell a compelling story about the world and their place in it.
• 0:31
  So much of life these days is like that, of business, of social media, of political parties, of social movements.
• 0:38
  It's shaped not by facts, but by, let's just say, alternative facts, which really means by feelings, by storylines.
• 0:47
  You yourself may even have a brand.
• 0:50
  You may be the disruptor or the carer or the loyalist or the contrarian or the lover.
• 0:55
  Today's guest, Matt Jones, was a political strategist and a speechwriter in the UK for the British Conservative Party when they were in opposition, helping them to define their brand against the incumbent Tony Blair.
• 1:07
  He went on to deploy his branding and marketing skills in the private sector.
• 1:12
  He founded a small boutique gin company, which he sold for reportedly nearly nine figures less than 10 years later, thanks largely to its place in the market.
• 1:23
  In other words, its branding.
• 1:25
  And Matt joins us today to explore how storytelling is shaping our lives more than ever, more than you probably realize, from the supermarket to the ballot box.
• 1:35
  and how we may just be able to bring some sanity back to public life.
• 1:40
  I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one, the only, Matt Jones.
• 1:50
  There's also something in the branding of all of these populist movements, these populist far-right movements, which is we care, we're the only people who are willing to cop flack for saying the unsayable because we care about you, because we are on your side, the forgotten people, so to speak.
• 2:12
  The left left itself vulnerable, I think, to that emerging on the right, not just because of economic malaise, but because it began carrying a tone of such finger-wagging know-it-allism that it was easy for people to feel alienated from the ambitions of the left.
• 2:30
  I think you are completely correct, and I just too built.
• 2:34
  On the left, there has always been this concern to be right, even if it means you don't win.
• 2:40
  The left is very, very bad at winning votes broadly.
• 2:44
  You look at the history of referenda here in Australia.
• 2:48
  Generally, if your issue is the yes vote in a referendum, you will lose.
• 2:53
  Typically, the yes vote is the progressive move society forward.
• 2:57
  Typically, it loses.
• 2:58
  People like to vote.
• 2:59
  Well, it also loses because we make it hard to win.
• 3:01
  We make it hard to win.
• 3:02
  You don't just need...
• 3:03
  It's not like a Brexit vote or something.
• 3:04
  But I would argue very often the people...
• 3:09
  articulating the wider vote.
• 3:11
  Yes, often the people of the left of the progressive movement, and they are terribly concerned with being right, intellectually right, puristly right, rather than winning.
• 3:20
  I think what we're seeing with Trump are movements that are more concerned with winning than being right, and then I think they add a second thing, which may...
• 3:28
  to your point, open the door to the Farages and Le Pens of this world finally getting access to power in their countries, which is the realization that when you are the outsider, when you are the disruptor in a system, you don't have to play by that system's rules.
• 3:42
  I think politicians for most of my lifetime have been concerned to be accepted members of the club.
• 3:48
  And one of the sort of characteristics of being in the club is you have to be able to experience shame.
• 3:55
  So if you do something wrong, you know, I grew up in this history of, it always seemed to be conservative politicians would stand tearfully on their doorstep with their wife and children next to them because they'd been caught having an affair.
• 4:06
  And they'd say, my wife and children are standing by me at this difficult time and I'm standing down and, you know, I'm going to take some time to reflect, to go back to all this stuff.
• 4:13
  Yeah.
• 4:14
  What this sort of modern movement says is you can just brush it off.
• 4:18
  You can be wrong and just never acknowledge it.
• 4:20
  You can do wrong and just deny it.
• 4:22
  And this new world of no shame and no consequence, again, is also, I feel, a little hack.
• 4:29
  It's like they found the floor in our system.
• 4:31
  It's like we used to say, well, we got you.
• 4:33
  We caught you in a lie.
• 4:35
  Last week, you said you're all in favor of this.
• 4:36
  This week, you are saying the opposite.
• 4:38
  In the old days, politicians felt the need to explain that.
• 4:42
  Yes.
• 4:43
  The Trump way says, don't explain, don't apologize, take no backward step, just keep moving forward.
• 4:50
  And as people have seen it work, I think that's where now the Farage is.
• 4:53
  I remember Nigel Farage famously on the night of the Brexit vote, the vote when the British went to a referendum to decide whether or not to stay in the European Union.
• 5:03
  The no vote won, if I remember correctly, by 51.8 to 48.2, whatever it was.
• 5:09
  So really, you know, less than a 2% swing either way.
• 5:13
  earlier that evening, it looked pretty certain from early exit polls that the Remain vote was going to win and that Britain was going to vote to stay in the European Union.
• 5:21
  And Nigel Farage went on the live TV and said, this is not over.
• 5:26
  This is a vote that we will keep having again and again, and we'll keep asking the British people.
• 5:31
  Five hours later,
• 5:33
  The Leave vote had won, and Nigel Farage went back on live TV and said, this question has been decided forever.
• 5:39
  We must never hold this referendum again.
• 5:42
  It would be an insult to the British people.
• 5:44
  And I think he had taken that playbook from Trump, this idea that you could do a full 180 spin within five hours on the same live TV network, and it just didn't matter.
• 5:54
  Yeah, shame requires... For shame to be an impactful accusation, the person has to not be shameless.
• 6:02
  It requires the participation of the person themselves to work, right?
• 6:08
  A shameless person can't feel shame.
• 6:10
  This is almost why I think some of the—that hypocrisy is a worse thing in the eyes of the forgotten people, the little people who are voting for Farage and Le Pen and Trump, than wrongdoing.
• 6:23
  Right?
• 6:24
  It's the hypocrisy of the elites who do feel shame to be pontificating about how much better they are than everybody.
• 6:30
  It's Hillary Clinton saying that she's not part of the elite, but then coming to Donald Trump's wedding anyway, and flying to Davos on a private jet so she can talk about...
• 6:39
  you know, as you can meet with Greta Thunberg.
• 6:41
  It's like the artifice of it.
• 6:44
  And there's something about Trump and Farage where the artifice is just part of the game.
• 6:50
  And like, it's like, you know, I'm not pretending to be anything that I'm not.
• 6:53
  I'm going to lie to your face directly from the podium instead of in back rooms with lobbyists, you know, where I'm screwing and pretending that I'm not.
• 7:02
  So I do think there's, just getting my head around the branding of it,
• 7:07
  There's a strange branding about like, we have your back because you can see exactly what we are and we don't hide it.
• 7:14
  And we have no shame about it.
• 7:16
  And we have turned politics into a tribal team sport.
• 7:22
  where I am your team on the field and you cheer me on.
• 7:25
  And anyone watching this who's a sports fan, just think about the opposition player you hate the most.
• 7:32
  Like someone, you know, if you're a Yankees fan and you think about that Red Sox player that you just absolutely cannot stand...
• 7:40
  And just shut your eyes for a second and picture them pulling on a Yankees jersey for two years.
• 7:44
  And in two years' time, you will be cheering to the rafters for their, as we call it in Australia, their shithousery now representing your team.
• 7:54
  And I think, once again, you realize this, and I think all of these things are...
• 7:58
  hacks, sort of gaps in the matrix that are being exploited.
• 8:02
  So we now have this incredibly fast moving news attention culture.
• 8:06
  So if you ride out the shameful period for 48 hours, the news culture has moved on.
• 8:11
  People are, you know, sort of
• 8:15
  reinforced into their worldviews by an algorithm that says it is us versus them.
• 8:19
  This is our tribe.
• 8:20
  This is our identity.
• 8:21
  So now our champion is landing punches on them.
• 8:24
  And the fact that they've caught him in a gotcha is just proof that they're out to get him and he's punching back and we're cheering on.
• 8:31
  The fundamental dynamics of political debate have changed so much.
• 8:35
  And in a way, we have entered this sort of ultra-branded era.
• 8:38
  And we call it things like identity politics,
• 8:41
  And we've lost a real sense of right and left in terms of policy.
• 8:44
  Again, back to that notion of attribution.
• 8:46
  You could look at half of the sort of nationalist economic policies of the recent Trump government and say, these do not feel like Republican policies.
• 8:55
  They feel like a command and control state.
• 8:58
  But we're much more in a world of identity rather than ideological purism.
• 9:02
  Yeah.
• 9:02
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• 9:07
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• 9:12
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• 9:18
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• 9:22
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• 9:26
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• 9:30
  catalogue of mind-expanding, bullshit-free, uncomfortable conversations.
• 9:35
  Back to the show.
• 9:35
  Jerry Seinfeld had a bit about the clothes of the Yankees and the Red Sox.
• 9:40
  You know, he's like, they'll literally trade a player.
• 9:44
  And then, you know, you were booing for him yesterday.
• 9:47
  And now, you know, you love him.
• 9:49
  And then they trade another player who you were cheering for.
• 9:52
  And the moment he goes to another team, you're like, boo, different shirts, different shirts, which is exactly that insight.
• 9:59
  On the question of conservatives being found in, you know, wasn't there some period where a number of conservative politicians in the UK would be found deceased in, like, let's just say, unbecoming situations, wearing frilly panties and belts around their necks and, you know, whips and things like that?
• 10:19
  I do remember a Clive James episode of Saturday Night Clive, which was his British weekend television show where he would do a news desk
• 10:26
  segment where he delivered the news that there was shock as a British Tory MP was found dead under perfectly normal circumstances in his home.
• 10:37
  So fast forward that to today and just the political future before we get back to brands and companies.
• 10:42
  What do you make of One Nation and the conversation in so many liberal democracies around immigration?
• 10:49
  Because I feel like this template of
• 10:52
  we care about you and the elites are off with the fairies.
• 10:59
  They're beholden to big business.
• 11:00
  They're beholden to globalization.
• 11:02
  They're beholden to their buddies in political parties.
• 11:04
  They're beholden to pollsters.
• 11:05
  It is a tricky one for mainstream parties to writhe out of and sort of dodge the bullet of populist parties who have a much simpler narrative, which is they're all corrupt.
• 11:18
  And so give it a shot.
• 11:19
  Yeah.
• 11:20
  So I think there's a few things I'll try and answer without getting into personal views, although we can talk about personal views.
• 11:27
  Life is a lot simpler when you are trying to articulate a very simple narrative, this good, this bad.
• 11:33
  When you are trying to govern, life is hard because suddenly you have to embrace the ambiguity and the complexity of how an economy works and all those things.
• 11:41
  I was listening only this morning to a podcast talking about the likely inflationary impact of
• 11:48
  the beefing up of ICE in the United States.
• 11:50
  And if they manage to deport the number of undocumented migrants that they are talking about deporting, they will be removing 5% to 10% of the total labor force in some sectors like hospitality and agriculture, which will cause the most extraordinary wage inflation.
• 12:05
  But...
• 12:07
  That fact doesn't matter in the simple narrative of we need to take back control of our borders and all those things.
• 12:12
  So simple narratives win more than ever.
• 12:16
  I think the sad truth is that, and I was having this discussion with someone the other day who didn't quite buy into it,
• 12:25
  We are in the middle of, or maybe we're in the tail end of a great economic inflection, where until 10 years ago, you could be reasonably confident that young adults were going to grow up more prosperous than their parents and more prosperous than their grandparents.
• 12:42
  And we are seeing that wheel now almost fully turned where younger people and middle-aged people are now looking and going, well, short of waiting for my parents to die and hoping that they didn't have too many children to divide the proceeds and picking up either their house or the value of their house, I don't see how I'm ever going to get ahead and out of my student debt, let alone out of my mortgage.
• 13:04
  And in that world where an economic promise, where the promise of hard work gets its return,
• 13:12
  In that world of this real sense that you have been cheated out of the deserved bargain that you thought you'd made, I think we become incredibly vulnerable to simplistic narratives that explain to us who the real villain of the piece is.
• 13:29
  And it becomes a look over there and whose simplest narrative wins.
• 13:33
  And I don't just blame that on the purveyors of those narratives, because I think equal responsibility lies on...
• 13:41
  with those people who've maybe vacated the battlefield there, who've not communicated with empathy, with love, but also with precision and with sophistication.
• 13:52
  So, look, these things are going on.
• 13:55
  I remember watching very, before I actually worked in politics, my first job was in military intelligence, and then I worked for the Treasury in the UK.
• 14:05
  And I remember sitting and watching Prime Minister's questions as a humble civil servant.
• 14:09
  And it would have been Tony Blair and William Haig, the first Conservative leader to lose after Tony Blair's government won.
• 14:19
  And they're arguing about unemployment.
• 14:21
  And William Haig stood up and said, this week unemployment has gone up by X.
• 14:26
  What does the Prime Minister have to say?
• 14:28
  And Tony Blair stood up and said, well, I can confirm to my honourable friend that unemployment went down this week.
• 14:34
  And I just thought, as a voter, I'm just giving up there and there.
• 14:37
  If these two men who claim to be the two most significant leaders of our country cannot agree on a basic fundamental statistic, because if they can agree, we can then debate what to do about it or what has caused it.
• 14:49
  But the fact that they can't even agree that this happened, then I'm just going to return to my gut.
• 14:53
  And if my gut says there are fewer jobs available and my job prospects are diminished, that is going to become the fact.
• 15:00
  And I think for me, I could see even then, like we were losing people.
• 15:03
  And I think we have lost people from the world of rational analysis, and we've created this open playing field now for people who offer simple, comforting narratives.
• 15:13
  It's one of the reasons I love the name of this podcast.
• 15:16
  We seek comfort.
• 15:17
  There is comfort in being told what you are experiencing, the sense of loss you're experiencing, the sense that life is a game and someone is cheating and it's not you, it's them.
• 15:27
  Mm.
• 15:28
  This is very comforting.
• 15:30
  G'day, humans.
• 15:31
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• 15:37
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• 15:39
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• 15:49
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• 15:55
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• 16:01
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• 16:02
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• 16:08
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• 16:11
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• 16:11
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• 16:16
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• 16:17
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• 16:22
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• 16:27
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• 16:45
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• 16:46
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• 16:48
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• 16:50
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