How The Past Predicts the Future (Short Talk) - VoiceTube: Learn English through videos!

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a few nights ago, there was a wholesale event at Square Miles Roastery Ondas part of it, a bunch of customers there, and I gave a short talk.
That talk was very similar to the one that I'd given in Dublin recently, which people have asked about seeing.
So I decided I would record it on Dhe.
Share it now.
This is then was right.
Friendly was really relaxed, and so this talk is reflective of that.
It's a little less serious in tone and content than the talks I have given at bigger, more serious events and conferences.
I don't think I said anything particularly shocking in there, but it's definitely a lot more relaxed.
Nonetheless, I enjoy Leave me a comment afterwards.
If these questions I'll do my best to answer them.
So how the past predicts the future, I would argue, and I wouldn't be the first to argue this, that a great deal of what's gonna happen can be discerned by what has happened in the past, you know, I mean, we we are doomed to repeat our failures as a species.
We've proven that over and over and over again.
So what I want to do is talk a little bit about how we got to hear, to see where that sort of sends us off as a trajectory for where we go next.
Make sense.
All right.
So I'm gonna start a long time ago to some people, to me, to whoever 2005 is a few people.
Maybe he were working and coffee in 2005.
The others maybe want to come in the UK.
The coffee scene at that time could best be summarized with this on.
This is not me throwing shade on someone's coffee machine or whatever this is.
Anyone know this manufacturer for For Chino, For Chief Jo White's cold.
For Gino, it's a contraction of Frank's cappuccino.
Uh, genuinely on.
This is a company based in Birmingham and they were building like this.
This style, I kind of just like boxy classic espresso machines back then and in the UK, we didn't really know very much about coffee to me, Honest Thies.
This was the company that was sponsoring the Brewster competitions back then on the competitions.
What kind of very much about like syrup chocolate and like sweet, sweet things and a bit of bartending flair, and that's kind of where we were on the coffee scene was not hugely advanced.
There were a few people trying, but really, we were not making good coffee.
Even, you know, the top end of things.
It was not particularly advanced, and I started working for a different machine company.
Then on Dhe.
My job is a training manager, and I would travel on the UK, and I would work with businesses and what with coffee suppliers, the language, their coffee suppliers on education and training.
Because at that time, no one, no one roasted their own coffee.
Right?
Uh, I would say that there were loads of little coffee companies all over the UK loads and loads of them on.
Most of them bought their coffee for master arrest and Lincoln in your right.
These are companies that we're doing probably in the region of about 4000 tons, each off kind of private label coffee.
Um, that that's a lot just for context.
And you would go and they would have these these kind of computers full of people's preferred blends, that we're all basically the same with different packaging.
Andi, you went and you said I want coffee that I can sell for, like, nine quid a kilo and they'll be like, Yeah, right on.
Then you would get a bag of coffee or a pallet of coffee at the end of it.
And at that time, there were a couple of little sort of start happy things.
Has Bean James Gourmet coffee over and Russell?
Why?
These were these tiny little weird anomalies in the UK market.
These were people who roasted their own coffee.
And that was just weird that I promise it was weird.
Downstairs, we have to hostess to worst thing machines.
We got little 15 killer and red is the kind of the other one the bath.
If you go downstairs, you'll see it that used to belong to Master Roast, actually, and it was bought by a customer of theirs in Milton Keynes on after two years, he was like this worst thing.
Business is a bit tricky.
Can you just rest my coffee again?
And I'll put the roaster on eBay, Uh, which worked out for us.
So back back then were in sort of, actually a little bit later, but around then we bought that roast on eBay for a disgustingly small amount of money, but it was in a disgusting state back then.
Not a lot of love for coffee as it was then.
But this was This was really the market, you know, like, there were loads and loads of coffee companies all over the UK basically selling the same thing, which was kind of fascinating and weird.
And in the UK, we thought that everything special came from outside on dhe.
The Scandinavians were really where it was at.
This will make me feel old.
How many people can tell me who that is?
He was so famous to me.
Uh, he was the world breast the champion in 2005 his guy called trolls pulls from Copenhagen, Still still in Copenhagen.
Contra coffee.
If you go, there is war in the T shirt on.
But this point that the Danes just kept winning the first chance.
You know what I mean?
Like a freak Storm would want it before Martin Helder brand I wanted before he was Danish to the year after him.
Klaus Thompson want it.
It was just It was getting boring.
And the nice thing was that it got so boring that the Danish weren't even interested.
In 2000 and 86 people competed in the Danish first championship because, yeah, we've got champions.
Who cares?
There's no mystery about what would happen if you win, because they were just for five Danish people walking around Copenhagen.
Not a big city who were world champions so rolling around two dozen six.
And that's a year.
That stuff starts to happen in the UK right?
Little seeds of things start to happen, and I guess I would say that the competition vaguely begins to professionalize.
It still looks very different tohave it does now, but this one company that I work for it was a very smart guy that started, decided that it was worth trying to do something in good coffee that was trying to grow a coffee culture.
And he was way before his time.
We tried to start a burst the guild in 2006 nobody came.
Uh, just there was no one to turn up on dhe personally, that for me that was kind of a big year because I got involved in competitions I won the UK that year on.
I don't know why I put these voters up.
But oh, uh, that God, it's the picture.
It's, um So So this was this was, huh?
Just a very young, less great version of me.
Yeah.
So?
So this was this wasn't just about me going to compete in the world, but it was really about what?
I don't know.
How important was me on the Net that confounded here, Kind of getting more or less than like a global community?
Is that that time I'd start and coffee in 2003 and I just I thought very lonely.
So I had coffee friends on the Internet on DDE not really in London and that stayed that way for a long time.
But getting involved in the competitions, you realize that this is this big kind of global community out there.
All these different cultures who away way further down the line of good coffee.
Then the UK wasn't that time right, which is quite inspiring, quite useful, but wasn't quite distant.
Um, so it brings us around to sort of 2007 on in London.
At that time, there were two really interesting coffee businesses in particular that I won't talk about, uh, one.
I hope it's familiar to like a couple of people here.
Anyone?
What?
White.
So this guy, uh, camera club, lovely go flat white Was this interesting anomaly to me along with the other business that'll come next, which I may as well bring up which is moment, actually so flat white and one with right, they're both They're both very successful in 2007 and they're very successful doing quite different things.
Flatware is successful doing espresso in this whole new way.
Ah, where the game waas put as much coffee as is possible into the basket and then get a little liquid liquid out as possible on the other side.
And if you want to be weird and nerdy about it like when we started weighing espresso, Well, I went in on bull shots with Cam 28 grounds into the basket, right?
Genuinely astonishing on about 20 out, which waas, you know, intense, huh?
As an experience, A little kind of salty and whatever, but it looked good to pour milk into, and they were smashing out drinks.
They were having fun.
They were super busy.
They were doing like 110 120 kilos a week out of that kind of peak times.
And they were doing this thing that was quite new.
And then you had Monmouth, right?
Started in 1978.
But in 2007 they're really kind of.
They're cranking as well.
Borrow.
Market is hugely busy, and the thing that they're doing, that sort of bothers me.
Still it not this bad thing.
It was that they were doing filter coffee, right?
They were doing lots and lots, lots, lots and lots of filter coffee, hundreds of cups, bruised order on filter coffee on.
For years and years afterwards, everyone was like, Nah, don't filter coffee.
No one buys it you're like, but they do hundreds a day, and it was like he had no, uh, they were just outliers on dhe.
The thing that's interesting for me, it was clearly there was this demand for coffee, and if you did something good and interesting, people really, really responded to that.
But it wasn't doing the thing that maybe we've seen more recently, where people are like, Oh, coffee.
There's money in that.
I'll just have a coffee, right?
People looked at this well I call that looks hard.
Maybe I'm not gonna do it.
I don't know.
But there was all this success, but none of the magnetism.
For some reason, people weren't desperate to get into it the way that we saw in the in the years that came later.
And that kind of waited me out.
Um, for me, I That was also a year where we actually traveled around the U.
S.
To try and sort of see things.
Anyone recognize this guy?
Little hero moment for me.
It's kind of his name is David Shoma.
He's fascinating.
The coffee is his shops tastes like it did 10 years ago because that's how he likes it.
And actually, that's immensely impressive.
You're The thing that bothers me slightly is that he still pulls better shots than all of its stuff.
That's what I like.
They just like a little bit better every time and his staff are rigorously drilled.
You working here a za bar back before you get to touch a coffee machine.
So the fact that he let me steamed milk it was mostly done.
In fact, we had a TV crew for us, it felt like specialty was kind of booming around the world.
Like San Francisco was a big thing.
Portland was a big thing.
Vancouver had like a massive sea and Seattle still doing its thing.
It felt like coffee was gaining momentum everywhere.
We seemed like a good thing for us starting square mile a decade ago in a row.
Welsh, which some of you I know are familiar with our visitors there on DDE.
I think that one of the lessons we learned back then waas the value of community, right?
The people that used to come to these weird events that we did I'm very proud of, Um I know something here in this room that came to this event on dhe.
Probably this event, if you're not in this voter, there's a few people that you might recognize if you work in a coffee too long.
Um, community was turned out to be this really powerful and interesting thing in London.
The early kind of coffee community here was a very coherent, very together coffee community.
I'm looking at getting up on dose in the back and kind of being like a great example of those businesses, right, because for a long time the news.
Now the news now is depressing, broadly speaking.
But for a lot growing up, the way that the news worked on TV was they would do big headline news.
Depressing, depressing, boring.
And just before the summary, there would be like.
And here's the crazy, weird person we found this week, right?
And they would pan over to some guy in a potting shared in the middle of England, and he'd be talking about breeding rabbits like what a crazy freak on.
Then we'd hear the news again and we'd finished sad.
And what I worried about was that people who are extremely passionate about quality tend to sound crazy, right, especially in a market that has no quality.
So if you're there going No, no, no, coffee is all terrible, and effect can be amazing and could be interesting.
It can be sweet and can be complex.
If you're just one person, you're a crazy person.
But if you have a community, people all saying the same thing, this becomes a whole other thing on dhe.
What's interesting is the media treats you really differently to being a crazy person.
You become a trend worth talking about with writing about on back at the inn this time.
Time out.
We're actually the magazine that were kind of influential and interested.
And if they wrote about your copy shop, you were busier next week, for sure.
That doesn't really happen anymore, but definitely happened back then on Bond.
It was the beginning.
I think of something really interesting for London.
So 2009 a CZ we take along.
And if I'm tell me if I'm right on this one, that is that the right year 2009.
Jimmy, you.
I got you in here a few businesses style in 2009.
Um, this is where I get into tricky water right now.
I'm gonna I'm gonna ruffle some feathers public, mostly because the next light it looks really weird.
Uh, a bunch of businesses started that became quite a comic for the London coffee scene.
There's more on here is more than our own here, but I think it began to spread What would turn out to be quite a difficult idea.
And I don't know why it looks like this.
Uh, I can type up Promise three idea that if you have great quality, then you will be successful, right?
This was an idea that really began to gain traction around this time on entirely letters down here.
It says Ms, because I don't think that's true.
I don't think the simple statement of quality equals success is true or correct.
I think advantage equals success, right?
And at that time, quality was an advantage, No question, right?
There was not a lot of good coffee, and having great coffee gave you an advantage in the marketplace, really did.
People would travel, and, you know, I mean, like, you could leverage your advantage to be successful at that time, But I think it's sort of told a story that was probably further compounded by coffee roasters, that good quality coffee equals success and I think didn't disservice to the rest of the hard work that goes into success.
That's about more than just serving a nice cup of coffee, and I think it's something that's become even more true now, where good quality coffee is not particularly hard to find.
Sure, some parts of the UK short some parts of London not as easier than others, but certainly a bit of London where it's very easy, very easy to find a good coffee.
Just cause you have good doesn't mean success.
It's Ah, it's the kind of Red Queen theory of evolution, right, which is a book by who Andi simply summarized as we talked about survival of the fittest.
Right?
Let's say you have a bunch of animals, the ones that can run faster don't get eaten, right?
Typical example.
All you have left of fast animals, right?
Once the slow ones have gone, no one has an advantage anymore.
And that's true.
In business, with everything on what we would turn to our advantage would very quickly be co opted by others.
From that year, Starbucks announced the flat White You mean they're They're like, That's a thing people by.
We should do that.
Uh, this was this was, uh, done by a really nice guy called Darcy.
He was the MD of Starbucks UK, and he was so nice they fired him, Uh, because he did things like closed stores where people didn't want to Starbucks and sort of listened to local communities and sort of tried to be sympathetic and how they opened places.
And I think the U S had office for, like, that's losing and you will go.
And we will put someone new in who just was like, we're gonna open more stores everywhere.
And they did on it works fine, but this was Yeah, this is 2009.
I think the dates missing up here costed did the same thing with there were, like, 13 ounce black.
Why awesome.
Even though it made no sense, you've seen the new cost of flat menu, right?
Have you seen this?
Everything is flat on its cover.
The flat family who lets them say this out loud?
Um, can get a flat locker flat black.
Uh, you can I'm not even That's not a joke.
Anyway.
Uh, it was strange times in 2000 2009.
So 2010.
I hate myself for this next sentence.
Um, capitalism, Uh, sort of sort of like a certain state of order, a certain state of being, and it does not abide by deviation from that state.
What it will do as a system is drag everything back to some kind of capitalistic order.
I will explain.
I promise you that.
Honestly, in some ways, 2010 was a year of kind of pink rebellion, of coffee, trying to get as far away from what it waas as it possibly could write, pushing as far as we could into Weird into New.
And I would to define that by how we made a bunch of really interesting, helpful mistakes, uh, which we didn't know where mistakes at the time.
But hindsight is a is a powerful and cruel thing.
We here did a thing called Penn University, which was like this temporary cafe that had six ish seats.
No espresso drinks.
Just filter coffee.
Three default coffee is no milk, no sugar.
That was it.
Everything was brewed order in front of you.
What we were trying to do at the time was try and make full to coffee, expensive and valuable, because filter coffee still had that greasy hangover of being a thing that was given away a hotel conferences that was just a part of dog filth that was caffeinated, unnecessary and like prep to do.
This thing that still just irks me.
Brett Cell filter coffee on this L'Espresso, and they use the same coffee blend for both because who cares?
And a Nespresso.
A print sending wall is the last time I checked.
I've been for a while.
£1.25 barking.
Uh, so that's one ounce of liquid or filter coffee.
99 p.
Because espresso special magic.
It's luxury, I don't know, but like this myth that espresso was somehow better and filter coffee was somehow worse was really a thing in a problem.
And so we did a thing.
We were like, Well, that's just sort of celebrate for coffee a little bit.
Um, What we what we learned in about three months and probably didn't communicate Waas Pouring water on coffee is slow and annoying and painful hard work without a huge amount of reward to it, you know?
I mean, it takes a long time to make a pore over, but poor of his kind of boomed around this time.
And it wasn't just in the UK that we were doing weird things.
Uh, anyone recognize this cafe?
People recognize this thing is intelligence.
His cafe in Venice Beach.
This wall is kind of pink madness, in a way.
So this cafe has five espresso machines in it.
This is this is this is how far we got, like the path of crazy.
So you come in easy.
You come in here and you line up to a central point.
And at that point you are collected on taken and hosted by breast.
It takes you to one of the four to group machines around the cafe like a personal interactive experience, right, Which, you know, that's like four cafes, all in one.
They had a custom old lama zarco redone with some strangeness inside it on a slow bar T and that kind of stuff.
So, like, five little mini cafes and then here, we can see is like stadium style seating, like bench seating.
So you could sort of sit and watch the spectacle of this thing.
It got a bit weird on dhe.
This also coincidentally say yet the pressure profiling, but became a thing, right?
It's the same thing.
Like, we just must explore and do new stuff on experiment because we're just gonna find the promised land of deliciousness on Bill.
Just unlock something that when we serve it to a customer like a lightbulb going on in their head, they'll get it right.
They'll get that coffee is amazing.
If I could just find how to breathe this espresso or serve them this drink.
Give them that experience, they'll get it.
And that's not really how people work.
That's not how people drink their coffee, But we were full of a great deal of hoping enthusiasm.
Um, and I think when that didn't pan out the way that we wanted it to, it led in some ways tow this.
I kind of paired of stagnation.
If you've worked in coffee in London for more than five years and you think there hasn't been some stagnation, let me know anyone.
Maybe you just haven't worked for five years.
Things the idea I was gonna slow down.
And this is the bit where capitalism's grubby little fingers stick into you and start to pull you back to the mainstream, like what it was before.
So if that's what's gonna happen, well, the question is, what can we learn, right?
What can we learn from where we've gone?
If if we plot that point out, we sort of deviated out from this normal, we got weirder, weirder and weirder, and then we stopped.
We are going to get to somebody pulled back in again.
And we know this because forgive the clip art.
Everything is cyclical, right?
There is loads of different cycles you could talk about.
What about the hype cycle?
That's kind of interesting.
One of you wanna Google it?
There's the straight innovation cycle, right?
You have a boring industry, so passionate people do some interesting stuff.
They gain some success.
Some of them become quite successful, begin to acquire other companies to maintain their growth.
They consolidate and you end up with not many companies and quite a boring industry again.
Beer in the U.
K.
Has done this before, right in the seventies and eighties.
Loads of breweries.
No, it's breweries and then nineties to thousands.
Five breweries kind of own everybody, right?
The industry massively consolidates.
All these little started breweries get absorbed by the giant evil breweries.
And what that led to was the craft beer movement here in London.
What happened again?
People, we are restless and annoyed, and they want better.
And they start doing interesting stuff and they grow and they grow in the gross and get more successful.
And then, lo and behold, it was a B InBev come and be like candid have you on this?
You and the acquisitions have started with the great speed in beer.
An increasing speed in coffee.
Right?
We're starting to see it very clearly on a much, much larger level You've got like J B.
We're familiar with J B.
This this kind of weird private equity thing.
Out of what?
They're from Australia.
No, J b from someone.
Anyone?
No one.
Um so there are things that have happened before that we can expect to happen again, coming back to coffee.
Um, this one's gonna be interesting.
And I finished it away.
Told Roasting white label roasting.
We're gonna start to see more and more coffee companies that don't roast coffee anymore.
It seems kind of weird, but right now, there are so many roasters in the market that roasting your own coffee is no longer an advantage.
You mean actually in a very aggressive marketplace.
If you could go cheaper and still make money, that's an advantage.
Now, I'm not interested in this, but lots of people are on.
The easiest way to get cheap coffee is to have a very big company right for you, with all of their scale put your brand logo on a bag and you can turn around to cafe expert like Hey, by my coffee.
It's whatever it is, but it's cheap.
It's none of this overpriced local craft.
This is just good, honest value for money on that's that's going to be a thing.
I'm not saying we're gonna stop.
We're not gonna y label roasted people.
I should be clear about this.
I have no interest in doing this.
We have noticed I'm doing this for other people.
It's would be a terrible business to do that.
But this is coming back, no questions about it.
And you'd be surprised by the number of roasters already doing it.
As they look to grow just volume a CZ, they desperately can.
This is inevitable.
We can be said about it.
We could be sad that big companies are going to buy a little companies.
Bigger companies are going by big companies and giant companies going by biggish companies.
It's just it's going to happen.
Uh, we can't stop it, Pete.
You know, capitalism demands growth, right?
Your capital.
You must leverage it.
Decrease your costs on dhe, make more money.
Uh, it's going to happen I don't like it.
None of this really like it.
It makes the whole situation boring.
But actually, that's not necessarily the worst thing in the world.
If we're trying to be interesting, sir, kind of brings us to the question.
What if we What if we want a different future?
If we don't want to go back into exactly the same loop, how do we split her off and spin off to the side, away from where everything's gonna go?
Well, I would argue that we're gonna have to have a little bit of patients right now.
It's really, really hard to stand out as high quality coffee place in London because there are loads of high quality coffee places in London.
That's not going to be the case in a few years time.
They'll just be unless someone have consolidated.
Some have sold themselves to Acosta.
Costs are gonna buy somebody.
No doubt.
I suspect I know who they want on their companies trying to be bought by costume right now, but yeah, that's a definite exit for somebody out there.
But if we don't want to do that, if we continue to plow the path that we want to plow, then we could be like some of the beer companies in the US This started in the seventies, right that have been through this cycle once and have grown persevered by continuing to go the way they set out to go in the first place.
Because the temptation is always gonna be now Or how do I compete?
Maybe I cut costs.
Maybe I go cheaper, maybe ago, more mainstream right, Which is gonna be an increasingly crowded and difficult place.
I think staying true to what genuinely inspired is in the first place that we're keepers deviant from capitalism, I think, is the way to go.
We have to have a really strong idea of what we're trying to achieve, have strong vision.
We have to get people behind it.
But it's about no caving to the increasing pressure.
I think I'm not saying that we should try and run by businesses or ignore our costs or ignore rising rents or ignore rising people costs and all of the challenges that we face.
But we've got to choose where we're gonna compromise.
And if we compromise in our quality in a brand and our vision that we become stuck in the massive competition.
We don't stand out anymore.
We have no advantage if we go like everyone else is going.
So it's really a SW.
Far as I'm concerned about remaining different everyone else on accepting what's gonna happen in the marketplace, you can try and fight it or you can try and take advantage of it, you know?
And I would rather surf the wave than drown under it, which is how I see it.
It's gonna happen.
I'm gonna stop talking now and I'll say thank you.
And if you have any questions, I would love to answer them, okay?