Embracing the PAST for FUTURE SUCCESS: Jason Kingsley on APPLYING HISTORICAL ETHICS to Business

Thank you very much for having me here. That makes me sound very grand. It's been a long and busy life I've had.

Well, I've always been very, I've always tried to be quite independent. So I went through sort of normal academic school, did my kind of exams at various stages, then went to Oxford University, did a zoology degree, and sort of did academic training. But while I was doing all the academic work and sort of learning the scientific principles of hypothesis and experiment, I was also fascinated by business, and I was fascinated by creative business in particular, so writing books or playing computer games or whatever it might be. And then the opportunity came up with a growing industry, the computer games industry. My brother was very interested in programming, so he decided once we'd both left university to have a go at doing it professionally, but not with the intent really of making a fortune or making a lot of money or making a success of it, other than to do cool stuff and have fun with a pursuit we felt, you know, we could probably earn a living from it. And if you can earn a living and have fun, then that's great. You know, you're the wealthiest person on the planet.

I've always felt that was an interesting issue with our society in general, and it's ethics. It's about ethics. And the book, the book started, I was studying the chivalric code, which I'd sort of heard about when I was a boy, and I just thought it was a set of rules written down. And the more I looked at it, the more it moved away. It was more an ethos, it was more a set of guidelines to help society deal with armed groups of men with armor and horses and spears and swords. It was an attempt, I think, an early attempt for society to codify a form of behavior to make the world a better place out of conduct. And a lot of it is about striving to be a better person. It's not necessarily about succeeding, it's about the path you've taken, the journey to be a better human being. And it suddenly occurred to me that I'd lived my business life and my kind of fantasy life, if you like, my medieval side of things and my love of fantasy books like Lord of the Rings and TV shows and movies like Highlander, they came together. And I suddenly realized there were ethics behind all of it. There was a way of behaving and a way of doing business that, especially these days when we've got a lot of very wealthy people whose ethics are not really front and center of their public persona, I thought it was an opportunity to address that in a tiny way.

Yes, yes, no complaints for that. And families as well, because one of the things I think in a leadership position, you've obviously got various pulls on your time, but I think at the base of it you've got a bunch of talented individuals who have families. These days, you know, when we first started it was mostly young men in the computer games industry. Now it's all sorts of people and all sorts of ages, including people that were born at times when I remember very clearly being alive. You know, it's amazing as you get older, this idea that what you thought was a long time in the past is actually a really long time in the past. For some people it becomes historic. I remember seeing one of my first, people might not remember the Nintendo Game Boy, the original gray Nintendo Game Boy. It was like a brick of a game, brilliant machine, Nintendo a brilliant company. And I went to a museum, I was a guest of honor, and I saw toys that I'd had as a boy in the museum. And I suddenly became gray and old instantly. You know, I just thought, wow, this is amazing. But that also makes you think a little bit about history and about going back into our past, and then beyond that, how did people think of themselves? Did medieval people ever go, well, I'm a medieval person? And the answer is no, they didn't. Only now we can look at them. Back then they were just people.

Oh wow, yeah, very nice computer. 32 colors. I can remember the early days of having to use pixels to actually do pixel art on the screen, and that was state of the art. And you look back at old computer games, and one of the key things that's changed in computer games isn't necessarily the gameplay, it's the graphics and what we can do now on the screen.

Yes, larger than the film industry and the TV industry and the music industry. It's massive. What's interesting is I think it's almost snuck up on everybody in authority. In that, you know, I talked to colleagues at the BBC, for example, and I talked to members of the UK Parliament, because I'm chair of a trade organization, so I talked to our bosses, if you like, in government. And a lot of them aren't that familiar with the games industry, which is quite strange. But it is, I think, because the games industry has grown and changed so rapidly, it's hard to keep up with it. So yeah, one of my jobs is to educate them about games. Games are for a huge audience. There's hundreds of millions of people throughout the world that play games, and we can make a game in the UK and it can be played all around the world. It can be exported, but it doesn't have to be exported on ships burning diesel. It can be sent over the wires, you know, the internet, this wonderful thing that empowers us all and probably infuriates us all as well. The internet, it allows us to actually get smaller as a world and see what other people are doing.

Well, I find it interesting. I think there are different forms of friendship these days as well, because I realized I know a lot of, I've got a lot of YouTube colleagues that work in the sort of the medieval-ish space, the live-action role-playing and maybe movies and games, and they're all friends of mine. And I met one of them in real life and I said to him, to this particular individual, I said, this is a bit weird, I kind of know you really well from your work and from Zoom videos and video conferencing and chats, but we've not actually physically met in the same space on the planet, have we? He went, no, it's weird for me as well. I kind of feel like you're a friend that I've never actually met. And I think for you, for me, we've got thousands, hundreds of thousands of people that know us through our work. And our work is quite raw, you know, it's not like it's descriptive, it's not like an actor who's got a scripted line to say. This is us, you know, we're talking now and giving people our feedback and our opinions, and so people actually know us quite well. In some ways they know an aspect of us, and I think that's actually quite wonderful. I was in, I traveled to America a few years ago and I was waiting in the line for the security, you know, to have my bags checked, and I was wearing this red shirt, well not this one but another red shirt similar to the one I use sometimes in my videos. And this big bloke came up to me and was carrying a gun, and I was thinking, oh no, here we go, I'm gonna miss my flight, aren't I? And he went, come with me, sir. And I thought, oh well, never mind, I haven't got anything to hide, so it's just going to be lots of time. And he said, I'm a huge fan of your YouTube channel, and would you like to come through here and beat the queue? And I felt a bit guilty because I don't really like jumping the queue because I'm a celebrity or whatever, because I'm not a celebrity, I'm just me. But in this particular case I thought, fine, I can't really go to the back of the queue, can I? I'll take the opportunity. We had a nice little chat, he checked my bags and waved me through and told me a shortcut to get to the lounge. And I just thought, that's really odd, but really kind of interesting. People throughout the world know our work.

Yes, that's the idea. I was going through the chivalric code, trying to find out where it was written down, and it's been written down in lots of different ways. Different cultures have different sort of thoughts about what it is. It was never really formalized. There was never a sort of central place that defined the chivalric code. It emerged in different places at different times in different ways. A lot of it comes from the Languedoc, the southern parts of France, that were actually France, they were the Occitan region, and they had their own religion and all that kind of stuff. And it's also synonymous with troubadours and these sort of romantic courtly plays, which is really interesting. It overlays that whole sort of high medieval, early medieval, high medieval stuff. And obviously France and England were great rivals in the medieval period, lots of wars all the time. But there was also a shared culture of behaving well. The trouble is some of it doesn't age very well. There's a whole area about the chivalric codes in certain aspects of them about going over to the Middle East and kind of fighting against the enemies of the Christian God, which of course is very male-orientated as well. So what I've tried to do is interpret them in a broader way and say this applies to not just men, it applies to everybody, and it applies outside the combat locations. You know, what is fidelity, what does faithfulness mean, what does bravery mean in a business context, what does wisdom mean in a business context? And all of these things obviously have been interpreted in different ways by different people. I found some bits missing as well, which might amuse you. For example, in the Holy Roman Empire, the area that is now Germany and sort of northern Europe, the concept of humility in knights is not really talked about very much, which I find fascinating. Whereas humility in French, Frankish areas and England was considered to be a knightly virtue, whereas humility in the German and northern European areas was not. And I kind of don't know why, it just seems to be the way it developed over time. And also a lot of people failed as well. People failed to be chivalric all the time, and I think that's what we need to be aware of. We can't be perfect, we shouldn't try to be perfect, we should try to do the best we can in the circumstances.

Well, I think that's also the story of the key Arthurian knights and searching for the Holy Grail, and pretty much all of them never find it. I think one knight, Percival, finds it but can't get hold of it. He sees the Holy Grail, and the principle really is it's the journey. The journey is the thing, the only thing we can control. The end game, well, sadly we all know what the end game for all of us is. You know, we'll pass on our knowledge hopefully to other people and then off we go. But it's what we leave behind, it's what we've done on that journey. And I've tried to live my life in a way that has positive impact on people as much as I can, and also that I enjoy as well. I'm not a purist, you know, I like a good glass of wine sometimes, or meat. Actually, I'm really into mead at the moment, really like that. And I probably fail sometimes to meet the ideal chivalry goals, but I'm still trying. The trying is the thing.

Yeah, I think it comes down to how you see yourself. And I think for a lot of people, money is a substitute somehow, a score they keep to prove to themselves that they're doing well. But there are many happy rich people, of course, don't get me wrong. But there also seem to be a large number that are, or at least give the impression that they're quite dysfunctional, that they're searching after things that are unobtainable no matter how much money you have. Because once you get to a certain perspective, there are certain points in financial security, and I'm not saying being rich is a bad thing. I think there's a point at which it becomes absurd that having multiple billions and doing nothing with it seems to be a bit weird to me. That's my perspective, and I guess I don't have multiple billions. But you also get people that seem to be very unhappy with their own self-image, their body image and what they do to themselves. And I think our society tends to breed paranoia in the media. The media talks about bad stories because they're the ones that get people's attention and clicks, and it creates this spiral of terrible things going on. And very rarely do you hear small good things happening to people because they're not clicking, it doesn't sell.

I mean, tell you a quick story. I was there with my son, you know, when I was driving him, he was doing hockey, driving to underwater hockey on a Friday evening. And he was hungry, so I mean, there's nothing out, and we stopped at one of these small kiosks, you know, very basic store. And so I got him a pack of cookies, not the healthiest thing, but there was nothing else available. So I went to the cash point and took my phone, because back then I hardly carried any cash, it was all wireless. And I wanted to put my phone on the machine, and then there was a sign called 'no pay wave', your pay wave is the system for wireless contactless payment. And I said, oh, you know, I can't buy these cookies now for my son because I have no cash with me. And you know what this guy said? I'll just take it. Oh wow, he just handed me the cookies. I mean, it was a very simple store, like this guy probably didn't have much money, and he was giving me this cookie for, I don't know, five dollars. And that would never happen to me here in Europe. I mean, it really, the next day I went there and I gave him this money and I said thank you. But I was so touched by this gesture of giving me these cookies. And I thought, hey, why are we always so, our default mode here is distrust. You know, we don't trust people. There the default mode is trust first, they trust you, they give you something. And this is such a difference. And sometimes I really ask, why are we like that? You know, why don't we trust, why don't we give first before we receive?

I agree, and I do wonder if it's to do with the algorithms in the media and in the sort of the content we consume, the newspaper headlines equivalent. The other newspapers are kind of declining, but the idea of the newspaper is trying to sell copies, so they put an outrageous headline that asks a question, and even if you don't buy the newspaper, you read it and you think, oh no, something bad has happened. And that constant drip, drip, drip of people trying to get your attention with outrageous headlines, the click, the equivalence of clickbait before clickbait was a thing, just wears you down. It makes your brain think all of these things are happening all the time. I mean, looking at the research I was doing for my medieval stuff, looking through the court rolls and things, bad things that happened, it was a much more violent place, the medieval world. There wasn't a police force. You know, you go outside the major cities, there wasn't really a, there was sort of justice but it was small scale, like local magistrates. So somebody's pig ate your apples, and that was a big issue because you didn't have that much, there wasn't a supermarket to go to. And people laugh and it is small, but it's also big for people that live in that kind of agrarian place. But cesspits overflowing and people falling into wells and these things, but they mattered for those people. But the amount of communication they had was based on the speed of a horse. There was no broadcast headlines to say that somebody in this big city has been murdered, because you wouldn't care about it because it didn't matter, because that was 50 miles away and it's irrelevant. And by the time anybody told you, you'd say, so what? But there was much more violence happening, but there was no communication of that news to all of us. So it's almost this flow of information that the internet has given us which kind of makes us more sensitive and want to consume more negative stuff.

Sorry, how far can you, well, if you're going really fast, about 55 miles. You can ride about 55, 60 miles in a day, but you'll be really sore and really tired. But at average, an average sort of ambling along, having fun, maybe stopping for lunch, you ride about 30 miles on a horse. On foot is roughly 15 if you're traveling gently. You can march, and long-distance walkers do a lot further than that, but I'm talking about people traveling because they've got to travel, not because they're trying to beat a time, or they're not long-distance marathon runners or anything like that. And that means there's a video coming out soon which is about the difference between taverns and inns. And inns were places you stayed, and they're often located at roughly a day's travel from one place to another, so at an old crossroads. So you would decide you're going from Oxford to Canterbury, and it would be a certain distance, I don't know how many days' travel, probably four or five days at least. You would expect to stop for four or five nights at these inns, and you would meet people coming the other way, and you'd meet people going north to south as well as east to west, and you'd mingle in this melting pot of this sort of location where everybody's going to stay the night and everybody's moving, they've got their journeys. And you'll just meet them, they'll just be in the tap room, they'll be drinking beer or mead with you, and you might have a conversation. They're like, oh, did you realize that there's a new king, a new king of England? It's like, is there? Does it make any difference? No, tax is the same, money is the same, mostly. Okay, cool. Or we've invaded France yet, have we? Oh, not again. Does that make any difference to us? Not really, unless they come around and make some of us join the army. We're still going to get the turnips in, we've still got to pick the apples, we still got to look after our pigs. And I just, this immediate news and the news media wanting your attention, it's the thing that sensitizes us to this negativity.

No, very few. There's a few, if you read between the lines, you could hear people coming back from wars that had PTSD, or at least they never wanted to go anywhere again and became recluses, or wanted to just, you know, stop the world, I want to get off. You could imply that some had a mental health issue, potentially quite a severe one. I mean, medieval war was brutal, utterly brutal. I'm not saying modern war isn't brutal, and a lot of it's sort of gunfire, but medieval war was very close up. And you also had people that were more used to life and death because they often, they would also often kill their own animals to eat them. You know, the tragedies like childbirth caused a lot of women to die, a lot of children to die as well. Roughly 50% of people didn't make it to adulthood.

So I think there's perhaps a bit more fatalism as well. If you've had six children and only three of them have lived to adulthood, that would give you a certain perspective on the world. And I think times were really bad for women. I think they were bad for men, but they were really bad for women. Certainly the medieval period, women did have rights in different parts of the country, of Europe as well. And so the north you go, more into sort of Viking-dominated areas, women had many more rights, and it seems to be towards the south they had fewer rights. Well, it's very complicated and try to generalize, but of course women were having babies, there's no form of contraception. Women were having babies at a very young age as well. You know, people were married at 14, 15 was perfectly normal age to be married. If you were very wealthy, if you were aristocracy, you were often married when you were children, which meant that you didn't necessarily marry somebody you liked, you married because they had land and you wanted to join them together. Which is why lots of kings had mistresses, because they had mistresses for love and affection, and they had wives for offspring and political reasons. So that's sort of gone away to a certain extent now, and that's been very nice. But I suppose if you're born into that and it's what you expect, that would be fine. But disease, plague, imagine the Black Death sweeping through from Marseille all the way up through Europe, and imagine roughly a third to a half of everybody you know dying. And I mean, we can reflect on that a bit more because we're just coming out of a pandemic, but a pandemic that killed a tiny proportion of people, still tragic, and I'm being affected by it personally, and pretty much everybody I know has been directly or indirectly affected by it. Scale that up ten times, how does that affect? I imagine it affects everybody really badly. So there's a lot of learning we can take from the past, take from medieval times.

I think bravery is really important. Bravery and honesty. I love honesty. Honestly, it doesn't mean you have to tell everybody everything, it means you're honest to yourself. Now, business is sometimes likened to war, and it can be. You know, you could be trying to win more customers, more clients, you'll be trying to get market share. Fine, that is battle, not battle with swords and cavalry and fights in armor, I mean, there's a form of it. Therefore you need your strategies and you might plan and you might need to react to circumstances that you didn't beat. I think that's really important. But I think honesty to yourself and perhaps to the market, there are people that hubris kind of damages, you know, people that believe their own PR, if you like. And I think keeping a balance between how you present yourself externally but also knowing your own weaknesses and strengths, I think is very important. So I would say bravery in business is really important, but you've got to couple that with honesty. You've got lots of responsibilities if you're in a leadership position. You've got multiple facets to your levels of responsibility. And I know people have got to be responsible to shareholders because they own your company. Sometimes in my case, my brother and I own it, so I wear two hats, very lucky. But you've also got responsibility to your staff, you've got responsibility for your customers. And I think honesty to customers is really important as well. And one of the things we've always tried to do at Rebellion is, winning a customer is difficult, keeping a customer is easy and more difficult. Well, I think if you lose, bad product, or you're just trying to maximize your return, it's really, you're right. But if you produce good product, this is what I've tried to do, this good product. And when somebody's looking for another computer game or another book or another comic, or even another video to watch or another podcast to listen to, they'll first go, well, I like the last one this particular person did, I'll have a look at what else they've got. And if you can deliver another good one, then you're satisfying them and you go, okay, that business, they've discovered you already and now they'll consume and be interested in what you make. Whereas if you deliver them something cheap and nasty, that's the opposite effect. It leverages the other way as well. It is completely the opposite to that. And you'll find it harder because they'll go, those people did a bad job, they gave me a piece of the thing I bought had a good photo but it's much smaller than I thought, it didn't work very well, I am not going to buy from them again. Now even if that was a mistake and you delivered something by mistake, you've got an uphill battle to try to win them back. So it's a kind of a leverage thing. So behaving well towards your customers and clients means that they will tend to want to work with you again. That makes it easy.

Yes, we've all done it. I mean, but I bought things, you know, you buy things online and anything, no, that's a really good picture, or that's the wrong size, or that's a lot smaller than I was expecting. You know, and I just think that's just bad business. But the other side, you get something that's really good, that's worked well for a long time, you think, I'm gonna buy a new one of those from the same company because that's lasted five years and it's really good, really well made, great.

Yes, well, good materials, things will work. I mean, a lot of our culture is about make something cheap and fast, throw it away, and throw it away. And that's very bad for the environment, it's really bad for us. And like you, I've got pairs of trousers and, not socks, I seem to get through socks really quickly. I literally wear my socks out, I think because I do so much walking and I do so much work with the horses and I'm facing around in my Wellington boots, so my socks don't last very long at all. But yeah, I've got shirts that are my favorite shirt and somebody goes, well, that's, you're really in retro fashion now, that's from the 80s. And I'm going, yeah, it is actually from the 80s and I'm still wearing it. Love it, love it.

Well, yeah, we've actually acquired 250,000 square foot of studio space just in the south of Oxford, where our headquarters is, because we want to do film and TV stuff. It's another area of business that we think we should be in. And what's interesting is it's a very, very conservative industry. The business models in film and TV are surprisingly old school. The idea that somebody decides whether I can make a YouTube video seems absurd. You know, we just make it and put it out there, and people decide if they want to watch it or not. I mean, the algorithm might serve it to lots of people or a few people, but at the end of the day we make something and we put it out there. You do a podcast and you put it out there, and if people love it, great. Film and TV is about people telling you what you could make. You have to pitch the idea of the YouTube video or the podcast to them, and they go, no, I'm not sure our target audience wants that. They go, how do you know? Why don't you just say yes, try it out, see what the market wants. So the idea was to become further independent, build up our level of independence here. We're working with a lot of creative people and we're working with a lot of business partners in that area. It's a hard nut to crack though. Film and TV is very old school, people control access to the audience. Even companies like Netflix, you know, Netflix have their way of working. In the states, for example, we know that they're heavily unionized to protect the individual people working in the industries, and they have fights all the time. You know, we're going through that fight at the moment, the writers are on strike, which means nobody could write any scripts. I think the actors are working out whether they're going to go on strike next. And it's all because it's almost a walled garden. There's no emancipation, there's no sort of access to the market, there's no access to an audience for anybody that wants it.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, and we could boost a half hour or an hour long chat like we're doing now, and we can get it out to the people, and people can like it, they can follow us in different places, try and see more of our work, whatever it might be. And it's taken us the time it's taken us, and we haven't got too many people hanging around. I've got no makeup on and you haven't got a wig on, and there's no dance routine and all that kind of stuff. So it's a very natural way of doing things, whereas Hollywood is not like that. But I also question whether it can stay like that. So for example, Netflix at the moment are in a bit of a bind because their shareholders want to know how well they're doing, and they have to let people know with data. They've got tons of data, which is great, and they determine that somebody has watched something if they've interacted with it for a certain length of time, and that certain length of time might be 30 seconds. Now, I wouldn't consider somebody watching one of my videos for 30 seconds a success. I think it was a failure. I'd go, oh, obviously I haven't interested you in what I'm doing, you know, that's a shame and I need to do something about it. 30 seconds would be bad. But for Netflix it's great. But also Netflix have to pay all the people that were involved in making it based on whether somebody's watched it. And of course Netflix need a bigger number for their shareholders to say lots more people are watching it, but they want a smaller number because they've got to pay a percentage to the people that made it for them as part of the deal. And I think that's a massive tension there, because Netflix can modify its numbers. I'm not detailed, I don't know the details about this, but if for example you wanted to massage the numbers, let's say of viewers of a particular TV show, you could drop that threshold from one minute to 30 seconds, your numbers would go up, but it wouldn't mean more people had watched it. But the headlines for the shareholders might have a positive impact. Or we could do it the other way, you could say actually we don't count a viewing of a TV show as a viewing until somebody's watched all of it, in which case your numbers would collapse. And there have been plenty of failed TV shows where people watch it, they're not that bothered by it, and then they just click off because they're not interested in it. So we've got lots of data, but it's how that data is then manipulated and presented to shareholders who determine whether your shares go up or down. And a lot of these companies borrow based on their share value or they increase in their share price, and of course that leverages them up, but when it goes the other way it leverages the other way badly, and suddenly they can't borrow the money, the bank's gonna give me my money back please, and then that causes a catastrophe. I think that's bad business basically. But I've never been in the public markets, if it's how the public markets work, I don't want my business to work that way.

Yeah, exactly. Madness, isn't it? Crazy. Yeah, but this is how they play these games.

Yeah, if your business is based on permanent expansion, it is obvious you cannot expand forever. There is literally a limit to the number of people on the planet or space on the planet that could buy your thing. If everybody bought an iPhone, I guess you could just sell them another one, but there is literally a limit. There has to be a ceiling. Therefore any business is going to necessarily kind of scale differently.

Yes, that's right, 18th probably. Should have been. Support your local bookshop. I love bookshops, so I would encourage people to go into bookshops and order it. But it's also available at all the various online places where you buy books, and available digitally as well. And at some stage I've got to get around to doing an audiobook version of it.

Yes, yes, a little bit about how I got into the whole medieval thing and my first ponies and my experiences in jousting and what it means to do these things. And yes, there's a little bit of biography, a little bit of autobiography in there as well.

Thank you very much. Yes, Modern History TV is the channel, and Leading the Rebellion is the book. And yeah, I want to keep making cool stuff for people and hopefully lift them a little bit out of this sort of negativity. I'm not trying to be all happy-clappy about it, but I'm trying to make them think a little bit about life and how it can be good. Life can be very good.

Not particularly, no. I do various different forms of social media. I'm @RebellionJason on Twitter, should anybody be interested in that format. But I do a few bits and pieces on TikTok and things like that. But my main channels are really YouTube.

Thank you very much. Hopefully we'll speak again, you know, when you've got a moment and we can just chatter about things. I've enjoyed it very much.

Thank you.