Fungible v Non-Fungible Goods

Jono Hey:

It's been a really long time since I've played Pictionary, because people don't usually want to play it when I'm around.

 

Which is really disappointing, because I really quite like it.

 

Tom Pellereau:

If kids get around for a play date, and they get around to pick them up, like, I kind of want my kid back.

 

Jono Hey:

I can't find your one, but...

 

Tom Pellereau:

I've got this on the...

 

Jono Hey:

Well, these two.

 

The best managers are the people who notice the non-fungibility in people.

 

Rob Bell:

And probably the best people in life.

 

Jono Hey:

One of the items in the museum is tennis racquets.

 

And of course, it's just a tennis racket, but it's not just a tennis racket.

 

It's the one way one, the Australian Open.

 

Rob Bell:

This week, we discuss what makes something fungible or not and discover that it's not always black or white.

 

Hello, and welcome to Sketchplanations, The Podcast.

 

We're here to put a little pep in your step, some dash in your mustache, a little vim in your shin, some verve in your optical nerve, flair in your big hair, gusto in your big toe, and some zing in your bingo wing.

 

It's a podcast where each week we delve into the goody bag that is sketchplanations.com, pull out one of the many sketches that brilliantly explain stuff in the world around us and discuss what it means and how it applies to our lives.

 

You can also find loads of great Sketchplanations content up on Instagram and Twitter.

 

Now then, what a man.

 

What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man, a mighty, mighty good man.

 

Not my words, the words of Dave Crawford, the American R&B songwriter and record producer in 1968.

 

Words possibly made most famous by Salt and Pepper and En Vogue's reinterpretation of the song in 1993.

 

Exactly who these words were written about is unclear, but it's been said that Crawford's catchy lyrical refrain was in fact a premonition, a foretelling of the arrival but 11 years later of not one but two distinguished baby boys destined to become mighty good men.

 

I'm Rob Bell, engineer and broadcaster, and I'm joined in this podcast by my two inimitable co-hosts, Jono Hey, creator and curator of Sketchplanations, and that tenacious, tender-hearted Tom Pellereau.

 

Evening, boys.

 

Tom Pellereau:

What an introduction.

 

Jono Hey:

Good evening.

 

I'm glad this has been recorded.

 

Play that for my kids.

 

Rob Bell:

How are we doing?

 

All right?

 

Tom Pellereau:

Exactly that.

 

I remember that song Pepper, I remember that song Pepper's song so clearly.

 

Rob Bell:

Absolutely, absolutely stone cold classic hit.

 

This week, I came a cropper slightly with my joyful Googling of you and your shenanigans over the last few years.

 

I typed in what I was looking for into Google and I was greeted with the following message.

 

Your search did not match any documents.

 

But that leads me to believe that I may have found a gap in the market for you.

 

My search in Google was for Tom Pellereau cardboard cutout.

 

Oh, now it came back with 2D life size representations of Tom Hardy, Tom Fletcher from McFly, Tom Brady, Tom Hanks, even Lord Sugar.

 

But no Tom Pellereau.

 

Maybe one to think about for Christmas.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Christmas special.

 

Jono Hey:

That is disappointing.

 

We did wear those T-shirts, Tom Pellereau T-shirts one time.

 

Giant Tom Pellereau T-shirts.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Five of you.

 

To my party.

 

Rob Bell:

With Tom's face plastered right across our chests.

 

Tom Pellereau:

A mass of pink T-shirts you turned up in.

 

Rob Bell:

My local branch of B&Q, Tommy, is very familiar with you because I now wear that T-shirt, I hope you're not offended, as a kind of working T-shirt when I'm doing jobs and stuff.

 

And a number of times when I popped out to go and get something that I haven't got at all, or some more grout or something.

 

I've got your bit.

 

And I don't realize I forget.

 

I forget.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Well, I'm glad you mentioned that because I'm actually wearing my kind of DIY stuff tonight and the two of you look very smart, especially Jono, in his very sort of Scandi.

 

Rob Bell:

He's slick, isn't he?

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, that was a plan.

 

I was hoping that you'd downplay yourself tonight, Tom, so I'd stand out.

 

Rob Bell:

Well, Jono, good evening.

 

Jono Hey:

Good evening.

 

Rob Bell:

I was thinking this week that you'd either be a massive asset or a huge frustration to play Pictionary with.

 

Yeah, and actually I have exactly.

 

So either brilliant or, oh, Christ, I'm against Jono.

 

And I have done it on, I think, both.

 

I've been on your side and on an opposing team, and it's either brilliant or really difficult to win.

 

Jono Hey:

Do you know what?

 

It's interesting you say Pictionary because it's been a really long time since I've played Pictionary, because people don't usually want to play it when I'm around.

 

Which is really disappointing, because I really quite like it.

 

I really quite like it.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Is that why you like Cranium?

 

Because you can trick people into playing Pictionary.

 

Jono Hey:

Oh, that's right.

 

Just pick all the drawing ones.

 

Rob Bell:

I remember we played it once, all of us, where we created our own cards.

 

Jono Hey:

That's good fun.

 

Rob Bell:

So you know you've got the different categories.

 

What, five of them?

 

I can't quite remember what they are, like action, difficult, people.

 

Yeah, that kind of thing.

 

We each wrote five options for each of those categories, and then we mixed it all up.

 

I remember we did that.

 

Jono Hey:

Good, it's a good game.

 

It's always good when you customize a game like that.

 

But yeah, as I say, whenever I suggest playing Pictionary, people say, why don't we play like Scrabble or something else?

 

Tom Pellereau:

I don't wish to start any rumors, but did Sketchplanations actually start as a Pictionary game that just sort of got a bit carried away?

 

Jono Hey:

Got a bit out of hand.

 

Yeah, it's all about getting your point across, isn't it?

 

Pictionary, boom, boom, boom, boom, two seconds.

 

What is it?

 

Rob Bell:

Well, it is.

 

So it's about the power of a really quick sketch in Pictionary, right?

 

Tommy, I was wondering if you often feel like you want to go to a quick sketch on the back of a fag packet, back of an envelope type thing, in order to communicate something, if that's a go-to for you or not.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yes.

 

Rob Bell:

It can be for me, for sure.

 

Tom Pellereau:

A lot.

 

And I see it in my mind and it's so clear in my mind.

 

And unfortunately, I don't have Jono's level of talent to be able to quickly draw it, so it takes me quite a bit longer.

 

And I now use a remarkable, I think it's called, a sort of E Ink, which I find brilliant, because you can rub stuff out, you can zoom, you can copy it, you can move it around.

 

And so I do quite a lot of sketching, not nearly as much as I would like to, because I really do enjoy it, but I don't have anywhere near Jono's skill, unfortunately.

 

Rob Bell:

But sometimes it doesn't need to be a good sketch, right?

 

It's just something that you feel you would communicate better through an image than through words.

 

I mean, or you can take it to the cranium level and maybe act it out as another option, but they're all there for you.

 

Jono Hey:

Pum it.

 

Tom Pellereau:

There's not enough like charade acting in business really, is there?

 

You know, in terms of, I did a presentation quarterly review today and to the team and maybe next time I should do it as a charade, you know, the whole thing, acting out.

 

Rob Bell:

Well, there's one in business that I don't think needs any words.

 

Tom Pellereau:

They all finger pointing, it's the ultimate.

 

Rob Bell:

Fortunately, you were never on the sorry end of that, Tommy.

 

Tom Pellereau:

I wasn't, I saw it a little bit, but I was never the receiver, which is very fortunate.

 

Rob Bell:

That's good.

 

Apart from the one time when he flips it on the last one, instead of you're fired, you're hired.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah, no, sorry, Rob, yeah, you're absolutely right.

 

I did receive it that once, that final time with the finger pointing in that you're hired.

 

An incredible, incredible moment.

 

I remember it very, very clearly still today.

 

Rob Bell:

Well, listen, the sands of time are slipping by quite literally in the context of the board game Pictionary with the little hourglass timekeeper, which means that you need to put your pencils down, count up how many you got and just move on with your lives.

 

Let's get on with this week's episode.

 

This week, we've selected one of Jono's sketches that explains the difference between fungible and non-fungible items or goods.

 

The printable artwork for this episode on your podcast player should be this Sketchplanation.

 

But if not, you can find it online or follow the links in the podcast description.

 

And I would suggest it's probably a good idea to check out the sketch before you get too far into the pod for this episode and all that you listen to.

 

Also, don't forget, we'll be going through some of your correspondents from previous weeks at the very end of this podcast.

 

And you can send us your thoughts, your experiences, your wishes and feelings about this episode or any that have come before to hello at sketchplanations.com or you can leave us a comment on social media too.

 

Okay, Jono, now I'd never heard the words fungible before you published your sketch about it.

 

Can you summarize what it means and then hence the difference between fungible and non-fungible?

 

Jono Hey:

It's interesting you'd never heard of it.

 

It's the sort of word that I kept hearing and people sort of seem to assume that I knew what it meant and I never actually knew what it meant.

 

And it always sort of sounded reasonable when they said it.

 

I'm like, oh yeah, I'm sure it makes a lot of sense, but I actually never knew what it was.

 

So I had to go look it up to find out what it was.

 

So yeah, essentially there's this concept of fungible goods and non-fungible goods.

 

And so what I really set out to do, as much for me as anything else, was to really settle in my mind what this is and to help make it unambiguous for anybody else, struggling with remembering which way around it was and what they actually meant.

 

So the core of it is fungible goods are mutually interchangeable for each other.

 

So the absolute classic fungible good is money.

 

So, if I give you a tenner, you can pay them back in ten ones or another tenner, and it doesn't really matter which one it is.

 

But non-fungible good is something that is not interchangeable with one another.

 

So generally, a huge amount of stuff obviously sit in the non-fungible category.

 

And fungible stuff tends to be things like commodities, like fuel or grain or, as I say, money.

 

But basically anything where if somebody was to swap it around, you really wouldn't notice and you really wouldn't care.

 

Yeah.

 

Rob Bell:

I'm just going to flip to the sketch quickly here now.

 

So in the sketch, your wonderful examples of fungible, oh, you've got it there, yeah.

 

Gold, corn, grain, fuel, money.

 

Lovely.

 

And then non-fungible, the flip side of that.

 

So is it more, those are things that are, so non-fungible items are things that have a uniqueness to them.

 

Is that right?

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

 

And I think there's some subtlety to it.

 

But like, so here's my, the thing that really made it click for me was this question, which is at the bottom of the sketch, which was, if I, or if you borrowed one of these for me, would I feel it pretty weird if you returned a different one, right?

 

Rob Bell:

I think it's such a great way for the, for me, that clarified it completely.

 

Absolutely.

 

And so it's a feeling, right?

 

Yeah.

 

That's not quite right.

 

Jono Hey:

And so, I dunno, yeah, classic thing.

 

Obviously, if I give you a tenner and you give me a different tenner, I really don't care.

 

But if I give you my car to borrow for the day and you give me a similar car, but a bit different, it seems a bit weird.

 

And it's funny because in some respects and from some angles, I think like a car could be seen as a bit of a commodity and it could be somewhat fungible.

 

Like for a business, cars might be sort of a bit fungible, you know, like if this is just another of the delivery vehicles.

 

Rob Bell:

Yes, it's a functional item that does a thing that other items similar to it can do equally as well.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, like send me a delivery truck.

 

I don't care which delivery truck it is, but if you borrow my car and give me back your car, that's a bit weird.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

 

Jono Hey:

I was thinking about that question about if you borrowed one, would it be odd if you returned a different one?

 

And it reminds me of the sort of, it's actually like a classic sort of plot for comedies or sitcoms or something.

 

It's like somebody was house sitting and the fish died.

 

Rob Bell:

Yes.

 

Jono Hey:

And I got another fish or I got another tortoise and it looks exactly the same as the other one.

 

So I'll just put it in there and see if they notice.

 

Rob Bell:

Oh, that's interesting.

 

So then if they don't notice, does that fish then become fungible?

 

And only at the point of them noticing there's a difference, it becomes non-fungible.

 

Jono Hey:

Potentially.

 

I distinctly remember a time playing football in the garden as a kid, early teens.

 

And my parents had just bought a lovely new little maple tree that they planted.

 

And of course, I think it had been planted a day before we knocked off one of the main branches of this delicate, beautiful Japanese maple.

 

And then in true kid style, we glued it back on.

 

Well, it kind of looks the same as the old one.

 

And it sort of was, but no, that maple, it lasted a few weeks before it noticed, and then it wasn't so new anymore, so maybe it got me through.

 

Tom Pellereau:

And most importantly, you weren't playing football when it fell off.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, I don't know what's happened to this branch.

 

Rob Bell:

Would we describe then a lot of the products that you make and sell, Tommy, as being fungible?

 

At point of sale, they're fungible items.

 

Is that right?

 

Tom Pellereau:

Sorry, I have to bring it up to make sure I get it right around.

 

Yes, so before you buy them, they're probably fungible.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Like a brush cleaner, the one at the front is the same as the one in the back and the one behind that, as it were.

 

And the same with, it's like a nail file.

 

But like, as soon as you've bought it and then start using it, it's then kind of non-fungible because then it's your one sort of thing.

 

And especially like a used nail file.

 

The ultimate one for me on the fungible, non-fungible is my kids.

 

If kids get around for a play date and they get around to pick them up, like I kind of want my kid back.

 

Like it's not like an ultimate...

 

Jono Hey:

Can't find your one, but at least it.

 

Tom Pellereau:

I love that the way you put people on there, Jono.

 

It's like the bottom left one, people.

 

Rob Bell:

But there is, I mean, talking about sitcoms earlier, Jono, the classic sitcom plot line, that's another one, where the kind of space headed dad goes along, granny goes along to pick up the baby from wherever and brings the wrong one home.

 

I don't think that makes the kid non-functional though.

 

Jono Hey:

I think Shakespeare was the earliest like sitcom writer or something.

 

He's always swapping people and dressing them up, you know.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yeah, true.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, I think actually it was quite interesting to think about when does something which appears fungible go to be non-fungible.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

 

Jono Hey:

And I think, like you said, it's a lot often about like when it's yours, when you add some experience or stories to it.

 

So I was thinking books appear extremely fungible because they're just books.

 

But if you've got like your favorite copy of something and you've leafed through it, and maybe you wrote something in the front, or you lent it to somebody and they added a few notes to it and it's picked up a bit of color and maybe a drop of the suntan lotion from that lovely holiday where you read it that time.

 

It's not the same book anymore, it's your book.

 

And so I don't know, you might want to swap it for a cleaner one, but you might also go, that's my special copy.

 

There's a million copies of the Bible, but there's some really special copies of the Bible, which they would probably be a bit off if you just swapped them out for a new print one.

 

Rob Bell:

So that's, some people might, some people might not.

 

Yeah.

 

In that sense, then I asked the question, is it a kind of sliding scale of fungibility of items, depending on what the item is and who the individual that it belongs to, is it open to interpretation or is it a kind of economically defined metric?

 

Jono Hey:

As far as I know, it's open to interpretation.

 

Rob Bell:

Right, okay.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, I mean, I just recently, somebody showed me from a holiday in New York, there's a museum for Rafael Nadal, and it's got one of the items in the museum is like his tennis rackets and his tennis rackets, where he's, you know, you know, won the Australian Open or whatever.

 

And of course, it's just a tennis racket, but it's not, it's not just a tennis racket.

 

It's the one where he won the Australian Open.

 

Like if you get somebody's shirt at the end of a football match and they throw it to you, it's not just a shirt anymore, right?

 

It's a special shirt.

 

And so what was sort of just a very fungible thing, a tennis racket, a shirt, is now something really special.

 

So yeah, it's curious.

 

I feel like they can transition depending on what happens.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah, that reminds me of a Family Guy plot that I saw a couple of days ago.

 

It doesn't matter, but carry on.

 

But it was about sports memorabilia and being able to fake sports memorabilia and saying, oh yeah, this is the baseball that hit that home run.

 

Actually, you just had it in your pocket.

 

Jono Hey:

It reminds me, there was a study that was done when people put some items up for sale on eBay and they added a story to some of them.

 

So it was exactly that, like you sell a baseball and it's just a baseball, but some of the baseballs, you add some like compelling story about why this is a special baseball.

 

And of course people just buy the same baseball, but the ones with the stories on people paid more for.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah.

 

I've come across this word in two ways.

 

One is through your sketch that we're talking about.

 

The other is through NFTs.

 

So what are they?

 

Non-fungible tokens.

 

I've heard them and heard them spoken about quite a lot over the last 12 months or so.

 

They became big a year or so ago, I guess.

 

Tom Pellereau:

So is fungible being around as a word for like, is it like furlough?

 

It's one of those words that's been around for kind of ever, but then just for some reason gets pulled into the current.

 

Rob Bell:

If I may.

 

I looked this up earlier.

 

I looked this up earlier because I was interested to know if this was a word that's come about because of NFTs and-

 

Tom Pellereau:

Or if it's like a Latin-

 

Rob Bell:

Kind of a digital age thing.

 

Tommy, you're bang on.

 

So it's been used apparently since 1765 as a noun, but 1818 as an adjective, which is what we're using it as here now, right?

 

From medieval Latin, derived from the Latin verb fungi, or it's probably fungi.

 

It's nothing to do with mushrooms.

 

Pochini.

 

Yeah, meaning to perform.

 

And apparently it's a word that's often showed up in legal and political context.

 

You can tell I'm not reading this at all.

 

So something fungible can be exchanged for something else of the same kind.

 

Going back to Roman law, apparently, res fungibilis, replaceable things.

 

So kind of a legal term.

 

Jono Hey:

Yes, even if you were renting a house and you broke everything and replaced it with all the same stuff, would they be replaceable according to your contract?

 

I don't know.

 

Or were they special?

 

That guitar on the wall, Rob, do you mind if I give you a different one?

 

I don't know.

 

Depends.

 

Rob Bell:

Depends.

 

Is it slashes or is it Tommy's?

 

But again, it's assigning value to something, whether that's an emotional value or a monetary value because of a story that goes around it, right?

 

I think that's what we're saying.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

 

I'm not an expert in this.

 

I think it is genuinely really interesting because it's a bit baffling when it comes to digital things very often because digital things by their very nature are so fungible.

 

Are so fungible, right?

 

Rob Bell:

Exactly.

 

Jono Hey:

So like if I create, well, let's do my sketches, right?

 

So they're literally like PNG files, portable network graphics.

 

I can download it to my computer, you can download it to your computer.

 

We can all download it to all of our computers and they're all completely fungible.

 

And so the idea with NFTs was to say, can we have a digital asset where there is only one of them and somebody owns that one and nobody else can have that one?

 

Which is a sort of an intriguing thing.

 

And so then you had like people getting like, you know, NFTs for like just like random images in some cases, something called the Bored Monkey Project, which is pictures of apes, which is crazy.

 

But then there's also like, you could get a Twitter avatar or whatever, which is your, yours and yours alone in principle, because you own the NFT for it.

 

But the funny thing is, I mean, it doesn't, like it doesn't stop anybody having the same picture.

 

So people say, I could issue an NFT for this and you'd be the only one who owns the NFT for this sketch.

 

But of course other people could see the sketch, but that's actually true in the physical world too.

 

Where because there's, you know, the Mona Lisa hangs in the Louvre and I can buy a picture, I could print one out on my wall right now and it would look almost exactly like the actual Mona Lisa.

 

But of course it wouldn't be the Mona Lisa and that's fundamentally different.

 

You got that?

 

Rob Bell:

It's that value.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah.

 

Rob Bell:

And I could follow you and I was following you brilliantly and I'm really enjoying this conversation.

 

But then when it goes quiet at the end of what you said, I'm left going, yeah, I mean, just give me a minute.

 

Just give me a minute.

 

Jono Hey:

I'm just processing it.

 

Tom Pellereau:

All I want to ask Jono is when are the NFTs coming out for his first ever Sketchplanation?

 

Jono Hey:

Well, and so I don't think they will.

 

I mean, so first of all, they have some major flaws.

 

For example, they built off the blockchain and in order to generate the NFTs, we actually have to churn through huge amounts of computing power and energy.

 

And so just to generate these NFTs, we actually use quite a lot of energy.

 

So there's not very sustainable reason that I know of from what I've read to be having them.

 

I'm sure people can argue differently.

 

Rob Bell:

Environmentally sustainable.

 

Jono Hey:

Literally environmentally.

 

In order to do this computing, to issue them, you have to run computers for a long time doing calculations.

 

But I did think there was, and this was, I listened to the Freakonomics Podcast, which did some excellent episodes on blockchain, including NFTs.

 

And it did have somebody who gave some really good examples where NFTs could potentially have a lot of value, which I thought was really intriguing.

 

And they're not just like, oh, I've got an avatar on my Twitter profile and you haven't.

 

And so the examples they gave, which are not necessarily NFTs, but there's something to do with the blockchain, which is where you have digital ownership records of things, which are distributed.

 

And in particular, they were concert tickets and art sales for artists.

 

And as you think about these two problems, they were quite interesting.

 

So I'll do the concert sales first.

 

It was quite interesting, concert tickets.

 

So if I'm U2 and I'm doing a new gig, obviously there's limited amounts of seats at the stadium, but I can't charge 5,000 pounds a ticket for them because that's alienating all my fans who can't buy those tickets.

 

So you charge a reasonable price for them.

 

And of course what happens is that they get bought up by other people who then sell them on for ridiculous prices.

 

And of course the true worth of those tickets, some of them might in fact have been 5,000 pounds, let's say, but who got that 5,000 pounds when they were sold?

 

The person who bought the tickets and sold them on.

 

So the artist didn't get any of that extra sale, and the fans didn't get to buy cheap tickets anyway.

 

And so the idea with something like potentially an NFT for tickets, you could have a unique ticket that you're selling and it could have something in it, like, which is called a smart contract, where you've bought that unique ticket, and if it gets sold on, there's something in the smart contract that says a certain proportion of what was sold on has to go to these parties.

 

And so that way the artist could benefit and potentially the person who bought the ticket first, or if you want to do it differently, but the artist could actually get some of the benefit of those ticket sales instead of the ticket sales.

 

So it's like, potentially could solve that broken market.

 

Rob Bell:

I was talking about this, exactly this, with somebody last week in how it relates to television and television programming, how, and films, it's exactly the same, how where piracy is a massive issue.

 

So there's an owner of a TV show, it's the production company more often than not.

 

Same with films, it will be the studios, or the distributor, whoever it is owns that film, but yet they get shown all around the world, and there's no means of kind of tracking that.

 

So to help prevent piracy and to have a more efficient royalties system, so when it is shown and where people are watching it, the royalties are distributed back to the same person, and can be protected by the blockchain, and with its relation back to NFTs as well.

 

Yeah, so same principle.

 

So it could be quite an efficient way of, I guess, protecting art in its global sense.

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, like the other example, which is completely obvious the moment you say it, right, is that, and Picasso, like he's dead, right, but you sell a Picasso, he sells it, and he sells it for, I don't know, 10,000 pounds when he's alive.

 

And then later that gets sold on for 50,000 pounds, and then later he gets bought for 10 million.

 

And Picasso got none of those future sales, even though he generated a piece of art that was worth 10 million.

 

He just got the original thing.

 

And so if you were to sell those with a smart contract involved, then potentially the artist can get that value all along the life cycle, if they created something of value.

 

And if they didn't create something of value, then it wouldn't get sold on.

 

Yeah, so I think there are some genuinely quite interesting potential applications of these, though I've not seen them in practice that much.

 

Rob Bell:

I'm conscious we've moved slightly over to like blockchains and NFTs and stuff rather than fungible, non-fungible.

 

That is the nature of this podcast.

 

So I'm going to bring it back to fungible, non-fungible specifically.

 

Is it useful to know the difference between the two?

 

Tom Pellereau:

I think socially it's quite important.

 

Rob Bell:

In the sense that Jono was talking about earlier, would it be odd if you lent someone something and they gave you something back that wasn't quite the same?

 

Tom Pellereau:

Yes, and I think culturally can be differences.

 

Rob Bell:

Okay, have you got an example?

 

Tom Pellereau:

No, but I find it even with different friends have different views on certain things.

 

As it were.

 

I'm quite casual about that sort of stuff, but some people really aren't.

 

If you borrow a book from them, they want that exact book back.

 

Otherwise, they won't necessarily say anything, but you kind of will find out later that you've really quite upset them potentially kind of thing.

 

And we all have different grounds, but I suspect that there are very different views culturally across the country, across the world.

 

And so it's probably quite important to be aware of that.

 

But otherwise, I suspect, no, it's not really important to know the difference between the word really.

 

It's quite fun talking about it, but fungible.

 

Rob Bell:

It's got fun in the words.

 

Jono Hey:

There's an interesting thing with business, where a lot of businesses, when they get big enough, want to get to the point where you can treat people as fungible to some degree.

 

So in a McDonald's or whatever, let's say, I want to be able to just bring in somebody, if they leave, if they don't work, I want to bring in somebody else.

 

And it doesn't matter.

 

I can swap the people in and out.

 

And so you've honed everything down.

 

So people are just like a cog in the machine and interchangeable cog in the machine.

 

But in practice, and certainly in any small teams, that's not the case.

 

And nobody likes to be interchangeable in that way, right?

 

Rob Bell:

Chelsea Football Club have been doing that with their managers last few years.

 

Jono Hey:

Managers generally.

 

Rob Bell:

Managers generally.

 

Jono Hey:

Just the merry-go-round.

 

Probably the best managers are the people who notice the non-fungibility in people.

 

Rob Bell:

Yeah, not just in sport, generally.

 

Yeah.

 

Jono Hey:

Exactly.

 

Rob Bell:

And probably the best people in life, probably as well.

 

Jono Hey:

Probably the best people.

 

I'm gonna do the podcast with two other people next week.

 

I hope you don't mind.

 

Tom Pellereau:

There was a point, who was that girl band?

 

Was it Sugar Babes?

 

Sugar Babes, who they just started switching.

 

Do you remember that?

 

Because there were like five of them, and then there was two, and then there was like another one, and then there was that, and then they kind of just sort of switched through.

 

And it was like, oh, that's pretty weird, but it kind of still worked.

 

Rob Bell:

We might have got that wrong.

 

I'm conscious we might have got the name of that band wrong, but I'll go with, I'll defer to Tommy's superior knowledge and his intuition.

 

Okay, well, let's see.

 

That's fungible, non-fungible.

 

I think that's explained very well there.

 

The context of it is great.

 

It's really, really interesting.

 

And I think it's lovely that it is an interpretable concept, fungibility, that it can be interpreted on a sliding scale.

 

And the boundary between fungible and non-fungible can be different for different people and when applied to different goods or items.

 

I think that's it.

 

Well done, Jono.

 

Thanks for clearing that up.

 

And we'll be going through your messages from last week in just a few moments.

 

So please do keep sharing your stories or thoughts about the topics we cover each week.

 

And you know, we're slowly growing this Sketchplanations podcast community, which is awesome.

 

You're listening in from all over the world.

 

It's fantastic to see.

 

So thank you.

 

Please do continue to subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends, all the rest of it.

 

Let's keep this going.

 

Thank you.

 

Next week's podcast is all about the accountability ladder.

 

You can look it up in advance on sketchplanations.com or just wait for the episode to drop at the usual time and place.

 

Otherwise, we'll leave you and your beautiful, perfectly sculptured, non-fungible ears in peace.

 

Until next week anyway.

 

Thank you very much for listening.

 

Stay well, go well.

 

Cheers.

 

Thanks, guys.

 

Bye.

 

Hello, we're back again.

 

It's just Jono and I going through the post bag this week.

 

And we're looking back on last week's episode on optimism bias.

 

So through Instagram, Lulu's sent us, or left us a little message saying, I'm always happy with my lot.

 

Never try to be something I'm not.

 

I reckon that would be exhausting and a waste of life.

 

I did think she was going into rhyming poem there at the start, but that's not where she ended off.

 

Thank you very much for that Lulu.

 

We've also had a message from Toby saying, I'm not sure my optimism bias is always positive.

 

I've annoyed a lot of mates by being late.

 

So this, I reckon this is in direct reference to Tommy and his stories of being late at the airport.

 

Yeah.

 

I mean, funnily enough, I think in a few weeks' time we're going to be looking at the true cost of being late from another one of your sketches, Jono.

 

But yeah.

 

Jono Hey:

I mean, I think you always have that intention, don't you?

 

You're like, you want to be there and you want people to be happy about you turning up and you want to think that it's going to be okay.

 

But yeah, the flip side is unrealistically expectations.

 

Rob Bell:

We've all done it.

 

Come on.

 

We've all done it.

 

Yeah.

 

So don't worry about it, Toby.

 

I'm sure your mates are used to it by now.

 

And maybe they even factor that in.

 

Who knows?

 

Jono Hey:

Don't be saying it.

 

Rob Bell:

Who knows?

 

We're gonna, Toby, we're gonna meet at 7.30.

 

Actually, guys, we're gonna meet at...

 

Oh no, I've got that wrong way around.

 

Toby, we're gonna meet at 7.

 

Actually, guys, we're gonna meet at 7.30.

 

But Toby, you'll see us there.

 

I've had a fairly long message here from Belinda on Instagram.

 

She said, I listen to your podcast, Not to be biased, and the psychology behind it is interesting.

 

I agree.

 

But she goes on to say that she calls it unrealistic or even delusional thinking.

 

But she agrees with it being heart overhead at the core.

 

I'm just gonna kind of skip on a little bit.

 

But a really interesting point in Belinda's notice, she says, a person's social class and status would be a factor within their optimism bias, especially when it comes to risk and any consequences of failure.

 

So I definitely understand that.

 

So maybe people who, if you look at it financially, people who are more affluent perhaps, maybe feel like they have more space to take risks and to be optimistic when it comes to maybe investments, whereas that's possibly not the case if money is a little bit tighter for you.

 

I have to say, Belinda does go on right at the end, she qualifies herself as being, in her words, an old cynical pessimist and claims that she used to be fun.

 

I'm sure you did, Belinda, I'm sure you did.

 

Thanks for those messages.

 

Jono Hey:

A couple more, I'll cover one was from Citizen Dame on Instagram, saying Dunning Kruger has entered the chat.

 

Thank you for that.

 

Rob Bell:

No, I don't get that, Jono.

 

What's Dunning Kruger?

 

Jono Hey:

Dunning Kruger effect is not one that I've covered, although I might be covering it soon.

 

Hello.

 

It often gets portrayed as, if you know a little bit, you're often inclined to think that you know a lot more than you do.

 

And actually, as you're an expert, you might think that you're not, because you sort of realize how much you don't know.

 

You might not think that you know as much as you do, even when you only know a teeny bit.

 

And so there's a sort of relationship that goes around the internet of, as you know a little bit, you go right to the top of Mount Stupid, where you might think you're brilliant at this, but actually then you're about to hit the bottom of like, oh, actually, maybe I'm not.

 

So I hope that was...

 

Rob Bell:

So that Dunning Kruger is like a little bit of knowledge is dangerous, that sense of it.

 

Jono Hey:

Also that, which is absolutely a real thing, when you're not an expert in a topic, it's very difficult to know how good you are at it, because you're not qualified to assess how good you are.

 

So that's kind of thing.

 

You might be everybody you ever play at chess and think you're amazing, and then you turn up at a tournament and get absolutely smashed, and then that will re-evaluate your expectations.

 

Rob Bell:

I think there's definitely one there for a future sketch for us to be joining.

 

So okay, so what's being said here by Citizen Day?

 

Jono Hey:

Well, I mean, it could be one of two things.

 

It could be in reference to us only knowing a bit about the things and talking a lot about them.

 

I hope it's not, but fair enough if it is.

 

Or of course, you know, like perhaps it applies to optimism bias.

 

Like if you know a little bit about something, you might think this will be a great success.

 

I think that's often comes with, you know, you talk about like if you're doing a startup, you actually have some benefit if you're naive and you're not an expert in something because you have that belief that you're going to succeed.

 

And once you know a lot more, you might realize all the reasons that you are probably not going to succeed and then therefore not try it at all.

 

So hopefully it's referenced that, which is a very good point.

 

Rob Bell:

Either way, I mean, I'll hold my hand up, you know.

 

Jono Hey:

We all are, we all are to some degree, yeah.

 

Rob Bell:

And finally, there was one more we had, isn't there?

 

Jono Hey:

Yeah, on Twitter, we had Chug saying, just keep iterating in a tight feedback loop.

 

What's the worst that could happen?

 

Which is, yeah, I mean, a really good point.

 

Like I think it gets a bit to like take risks where you can and where you are able to fail.

 

So ideally, not jumping across a chasm on a motorbike.

 

Yes.

 

If you keep that feedback loop small, then it will help you evaluate how you're going to do a bit more realistically.

 

Rob Bell:

So then, and that then feeds into everything we're talking about in last week's episode, where, you know, yes, we were all probably guilty of, well, a lot of us are guilty of sometimes being over optimistic, but the more evidence that you can get to base your decisions on, yes, you can still be optimistic, but hopefully that might be tailored by that feedback, Luke, and by the evidence.

 

Jono Hey:

Absolutely.

 

And if you keep it, keep it tight.

 

Don't go, don't go, don't go back to the house on things, you know, on your first bet.

 

Rob Bell:

I like to work like that.

 

I like to work like that.

 

It does make my decision making quite slow sometimes.

 

Whereas I know other people, I won't name them, but she knows who she is, who loves to make these big decisions.

 

And they go, oh, hang on.

 

Oh, all right, didn't know about these things.

 

But you know, that's all part of life's rich tapestry.

 

Jono Hey:

That's why we work in teams.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Exactly, Jono.

 

Rob Bell:

Exactly.

 

Tom Pellereau:

Enjoyed it.

 

Brilliant.

 

Rob Bell:

Well, that's it for this week, guys.

 

Thank you so much for all your comments and for your feedback.

 

And thank you again for continuing to grow our family of Sketchplanations podcast listeners.

 

It's brilliant.

 

Let's keep it all going.

 

We'll be back next week.

 

Until then, take care.

 

Cheerio.

 

Jono Hey:

Okay.

 

Rob Bell:

All music on this podcast series is sourced from the very talented Franc Cinelli.

 

And you can find loads more tracks at franccinelli.com.