episode-1-script.md

# What's Your Problem? — Episode 1 ## "When a Mouse, a Monk, and a Radio Station Solved the Impossible" **Runtime:** ~45 minutes **Host:** Dave Thackeray **Format:** Solo narrative with occasional "aside" moments --- ## [COLD OPEN] *[No music. Just Dave's voice, intimate, conspiratorial.]* **DAVE:** I want to tell you about three failures. The first is a shy, physically small man who couldn't pass his diplomatic exams because his Italian wasn't good enough. His colleagues called him "the door mouse." The second is a medieval monk who got into a theological argument with the most famous preacher in Europe — and lost. Spectacularly. The third is a radio station that loses fifteen million pounds a year. On purpose. *[Beat.]* One of them changed the outcome of the First World War. One of them invented an entirely new style of architecture that dominated Europe for three centuries. And one of them is quietly saving a media empire while everyone mocks it as a vanity project. Three failures that weren't. Three problems that looked obvious — until you actually looked at them. Welcome to "What's Your Problem?" I'm Dave Thackeray. I've spent thirty years as a journalist, strategist, and professional question-asker. And this show is about one thing: **finding the problem behind the problem.** Because here's what I've learned after three decades of sitting in boardrooms, newsrooms, and the occasional very uncomfortable hotel conference room: **The issue everyone sees is rarely the issue that matters.** Today, I'm going to prove it with a mouse, a monk, and a fifteen million pound moat. Let's go. --- *[THEME MUSIC: Something unexpected — maybe baroque harpsichord that morphs into modern electronic? We're not your usual business podcast.]* --- ## [ACT 1: THE DOOR MOUSE] **DAVE:** January 17th, 1917. London. A cramped office in the British Admiralty. Room 40. If you've heard of codebreaking in the World Wars, you've probably heard of Bletchley Park. Alan Turing. The Enigma machine. Benedict Cumberbatch in a cardigan looking tortured. But Bletchley was the *sequel*. Room 40 was the original. And it was... weirder. The man running the operation was Admiral "Blinker" Hall — called that because of a chronic facial tic that made him blink constantly. He'd learned to use it as a weapon. Witnesses said he'd deliberately blink at you during negotiations until you got so uncomfortable you'd agree to anything. His top codebreaker was a man called Dilly Knox who did his best thinking in a bathtub. Literally. He'd installed one in his office. He lived on chocolate and coffee, and once — this is documented — he tried to refill his pipe with sandwiches. These were not the square-jawed heroes you'd cast in a movie. These were magnificent weirdos. And one of them was Nigel de Grey. De Grey was a publisher. A puzzle enthusiast. He'd failed his diplomatic exams because his Italian wasn't good enough. He was small, shy, and easily overlooked. His colleagues called him "the door mouse." *[Beat.]* On January 17th, de Grey and his partner — a Presbyterian minister named William Montgomery — were on duty when a long, garbled German message came across their desk. They worked patiently. Cross-referencing. Filling in gaps. Using the "Index" — a system maintained by the women of Room 40, a kind of human Google before Google existed, 100,000 code groups cross-referenced by hand. And then they realised what they were looking at. Germany was offering Mexico an alliance. If America joined the war against Germany, Mexico would invade the United States. The prize? Texas. New Mexico. Arizona. This wasn't just any message. This was — potentially — the key to bringing neutral America into the war. *[Pause.]* Now. What would you do? If you work in most organisations, I can tell you exactly what happens next. You write a memo. You schedule a meeting. You prepare a deck. You find the appropriate stakeholder. You manage upward. You do not — under any circumstances — run. **Nigel de Grey ran.** He sprinted down narrow corridors, gleaming with sweat, and burst into Blinker Hall's office shouting: *[Dave, with urgency:]* "Do you want America in the war, Sir?" *[Normal voice:]* And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Zimmermann Telegram — one of the most famous intelligence coups in history — was delivered. Not by a master spy. Not by a military hero. By a door mouse who recognised the moment and *moved*. --- *[Musical transition — something that feels like a shift, a gear change.]* --- **DAVE:** Now. Why am I telling you this? I could give you the obvious lesson. "Seize the moment." "Fortune favours the bold." Something you'd see on a motivational poster next to a picture of an eagle. But that's not actually the interesting part of this story. The interesting part is what happened *before* de Grey ran. Because here's the thing about Room 40: they'd been solving German codes for years. They had intelligence that could have changed the outcome of the Battle of Jutland — 6,000 sailors died in that battle, and some historians argue it was preventable if Room 40's intelligence had been used properly. But it wasn't. Why? **Because Room 40's analysts were — and I quote — "not permitted to understand or interpret the information themselves."** Let that sink in. The brilliant minds who could see the patterns, who could decode the enemy's plans, who could literally read Germany's mail — they were forbidden from saying what it meant. They had to pass "raw data" to "Naval specialists" who lacked the context to understand it. The wall between the "boffins" and the "military" wasn't just organisational. It was a feature. It was by design. And it cost lives. *[Beat.]* At Word And Mouth, we call this the "proximity problem." It's when you have the information in one place, and the decision in another, and there's a wall in between. Not a physical wall. A bureaucratic one. An organisational one. A "that's not my department" wall. The people who can see the bomb are not permitted to say it's a bomb. **Room 40 was 40 feet from the admirals who needed their intelligence. And 40 feet might as well have been 40 miles.** The Zimmermann Telegram only worked because de Grey — the door mouse, the failed diplomat, the publisher who liked puzzles — broke the wall. He didn't write a memo. He ran. And here's the lesson you won't find on a motivational poster: **Proximity without communication is worse than distance.** Check your handoff points. Check where information dies. Check where the bombs are, and who's allowed to say the word "bomb." --- ## [SEGUE TO ACT 2] **DAVE:** Alright. Stay with me. We're going to take a sharp left turn now. We're leaving January 1917 and going back — way back — to June 1144. We're leaving the cramped offices of British Naval Intelligence and going to a cathedral. We're leaving a door mouse and meeting a monk. And I promise you — I *promise* you — by the end of this, you're going to see the connection. *[Beat, slightly playful:]* You might also learn more about medieval architecture than you ever expected to learn from a business podcast. But that's sort of the point. Here we go. --- ## [ACT 2: THE MONK AND THE LIGHT] **DAVE:** 11 June 1144. Just north of Paris. An assembly of the most powerful men in France has gathered for an event that will bend the arc of Western culture. King Louis VII is there. Bishops. Nobles. They're standing in the new choir of the Royal Abbey of Saint-Denis — the sacred necropolis of French kings. The air is thick with incense. But what stunned the crowd, what silenced the critics and inaugurated an era, was not the sound. It was the light. Where the heavy, gloomy darkness of the old church had been, there was now... something impossible. The walls had vanished. Replaced by what the man who built it called a "wonderful and uninterrupted flood of most sacred light." Stone, dark and heavy, had been taught to fly. *[Short pause.]* This was the birth of the Gothic. Chartres Cathedral. Notre-Dame. Westminster Abbey. They all trace their DNA back to this moment, this place, this man. **Abbot Suger.** *[Pronunciation note: SOO-zhay, like the French would say it.]* And here's the first thing you need to know about Suger: he was an outsider. Born — probably — to peasants. Or maybe minor knights. Possibly — this is whispered, never confirmed — the illegitimate son of a previous abbot. He was given to the monastery at age ten. A charity case. An oblate. And from that moment, he clawed. He climbed. He proved himself through "indefatigable energy" — that's a quote from a contemporary — until he became not just abbot, but the most powerful churchman in France. The second thing you need to know: he had an enemy. **Bernard of Clairvaux.** Bernard was the "religious superstar" of the 12th century. A mystic. A preacher. A man of high noble birth who had renounced the world to found a radical new order devoted to simplicity and silence. And Bernard *hated* what Suger represented. Around 1125, Bernard unleashed his thunderous critique. He sneered at opulent churches full of gold and decoration. He called them — and I love this phrase — "a ridiculous monstrosity, a shapely misshapenness, a misshapen shapeliness." For Bernard, art was a distraction from God. Beauty was a trap. The eyes marvelled at the marble when they should be meditating on the divine. And crucially: Bernard was right. For monks. In a cloister, with literate men who could find God in scripture, beauty was arguably unnecessary. Maybe even dangerous. But Suger saw something Bernard didn't. --- **DAVE:** Saint-Denis wasn't just a cloister. It was a *pilgrimage site*. Thousands of ordinary people — illiterate, uneducated, exhausted — came to see the sacred relics. On feast days, they literally trampled each other in the crowds. Suger's great insight was this: **Bernard's critique was for the wrong audience.** The monks could find God in silent contemplation. The ordinary person needed *visual aids*. Listen to how Suger justified it: *[Reading, slightly elevated tone:]* "The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material." *[Normal:]* For the illiterate masses, beauty wasn't a distraction — it was a *vehicle*. Light wasn't decoration. It was a physical manifestation of divine grace. And that's when Suger had his second, more practical problem. **How do you get more light into a church?** --- *[Beat.]* **DAVE:** Okay. Quick architecture lesson. I'll keep it short. Romanesque churches — the style before Gothic — used round arches and massive, thick walls to hold up the roof. Stone is heavy. Roofs are heavy. You need thick walls to support them. More windows = thinner walls = building collapses. Simple physics. So if you want to flood your church with "sacred light," you have a problem. Light needs windows. Windows need thin walls. Thin walls can't hold up the roof. Suger's unnamed master masons solved this with one brilliant idea: **Move the support outside the building.** *[Beat for effect.]* They invented three interconnected things. First: the pointed arch. More efficient than a round arch — it channels weight downward better. Second: the rib vault. A skeleton of stone ribs that collects all the roof's weight and channels it to specific points instead of along the entire wall. Third — and this is the key — the **external buttress**. Flying buttresses. Stone props on the *outside* of the building that push against it, absorbing the pressure. By propping the church up from the outside, they freed the walls from their structural job. The wall was no longer a wall — it was a screen. And screens can be made of glass. *[Short pause.]* **DAVE:** I want you to hold that in your head. When you have two conflicting requirements — we need thick walls AND we need thin walls — the conventional answer is to compromise. Meet in the middle. Trade off. Suger's answer was: **move one of the requirements somewhere else entirely.** The walls couldn't be structural AND transparent. So they moved the structure outside, and let the walls be glass. --- *[Musical transition.]* --- **DAVE:** Now. There's one more twist in this story, and it's my favourite part. Suger justified all of this — the gold, the glass, the light — with theology. He claimed that his abbey's patron saint, Saint-Denis, was the same person as an ancient mystic who had written profound texts about how material light was a reflection of divine light. This gave him *unimpeachable* authority. This wasn't vanity — it was scripture. There was just one problem. **He was wrong.** Saint-Denis — the 3rd-century martyr buried in the abbey — was not the same person as the 5th-century Syrian mystic who wrote those texts. They were three different people, separated by centuries. Suger made a spectacular historical error. And yet... it worked. His wrong reason produced the right outcome. His mistake gave him permission to build something that *functioned* — that brought light and awe and faith to millions of people for centuries afterward. *[Beat.]* At Word And Mouth, we think a lot about useful myths. Sometimes the story you tell yourself to get started isn't the story that's objectively true. But if it gets you moving — if it produces something that works — the wrongness of the origin doesn't invalidate the rightness of the result. Suger's mistake made the Gothic possible. The Gothic changed the world. Sometimes you need to be productively wrong. --- ## [SEGUE TO ACT 3] **DAVE:** Okay. Deep breath. We've been to 1917 London. We've been to 1144 Paris. Now we're coming back to the present. Well, 2020 to now. We're leaving codebreakers and cathedrals and entering something much more mundane: a radio studio in London. But here's the thing about mundane. Sometimes mundane is where the most radical strategy is hiding. Sometimes the most boring-looking thing in the room is the cleverest thing anyone's doing. Let me introduce you to **Times Radio**. And before you tune out — before you think "I don't care about a British radio station I've never listened to" — I promise you: this is going to change how you think about loss-making ventures. Possibly forever. --- ## [ACT 3: THE £15 MILLION MOAT] **DAVE:** Times Radio launched on 29 June 2020. Right in the middle of the pandemic. Boris Johnson was the first guest. It cost — by most estimates — somewhere between £15 and 20 million a year to run. It makes maybe £3-5 million in sponsorship revenue. Which means — on paper — it loses £10-12 million a year. Every year. And if you measure radio the way the industry typically measures radio, Times Radio is a failure. LBC — its main commercial competitor — has about 3 million weekly listeners. Times Radio has around 616,000. LBC wins. End of story. Except... that's not the story. --- **DAVE:** Let's do some maths. The Times newspaper has approximately 640,000 digital subscribers, each paying an average of about £120 a year. That's £76.8 million in annual recurring revenue. In subscription businesses, the most important number isn't new customers. It's churn — how many customers you lose. Every 1% of churn you prevent at 640,000 subscribers paying £120 is 6,400 people. That's £768,000 saved. Per year. Per percentage point. Now. What if I told you that subscribers who read The Times AND listen to Times Radio are significantly less likely to cancel their subscription? I can't give you the internal data — News UK doesn't publish it. But this is the logic that every subscription business knows: **multi-modality creates stickiness.** If you read the paper in the morning AND listen to the station during your commute, you've got two daily habits, not one. You're more embedded. You're harder to lose. Times Radio isn't a radio station. **Times Radio is a subscription-retention programme that sounds like radio.** *[Beat.]* --- **DAVE:** Think about it like a castle. Your castle generates £76.8 million a year. You've got a treasury full of gold — recurring revenue. Now someone offers to build you a moat for £15 million. The moat doesn't generate revenue. It just sits there, looking expensive. Every year, accountants shake their heads at the moat's P&L statement. "The moat made no money again," they say. But every year, invaders — competitors, churn, subscriber fatigue — try to breach your walls. And the moat stops some of them. If the moat prevents just 2% of your customers from leaving, it's saving you £1.5 million a year. If it prevents 10%, it's paying for itself. **You don't judge a moat by its fishing revenue.** --- **DAVE:** There's more to the Times Radio story. They figured out that if you're already paying for audio production, adding video is nearly free. They put cameras in the studio. Now they have 1.6 million YouTube subscribers and an estimated £1-3 million a year in pure-margin AdSense revenue. They figured out that "shock jock" radio attracts volume but low-value audiences. Polite, civilised conversation attracts ABC1s — the demographic that pays premium prices. 71% of Times Radio's audience is ABC1. They figured out that when a star presenter leaves, the format should survive. When Matt Chorley left his morning show, the slot kept working. The format was stronger than the star. **Talent is rent. Format is equity.** And they figured out that 8 hours a week of listening — their average — is a better metric than reach. Because time-spent-with-brand predicts retention better than unique visitors. *[Beat.]* This is what I do at Word And Mouth. I look at things that seem like failures and ask: what problem are they actually solving? Because the answer is almost never the obvious one. --- ## [FINALE: THE PATTERN] *[Slight musical bed, building toward resolution.]* **DAVE:** Okay. We've been to three places. 1917 London. 1144 Paris. 2020 London. We've met a door mouse, a monk, and a radio station. Three completely unrelated stories. Different centuries. Different industries. Different stakes. And yet. *[Beat.]* Every one of them had a problem everyone could see. Room 40's problem: we need to crack German codes. Suger's problem: we need more light in the church. Times Radio's problem: we need more listeners. And every one of them discovered that the obvious problem wasn't the real problem. Room 40's real problem: the wall between data and decision. Suger's real problem: not architecture, but theology — proving beauty was a vehicle, not a vanity. Times Radio's real problem: not audience size, but subscriber retention. --- **DAVE:** And here's the pattern — the thing I want you to take away. **The problem everyone sees is rarely the problem that matters.** De Grey didn't solve the code problem — he'd already done that. He solved the information-gap problem by running. By breaking the wall. Suger didn't solve the light problem with better windows — he solved the structural problem by moving the support outside the building. Times Radio didn't solve the audience problem by chasing reach — they solved the retention problem by being sticky. *[Beat.]* This is what we call the PROBLEM framework at Word And Mouth. **P** — Perceive. What do they think the problem is? **R** — Reframe. What's the problem behind the problem? **O** — Orient. What domain is this? Simple? Complex? Chaotic? **B** — Build. What's the unexpected solution? **L** — Launch. How do we test it fast? **E** — Evolve. What did we learn? **M** — Measure. Is the original problem actually solved? It looks simple. It is simple. But like flying buttresses, the simplicity hides incredible structural intelligence. --- **DAVE:** So here's my question for you. What's your problem? Not the problem on the whiteboard. Not the problem in the strategy deck. Not the problem everyone nods about in meetings. What's the *real* problem? The one you're not seeing? Where are your walls between data and decision? What are you trying to support from the inside when you could move it outside? What are you measuring as failure that's actually protecting something much more valuable? If you want help figuring it out — that's literally what I do. Find me at wordandmouth.com. Or just reply to this, wherever you found it. *[Beat.]* Thank you for spending the last 45 minutes with a mouse, a monk, and a radio station. They changed the world by solving the wrong problems right. You might too. --- *[OUTRO MUSIC: The theme, but softer, resolve-y.]* **DAVE:** This has been "What's Your Problem?" I'm Dave Thackeray. Next episode: **When AI Replacement Goes Wrong.** Klarna. Shopify. Duolingo. And the humans they're quietly rehiring. See you then. *[Music fades.]* --- ## [END] --- ## PRODUCTION NOTES **Tone targets:** - The Economist meets Drunk History meets your wittiest mentor - Smart-not-smug (avoid "as you probably already know") - Curious, not lecturing - Use "we" when talking about Word And Mouth - Use "I" when telling personal stories **Sound design:** - Cold open: bare, intimate, no music - Cathedral section: subtle reverb, maybe distant organ drone - Radio section: slightly more modern, warmer - Transitions: musical gear-shifts, not on-the-nose sound effects **Pace:** - Slower in cold open (let lines land) - Build energy through Room 40 story - Cathedral section can breathe more (it's the "teaching" section) - Radio section is punchy, business-y, faster - Finale slows down again for the synthesis **Recording note:** - Have fun. If a line sounds too stiff, riff on it. - The script is a map, not a prison. --- `#podcast` `#script` `#whats-your-problem` `#episode-1`