RORY SUTHERLAND | Psychology In The World Of Advertising

Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising, an author & writer for The Spectator. Causing some form of behavioural change is the goal of all advertising and whoever holds the keys to understanding consumer psychology has an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal. Rory is one of the world's most influential advertising professionals and this episode is nothing short of gold for anyone who is a consumer, or advertises to them. More Stuff: Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland Buy Rory's New Book Alchemy - https://amzn.to/2HdiUPL - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/modern-wisdom/id1347973549 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0XrOqvxlqQI6bmdYHuIVnr?si=iUpczE97SJqe1kNdYBipnw Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - I want to hear from you!! Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  Hi friends. My guest this week is Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman of Ogle The Advertising. Now, before most podcasts start, there's a little bit of foreplay, backwards and forwards between myself and the guest, catching up and talking about what we're going to talk about and stuff like that. With Rory, it was more analogous to me trying to step onto a train going high speed and he just began. So I started recording straight away. Also Rory had a British gas technician come around to sort out his boiler partway through. So you will go through the adventure that is Rory's boiler, plus all of the amazing

• 0:50Chris Williamson?

  things that we spoke about today. He is an absolute master of behavioural economics and the psychology of advertising. Anyone who has ever bought anything in a shop should listen to this podcast. I'm not going to pontificate anymore because it's just fantastic. Enjoy.

• 1:25Rory Sutherland?

  I always regard consumer capitalism as kind of the Galapagos Islands of understanding human motivation. Because just as evolution throws up things, the duck billed platypus, the kangaroo etc, that don't really make much sense. In the same way, consumer capitalism is interesting, both the things which shouldn't be successful but are. And the classic example of that is Red Bull. But I mean, you could actually, if you think about some of the greatest business successes of the last 10, 20, 30 years.

• 2:02Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, going back further, denim, for example, doesn't really make sense as a fabric. The popularity of denim doesn't make any sense. It kind of fades, it looks a bit shit. It was manufactured as a wagon cover and then worn as overalls by indigent labourers. You know, you would have expected silk to have become big. Yeah. And the trouser front, but nope, it's not silk, it's jeans. Uh, then you've got things, again, you know, if you'd made a business case for Wikipedia and your last slide had said, and the best thing is that everybody's going to write this for free, okay? Basically, you would have been shown out of the room. It's completely insane. Red Bull, again, doesn't taste very nice, cost a fortune, uh, comes in a tiny can, you know?

• 2:45Rory Sutherland?

  No one making a case for that really would get anywhere. No one know, in a Soviet-controlled economy, no one would have sat down with a, you know, the Supreme Soviet and said, well, for our next seven-year plan, what the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics really needs is an overpriced, disgusting, tasty drink. But at the same time, I think it's interesting because I think what capitalism and evolution does is it throws up, um, you know, bonkers successes, but there are also things that fail that logically shouldn't. I mean, in the case of, in the case of, say, um, evolution, why is, um, pathogenesis or why is, in other words, um, asexual reproduction so very rare? Yeah.

• 3:30Rory Sutherland?

  Because if you want to replicate 100% of your genes, simply splitting into two, uh, is a, you would think is a pretty cool, uh, system. Well, the sex stuff is- Well, you only need one of you, right? Yeah, exactly. And off you go. Uh, what seems to happen is that you, uh, when a disease hits, you all die. Not enough genetic variation. Sex is the diversity trade-off that means that some of your genes will survive. It's hedging your bets, essentially. It's, um- It's, you know, covering your bases because you'd rather have your genes survive split between a variety of different carriers than put all your eggs in one basket.

• 4:12Rory Sutherland?

  And I think what tends to happen is you do get these asexual reproduction things happening and they're very, very successful, right up to the point where they aren't. And then when they fail, they fail spectacularly. Now, is this my, this might be unfortunately.

• 4:27Chris Williamson?

  Is this your man from British Gas?

• 4:28Rory Sutherland?

  Hold on, I'm so sorry. This is, this is gonna make this, I suppose it's very authentic podcast.

• 4:34Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely authentic podcast.

• 4:35Rory Sutherland?

  He's outside, I better go down.

• 4:36Chris Williamson?

  No worries.

• 4:37Rory Sutherland?

  We can pause if you like.

• 4:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we've paused.

• 4:41Rory Sutherland?

  Right.

• 4:43Chris Williamson?

  We're back.

• 4:44Rory Sutherland?

  That was probably more about wash basins than you needed to hear, but there we go.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  Totally, totally fine. They're a, they're a finicky and, and very fine tuned, subtle, subtler device. So I wanted to talk about a news article which I got sent yesterday. I can't believe that I've never heard of this before, but you may have done. Have you heard of the hit to kill phenomenon in China?

• 5:05Rory Sutherland?

  No.

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  So.

• 5:07Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, is this this thing where it's more expensive? If, if you hit someone and they survive, it's, it's more expensive because you get sued.

• 5:18Chris Williamson?

  Essentially, yeah. So if you hit a person in China in the car, you have to pay the medical bills for a lifetime. But if you kill them, you only pay once, like a burial fee. So the fee for killing is about thirty to fifty thousand dollars. But a lifetime of medical expenses is in the excess of millions sometimes. So there's these bizarre videos where drivers will hit someone and then reverse backwards and forwards over the body because it's more economical to kill than it is to injure.

• 5:47Rory Sutherland?

  So you have, I don't know if you know that film THX 1138, but that's a very early George Lucas film, but that's the kind of world in which, oh, sorry, perfect, no problem at all, in which, you know, the, the whole of the world is kind of controlled by accountants. Funny enough, of course, that's true in the UK in that in the UK about five years ago, the insurance industry was hit by a young male driver who effectively plowed into a bus queue. Leaving a large number of people essentially critically injured and disabled for life, but not dead. And I think the the total cost of the claim came to something like seventy million pounds from one accident.

• 6:28Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 6:30Rory Sutherland?

  Now, uh, someone in the insurance industry admitted to me, they said that uh, we would have been considerably better off if you'd actually killed them all.

• 6:39Rory Sutherland?

  Because patentless industry. Now, you've simply got to trust the insurance industry in this case. Um, uh, not to send people around to hospitals disconnecting life support systems.

• 6:50Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 6:52Rory Sutherland?

  Um, and one would hope that that doesn't happen. Um, but um. Uh, of course, that that fairly simple economic truth is is true all over the world. Uh, that um, uh, it's only in China where presumably the people are uninsured. Is that right?

• 7:07Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure about that. I think it, I don't understand why their insurance doesn't cover the expenses of uh, incident which is associated with their insurance. I'd have presumed that's what the insurance would have been there for.

• 7:20Rory Sutherland?

  And we have to be careful about this because of course, um, we, um, uh, the reason we have to be careful about this is there's an element of prejudice which is probably a bias, which is we tend to see the Chinese as slightly more calculating or unemotional. And you know, there's a whole bunch of sort of stereotyping going on there.

• 7:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Rory Sutherland?

  We've also got to remember that, of course, the proliferation of, I I mean, I I think the Russians probably are pretty shit drivers. But my my impression of rough Russian driving skills isn't helped by the fact that uh, dash cams are much more common in the Soviet Union or were historically, or in Russia rather, uh, than they are in the West. And therefore, the a disproportionate number of those videos on YouTube showing people driving in a bonkers fashion or trashing supercars or driving out in front of trains.

• 8:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Rory Sutherland?

  A disproportionate number of those are going to be Russians simply because uh, in Russia, it seems to be that having a dash cam.

• 8:21Chris Williamson?

  Standard fitting.

• 8:22Rory Sutherland?

  Is is just a standard fitting, whereas I don't have one. I've always asked that question, by the way. What happens if you go to dash cam and you make a terrible mistake yourself?

• 8:32Chris Williamson?

  Just throw it out the window.

• 8:33Rory Sutherland?

  You throw it out the window or trash it or roll it, drive over it.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, the the unfortunately, the dash cam, which logged the footage of me crashing into someone, was destroyed in the crash as I crashed into someone.

• 8:44Rory Sutherland?

  Ah, right, OK, so you have to construct that story. It did occur to me that I I looked at buying a dash cam and thought, this is a bit of a double edged sword, isn't it? You know, because it's gonna, it's gonna capture my road rage if I'm swearing at the guy in front. It's gonna capture all that shit, which, you know, isn't necessarily going to help me in a court of law.

• 9:04Rory Sutherland?

  And so it did occur to me that a dash cam will, you know, maybe I'm better off without one.

• 9:09Chris Williamson?

  It depends, it's it's hedging your bets there about whether or not you think that you're going to be the victim or the perpetrator of of accidents more or less of the time, I suppose.

• 9:18Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, it's a worrying thing in a sense, because it is. There's something about that that's indicative of a low, a low trust culture, isn't there?

• 9:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I'd like to think I'm the kind of person who, regardless of the evidence, if it were my fault, I would, you know, I know we're always told in a road accident, you must never apologize, never admit blame because of the legal implications. But I'd like to think if I ran into the back of someone, I'd basically say, look, fair and square, this is what happened.

• 9:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Rory Sutherland?

  And I'd take the hit and I'd like to think I'm that kind of person. And so the idea that we're not in it, we're in a society where, you know, the assumption is that other people are lying, strikes me as a bit alarming.

• 9:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think you're trying to, we're trying to protect for a few

• 10:06Chris Williamson?

  odd situations where there's a little bit, the the system goes awry, so to speak with that.

• 10:11Rory Sutherland?

  Well, they're the fake whiplash claims, aren't they, which of course are. So in other words, someone will break, I mean, occasionally someone will drive in front of you and then break stupidly in order for you to go into the back of them.

• 10:22Chris Williamson?

  There was families of people that were doing that, wasn't there, driving across into slip lanes and river and stopping in front of lorries and stuff like that.

• 10:29Rory Sutherland?

  I'll tell you a very wonderful story which you'll love, which is very podcast worthy, which was, I hasten to add, a friend of a friend of a friend, but I think it is actually true.

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  Detach yourself as far as you want from the story Rory.

• 10:39Rory Sutherland?

  He was driving home extremely drunk and drove onto a large roundabout on his way home and realised that he'd overshot and missed the turn. Now, you'd think the beauty of a roundabout to a sober person is that if you miss your turning, you can simply go round again. To the pissed mind, Harold, this isn't immediately apparent. And he immediately slammed on the brakes and started reversing back to the correct turn off. While reversing back round the roundabout, he slammed into a car behind. And he was just about to basically leg it when a police car turns up, just at the moment you don't want it to turn up, you see. And the police car just goes, hold on a second, sir, will you just mind a moment?

• 11:21Rory Sutherland?

  I've just got to speak to the driver behind you. And he sees the policeman go and breath lies the man into whom he's reversed, you see, which to the cop is not irrational. If someone's hit a car in front, you assume the car behind is to blame. And the breath lies of the car behind comes up positive. And the policeman then simply walks up to his window and says, well, you really better go, sir. He said, I'm terribly sorry, that guy behind completely out with the fairies, he told me that you came round the roundabout backwards and reversed it there. And so this chap simply drove. Some guardian angel had managed to help him get away with it.

• 12:03Chris Williamson?

  So much serendipity there. Oh my days. Well, yeah, that is thanking your lucky stars situation, isn't it?

• 12:11Rory Sutherland?

  It is really, isn't it? Yeah.

• 12:12Chris Williamson?

  I want to, I want to move on to the most pressing topic at hand, which is the debate between wet and dry toilet paper and whether or not you should have a B day or the Arabic shatoffa in your house.

• 12:24Rory Sutherland?

  Yes. Well, I'm a big fan of the shatoffa. I'm a big fan of the Japanese toilet. I'm a big fan of moist toilet paper. I mean, it seems to me, my father, who's 88, said the same thing, that the whole business between getting up in the morning and leaving the house.

• 12:39Rory Sutherland?

  If you consider the extraordinary improvement in terms of time-saving that's brought to us at other times of the day by things like the dishwasher, or indeed online shopping if you choose to use it, or the washing machine, or the extraordinary entertainment made possible by television, that part of the day has been transformed since my father was born in 1930, okay, since his own father was born in about 1895, it's unrecognizable. And yet, the first part of the day, nothing, you know, shit, shave, shower, basically nothing's happened. We still have a Victorian first half hour of the day.

• 13:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, we're primitive.

• 13:16Rory Sutherland?

  We are totally primitive, and it strikes me that this is an area where there's huge potential for innovation. But the reason moist toilet paper also fascinates me, because it's one of those things, and the immediate parallel is what we're doing now, which is video conferencing. It's one of those technologies which should be big, but isn't. And it seems very strange to compare moist lavatory paper with video conferencing.

• 13:41Chris Williamson?

  What we're doing right now, yeah.

• 13:42Rory Sutherland?

  But both of them, you can make a fantastic logical case for, okay? So I make the case for moist lavatory paper, how come our anus is the only part of the body which we think it's adequate to clean with dry paper? I'm entirely with the Islamic world on this one, I'm with the Japanese on it, because you wouldn't go out into your garden with some fairly harmless earth, potting some plants, and you'd come in and go, oh, look, I've got mud on my hands, let me rub them very vigorously with some A4 printer paper to remove the mud. You'd kind of use water, wouldn't you? Okay? And the fact that we in the West, who consider ourselves so advanced, clean our rectums with dry paper is ridiculous, okay? You can just about excuse people who, I suppose, who do it first thing in the morning and

• 14:27Rory Sutherland?

  then have a shower or a bath. You could say, okay, that's something. But I mean, at least that Arabic tube thing is at least a nod in the right direction. I find it a bit weird that you occasionally get them. I was in a prison in Qatar, a long story, but they have the tube, but they don't have any toilet paper, which is a bit weird. I'd have both.

• 14:44Chris Williamson?

  Well, the problem that I've found, so Youssef, who is one of the co-hosts of the show, he recently purchased his first property and one of the mandatory things that he had to have ahead of a washer dryer combo was a shot off in his

• 15:00Rory Sutherland?

  I agree with him.

• 15:01Chris Williamson?

  in his bathroom. But the problem is that it's right next to the boiler. So the water pressure that comes out, if you don't have, if you're not able to hold sufficient anal tone and ring tension, you end up accidentally giving yourself an enema with your

• 15:18Chris Williamson?

  with your own shit.

• 15:21Rory Sutherland?

  So some colonic irrigation through

• 15:24Chris Williamson?

  Reverse.

• 15:25Rory Sutherland?

  In reverse. Oh, my God. Of course. Oh, my God.

• 15:30Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, because I'm having my bathroom done at home later on this year. So I think I will consider one of those because I agree with you. I think it's barbaric that we don't have them. And actually, very strange, actually, two things. One of the things I often talk to my dad about this, my dad's 88. So you have this very interesting contrast. I also buy gadgets for my dad to see whether he uses them or not as a kind of experiment because I'm the kind of idiot, okay, who'll buy any old shit. You know, I've bought yogurt makers, bread makers, I bought any bloody gadget that I can, simply because I enjoy its intrinsic gadgetiness. And so I always find it interesting buying my dad things because what he likes and what he doesn't is revealing as to what's genuinely useful.

• 16:15Rory Sutherland?

  Because I think, I think at the age of 88, you, you've got a fairly sensible take on what's life improving and what isn't. I bought one of the Google HomePod minis, which is like Alexa, it's like the Echo Dot, but the Google equivalent. And I wrote about this in The Spectator, and a few people said, oh, what the hell are you doing plugging, you know, Amazon and Google's products? It was not as if they need any help. My argument for this was that mostly those products have been sold as ways to turn on your lights remotely, control your thermostat. Now, I do all that shit because I'm weird, okay? My argument was that for your spectator reader or your spectator reader's mum and dad in their seventies or eighties, it's a technology none of those people will buy off their own back. There's not a chance in hell that anybody aged eighty is going to wander into Curry's PC world

• 17:00Rory Sutherland?

  and go, "Get me an Amazon Echo Dot or a HomePod Mini." Actually, if you think about it in pensioner terms, it's the world's best radio for thirty quid. Okay, it'll play any music you want, you just asked for it. It'll play any radio station you want, it'll tell you the time, it'll tell you the weather, it'll tell you how to cook a turkey. So thirty quid for the ability to speak to a supercomputer. Interestingly, my dad, I only installed it on about twenty seventh of December, but he uses it about, you know, six to seven times a day.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 17:33Rory Sutherland?

  Brilliantly, after I wrote that article, a friend of mine told me that his mum is in a nursing home where they bought an Echo Dot. And they put it in the lounge of the nursing home. Now, I think this is a brilliant idea. Now, no one's ever thinking, and no one's going to position a tech product as it's perfect for oldies, okay? Because it's kind of the kiss of death in marketing terms. You know, it's rather like, I bought from a company which only sells products to the elderly and disabled. I bought a lot... I bought a long-handled dustpan and brush.

• 18:09Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 18:09Rory Sutherland?

  So it's a dustpan with a really long handle and a brush with a really long handle, which means you don't have to grovel on the floor when you've tipped some cornflakes, okay? Now, it's a brilliant product for the disabled, but it's also a pretty brilliant product for anybody who isn't disabled.

• 18:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's the fact that it's not sexy, isn't it? That's the problem.

• 18:26Rory Sutherland?

  I know, I know, that actually, this is one of the most interesting questions in tech, which is, how come we put a man on the moon before we thought of putting wheels on luggage?

• 18:38Rory Sutherland?

  I mean genuinely, you know, if you think of the level of genius required, okay, between those two, those two enterprises.

• 18:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 18:46Rory Sutherland?

  It was literally long after we'd had a map, long after we'd had, you know, tranquility base, et cetera. Someone thought, well, this luggage stuff, actually, most of the weight could actually be borne by the floor and using a wheel, which is not an unfamiliar invention.

• 19:04Rory Sutherland?

  You know, now, okay, I'm sure that what's happened partly is that sideline tech like skateboard inline wheels became more and more affordable as a byproduct perhaps of skateboarding or something of that kind.

• 19:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Rory Sutherland?

  And that the technology somehow improved. Nevertheless, you could have had a basic wheel suit.

• 19:21Chris Williamson?

  Could have been something beforehand. So are you saying weirdly that giving products to pensioners is kind of like the litmus test, Occam's razor, canary in the coal mine for whether or not a product's very...

• 19:34Rory Sutherland?

  Well, yeah, I mean, first of all, pensioners don't, you know, generally, they're not doing things to show off or, you know, they're, they're, they're low on signalling and they're high on pragmatism and practicality. And the other thing I bought my dad, which was an extraordinary success, the Philips air fryer. That's a, it's a, it's actually technically, it's not a fryer, it's a super, it's a small desktop fan oven with glass, superheated air, and you can cook chips or cook any food. Think of it as halfway between an oven and a microwave and you've got about the right thing. Now, I bought one myself and I thought it was an absolute game changer. And I thought, well, maybe this is just because of my inherent tech and failure, sort of neophilia. I bought one for my dad, who's become a weird air fryer evangelist, going around various

• 20:19Rory Sutherland?

  other old people.

• 20:21Chris Williamson?

  Just frying shit.

• 20:23Rory Sutherland?

  Pointing this out. And actually, to the other people's credit, they do actually, occasionally people come up to him in the pub and go, that air fryer, that was a good tip.

• 20:30Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 20:31Rory Sutherland?

  Um, but yeah, I think, I think designing for the disabled or designing for the elderly is inherently interesting because...

• 20:39Rory Sutherland?

  I've written about this in The Spectator because, in a sense, if you take, for example, wheelchair ramps, well, wheelchair ramps are also useful for people with wheel luggage, okay? The legislation that replaces doorknobs with door handles is designed for people who don't have use of their hands, who can open a door with an elbow rather than needing a hand. Now, what you've got to remember, and likewise, the reason that the shampoo opens at the top and the conditioner at the bottom, I think was designed for partially sighted people.

• 21:10Chris Williamson?

  Is that so? I've always wondered why that is the case.

• 21:14Rory Sutherland?

  But it's a good principle because in the shower, you're partially sighted.

• 21:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 21:18Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, if you wear spectacles, you're not wearing them in the shower. If you are, you can't see a fucking thing. I don't wear spectacles, I still can't see a fucking thing in the shower.

• 21:26Chris Williamson?

  That's unless someone really mean comes in and turns the shampoo upside down and the conditioner upside down.

• 21:33Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly, yeah. Then you take the fact of, say, the doorknob. Well, if you're carrying two mugs of tea, you effectively haven't got the use of your hands. So actually, most humans are partially disabled. Inside for this came from BT brought out this huge buttoned phone, which was designed for people who are significantly visually impaired. And weirdly, to their surprise, it became their best-selling, what would you say, wired telephone. And of course, they ran this as a bedside phone. You've got people who haven't got their specs on, they're probably reaching over and lying on one side, so they want to be able to dial by touch rather than by sight. Designing for the extremes is always interesting, and I think, you know, don't get me wrong,

• 22:18Rory Sutherland?

  I don't blame them for marketing Alexa as a kind of leading-edge tech thing. But the reason I wrote the article in The Spectator is the application for anybody over the age of 60, and bear in mind, no one over the age of 60 is going to buy that thing. So what I wanted people to do is buy it for older people as a Christmas present. Now, the wonderful thing is, my friend's mother, who's in the nursing home, she's a big Ray Charles fan, and she gets to the lounge first and she says, "Alexa, play Ray Charles." And off the Ray Charles goes. She won't use the Alexa when there's anybody else in the room because she doesn't want the other old people to know how it works, because then she'll have to put up with their shit music.

• 22:59Rory Sutherland?

  So she actually uses Alexa in a fantastically furtive way, where she'll never actually change the volume or change the music while there's anybody else present.

• 23:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep. She's just pleading ignorance, the same as everybody else.

• 23:11Rory Sutherland?

  I don't know, it just plays Ray Charles. What am I supposed to do?

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  It's the Ray Charles machine.

• 23:15Rory Sutherland?

  It's Ray Charles or Mahalia Jackson. It's a special radio that plays nothing else.

• 23:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're totally right. It seems like designing for the extremes with this kind of super utilitarian approach, where you've got the absolute no-frills and everything. So as a perfect example, we are shoehorn evangelists on this show. Anyone who doesn't have a shoehorn is losing thumbskin at a rate that is completely destructive.

• 23:44Rory Sutherland?

  Or fucking your shoes by scuffing them as you put them in.

• 23:46Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 23:47Rory Sutherland?

  I totally agree with you on that. The shoehorn is, again, and actually the long-handled dustpan and brush, which I bought from a disabled supplies place. That, again, is obviously every dustpan and brush should be like that.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Rory Sutherland?

  And so there's an interesting question, which is, I mean, there's a wider question here, which is, are things which are easy sort of stigmatized or devalued? And so videoconferencing fascinates me because are businesses reluctant to adopt it simply because it is comfortable, pleasant, and you can do it from home? So is there this sort of macho signaling, which is, no, no, no, if it's a serious business meeting, you get up at six o'clock in the morning and you fly to Frankfurt? And that what we're doing is we're signaling commitment through effort. Now, that wouldn't matter if the effort were actually beneficial. I mean, an example of a technology, just as, okay, evolution leads to brilliant things

• 24:43Rory Sutherland?

  which work fantastically, which none of us would ever have thought of, but it also leads to dumb runaway, what's called Fisherian runaway, the peacock's tail, okay? Where you get effectively runaway arms races between different males, say, to attract female attention.

• 25:00Rory Sutherland?

  It always occurred to me that the typewriter as a technology was emblematic of that in that it meant that for a period, the word processor did a different matter because you can take shit, edit it, you know, change the address e, you know, you don't have to type the same thing forty seven times. Word processor is a different thing. But the typewriter essentially meant that for a period of about a hundred years, everything produced by a serious business had to be written twice. And then if it needed editing, because I'm just about old enough to remember when you'd get shit typed for you at work. It was only really the first two or three years of work where you'd handwrite a memo and your P A would type it up and distribute it. But I can just about remember this and it was really

• 25:44Rory Sutherland?

  stupid because there'd always be a mistake or you'd change your mind about something, which actually meant that what you had to be written ended up being written four times. Older Ogilvy people have told me that you had to, basically, if you're a young person at Ogilvy in the nineteen sixties and seventies, you had to spend about two or three hours a week as a kind of Terry Thomas in the typing pool.

• 26:07Chris Williamson?

  Oh, you had to grease everyone.

• 26:09Rory Sutherland?

  You had to go in and go, hello gorgeous creature. And then do all the, you go in in your velvet smoking jacket. Hello. And the reason for that is if you didn't have a bank of favors and affection in the typing pool, you couldn't get anything written. And so you were more or less ineffectual at your job. You had to, everything you did was a favor trade. Now, senior people could just go, I need these seven things typed out. But if you were junior, you're put at the bottom of the pile. So your only chance of escaping obscurity was by essentially doing the Leslie Phillips Act.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  Bringing in the donuts and the scented candles and all that sort of stuff.

• 26:47Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly. And it must have been extraordinary. And now, the advantage of that, of course, over email was that the only shit that got out was important because you actually had to burn some favors to get it produced. Whereas under email, any idiot can basically generate huge amounts of work for somebody else without any cost to themselves.

• 27:06Chris Williamson?

  Everyone who's listening will know that, right? The amount of disinformation that we get.

• 27:10Rory Sutherland?

  Email would be an example of one of those. So where tech goes wrong, I think is a really interesting question because it's similar to where evolution goes right. Inventiveness, extraordinary kind of, extraordinarily inventiveness and unbelievable way to solve problems laterally.

• 27:27Rory Sutherland?

  And through unexpected sources. But the downside is that we we can essentially become embroiled in utterly senseless competition. And I think email, I think email is a case where it feels like work and therefore we assume it's productive. But okay, we're doing this as a as a video conference. Okay, now, if this podcast were recorded with us speaking at the speed we could type, with, you know, pauses of a couple of hours in between responses. So my next sentence would be, imagine if you... Now, you wouldn't have any listeners, it'd be painfully slow.

• 28:08Rory Sutherland?

  But when we're typing, we're not conscious of the contrast between the speed of typing and the speed of speech. So we think, oh, I'm typing quite fast here, you know, I'm really being productive. Now, despite the fact that that email exchange that takes place... Oh, sorry, have you finished?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  I'm just gonna go do some paperwork on that.

• 28:25Rory Sutherland?

  Paperwork, fantastic, I won't be long, yeah. Okay, so an email exchange that takes place over three days and takes an hour of your time, possibly could have been settled in a four-minute phone call.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:36Rory Sutherland?

  Do you want to do that now? I wouldn't do that now. Okay, well, what about...

• 28:40Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, you're out. But that, but weirdly, when we're engaged in that three-day-long hours, hour-and-a-half time crafting the emails back and forth, we're not conscious of the relative inefficiency. In the same way that we're not conscious of the fact that the Victoria Line's much faster than other tube lines. And I don't know if you knew this, but the Central Line and the Victoria Line are pretty fast. The Jubilee Line's fast, Northern Line's pretty, Circle Line's fucking, you know, that's continental drift, basically.

• 29:12Rory Sutherland?

  But nobody notices how fast the Victoria Line is because the time between stations is about the same. What you don't realise is the distance between stations is much, much further apart. So actually, you're really wellieing it on the Victoria Line for significant periods of time.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:27Rory Sutherland?

  But our consciousness doesn't tell us that. And I'd weirdly spent, oh, God, don't even go there. I'd spent thirty years of getting to Euston Station, not realising that if you go to Victoria and get on the Victoria Line, you get to Euston in about eight minutes. I mean, it's teleportation compared to the other routes. And... So I always find this really interesting. I mean, A, that where human perception lets us down, B, where what we invest our time and attention on in terms of innovation can be extraordinarily counterproductive. And as I said, I mean, you know, I would say what we should have done is we should have announced the Alexa as, you know, for all elderly people

• 30:12Rory Sutherland?

  living alone, this is one of the best things to happen in 10 years.

• 30:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 30:17Rory Sutherland?

  And yet, nobody's mentioned that. Okay, they're all going, turn your lights on. Well, yeah, you can do that with a switch. But a great story about light switches. And this is another fascinating thing about how technology works. The first electric lights mimic the first gas lights in that the switch was beside the light. You may remember, American Standard lamps often have that thing you turn at the top. And it seems a bit weird to us. But that's actually a skewer morphic mimic of how you turn a gas light on or off by twisting a little flange. Okay.

• 30:51Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic term.

• 30:52Rory Sutherland?

  Flange, right. Christ.

• 30:58Rory Sutherland?

  And so the first electric lights in America, you'd wander into the center of the room, reach up towards the bulb, turn a knob, and the light would come on. People, oh, brilliant, it's electric. And then someone said, well, you can actually put the switch right next to the door. So when you come into the room, you just turn the light on. Now, you'd think people would go, fuck, why didn't we think of that? Okay. But they didn't. They went on completely unnecessary luxury. So they went on for 10 or 20 years, basically bumping into furniture in the dark, trying to find the light. Because this seemed to them at the time, a completely unnecessary indulgence.

• 31:34Chris Williamson?

  It's this odd artifact of what's already existed.

• 31:37Rory Sutherland?

  What's already existed. So I've already solved that problem. So therefore, in my mind, it isn't a problem. Because, you know. And it's really fascinating. You can actually find, and I was looking at this the other day, I looked on Google Images for ads for electricity. Now, you're going to say, well, you know, if you ever moved to a house, okay, which wasn't on the electrical grid, right. Basically, day one, you go, okay, the first thing we've got to do is we've got to get this wired for electricity. I'm not even, you know, the idea that you'd have a salesman come out and explain to you why it was a good idea. Okay.

• 32:11Rory Sutherland?

  The idea that this guy would have to come around and go, well, the great advantage of having electricity is, you go, what the fuck are you talking about?

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  Exactly. Mate, just can you just please put the wires in?

• 32:19Rory Sutherland?

  Can you just please put the wires in? But of course, in the early days, you actually needed to do this. And it's fascinating because you can see these ads and there's a copyright of myself. I can imagine myself writing exactly the same shit. Okay. So it's an ad, I think, by the Dublin Corporation encouraging people to get electricity in their homes. And one of the great things it does is it says, well, Maureen, with my new electric kettle. Okay, now, you know, I can simply flick it on. I don't need to light the stove and it produces hot water. Now, and the copyrighter then goes on to imagine two possible consumer benefits from this that none of us have ever adopted. He says, so first of all, when I'm having tea with you, I don't leave the kettle on the stove.

• 33:04Rory Sutherland?

  I have it on the table between us. So if we need to top up the pot, I don't even need to get up from the table. Okay.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Rory Sutherland?

  And every night I take my kettle upstairs to bed so I can have a cup of tea in the bedroom.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 33:19Rory Sutherland?

  Now, the fascinating thing there is they make both of them a true. Two benefits of having an electric kettle is, one, you can make tea in any room of the house. Okay. Two, you can actually have the kettle anywhere you want it to be, not necessarily on the stove. The strange thing is that nobody, as far as I know, ever does any either of those two things.

• 33:38Chris Williamson?

  It's a stationary object. It stays in the same place.

• 33:40Rory Sutherland?

  It's a stationary object. I've never moved it anywhere else. The, okay, some people had teas made, but it's never occurred to me, you know, to take a kettle into my bedroom.

• 33:49Chris Williamson?

  Yep, thankfully.

• 33:50Rory Sutherland?

  But I mean, all for liposip, have I ever done it? No, don't think so. I go into the kitchen.

• 33:54Chris Williamson?

  You put it in the cup downstairs. And the other thing as well is if, if you did do that.

• 33:57Rory Sutherland?

  One second, I've got, I've got, I've got, here we are.

• 34:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 34:01Rory Sutherland?

  It's all done, is it?

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, good. So you actually have three leaks on there.

• 34:04Rory Sutherland?

  Wow. Oh, that explains why it was so weird.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, you had a pinhole on your hot and then your cold was leaking from the, from the top end of the tap and put the boiler bit. So I've replaced the boiler.

• 34:14Rory Sutherland?

  Let me give you something too. Sorry. No, no, no, no, it's just, this is really useful. Thanks.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  So I've just replaced a whole lot. Um, good as gold. I'll put everything back, so.

• 34:24Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, that's fantastic. Thanks very much indeed. That's great.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Oh, thanks very much.

• 34:28Rory Sutherland?

  No, it's a pleasure. Thanks. If you just slam the door.

• 34:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:32Rory Sutherland?

  Once you're down, that'll be absolutely great.

• 34:36Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, there we go.

• 34:37Chris Williamson?

  All good.

• 34:38Rory Sutherland?

  Perfect.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Right, take care.

• 34:40Rory Sutherland?

  Thank you very much indeed. Have a good, what day is it now? It's Friday. Have a good weekend.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  You too. Take care.

• 34:45Rory Sutherland?

  Thanks, all the best. Bye bye.

• 34:47Chris Williamson?

  Are you wearing a smartwatch there, Rory?

• 34:51Rory Sutherland?

  So here we are. So I suppose if you look at electricity, I mean, one thing that interests me about that is it actually suggests that marketing and consumer innovation are a significant factor in determining economic growth. We never look at this. We always assume that supply creates its own demand and that once you invent electricity, people just go, well, fucking hell, where have you been all my life? But actually, for the most part, they don't. They actually need to be persuaded. I mean, you know, there were farmers in Wales, my father can remember, who had electricity to power their milking machines in the cow shed, but didn't want it in the house.

• 35:29Chris Williamson?

  That's so bizarre, isn't it?

• 35:31Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Chris Williamson?

  What do you think?

• 35:32Rory Sutherland?

  Welsh farmers, mind you, so I mean, it's.

• 35:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, might not be straight down the middle of the representative demographic, but yeah. What do you think this says about the value of advertisers then? Because I know you've got a very interesting analogy you use about alchemy, which I absolutely love.

• 35:49Rory Sutherland?

  Well, I think that marketing and advertising in terms of both behaviour change and also creating the context for things that enables us to see why they're desirable, might be much, much more important in terms of economic growth, productivity and just the wealth of nations than economists have given it credit for. Now, one thing I'd say is that the United States enjoys a huge advantage as an economy, not only in its productive capacity, its scale, its, you know, size, but also in the nature and character of its inhabitants.

• 36:30Rory Sutherland?

  Which is for good and ill, and it's not always for good, okay? But Americans are, if we're being cynical and European and a bit snooty, they're a bit credulous. And some, you know, oh, wow, look at, you know, Greg Proops used to do a fantastic comedy routine about this, which is, you know, the American at Disneyland versus the Brit, you know? And you see a giant eight foot mouse, the Americans going, hey, geekins, do you see that? Like, he really does live here. And then there's the British dad who sort of looks around and there's a six foot mouse, oh, for fuck's sake.

• 36:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. Mate, if you've got nothing better to be doing.

• 37:02Rory Sutherland?

  If you've got nothing better to be doing. And so the American belief that life is capable of continuous improvement,

• 37:11Rory Sutherland?

  which I mean, I have to say, I mean, most of the nice things that have happened in cynical Europe have probably happened on the back of that American, you know, you know, just as actually most of the really worthwhile shit was invented by people in sheds in the Midwest. You know, let's give them credit for this because, I mean, Brits haven't been bad. Scandinavians, I mean, you know, and the French do, French are very weird. They're either very conservative or very inventive.

• 37:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:34Rory Sutherland?

  I can't get my head around that at all. They're either the most inventive, creative people in the world or like the most weirdly conservative.

• 37:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:42Rory Sutherland?

  And both, I guess.

• 37:45Rory Sutherland?

  But, but actually, you know, what is it? I mean, you know, 50% of the innovations that actually make life pleasant and livable and easy, you know, have probably come from the US in some shape or form. And they've been adopted because of that American belief that there's always a better way of doing something.

• 38:02Chris Williamson?

  Is that because it's such a young country, do you think? I always, I always think this when I, when I think about the difference, especially between the UK and America. I always draw this analogy that the way that Americans talk, this kind of top down love for the country. Like, I've never once heard an English person say, you know what it is? I really just love England. I want to do it for my country. It's the sort of thing that you associate with like far right activists and people with skinheads.

• 38:28Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, which is a terrible shame, actually, because, I mean, we've got quite a lot to be pretty, I mean, you know. To be absolutely honest, I mean, the places living here, it's pretty great, actually.

• 38:39Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the weather, it's fantastic.

• 38:40Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, apart from January, February, March. Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah. And I mean, clear out January. If you can ever find a life, my father, funnily enough, said, one of his regrets was, he said, by the time you kids had left home, what I should have done in my late sixties is buggered off to Spain for January, February, March.

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  Had a holiday.

• 38:59Rory Sutherland?

  You know, because it wouldn't have cost very much, turn the heating off at home, you know. And, um, uh, you know, those are the three worst bits. I mean, mind you, a hell of a lot of the world has that. I mean, Chicago is beautiful in spring and autumn. New York, actually, New Yorkers are convinced they have a great climate. But actually, it's too fucking cold in the winter and it's too fucking hot in the summer. And when there's a heat wave in or a cold snap in New York, it's unlivable, whereas London rarely does that, you know.

• 39:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 39:27Rory Sutherland?

  Um, and you know, that, I mean, where's, I mean, there are places which have a pretty perfect climate, I guess, in the Canary Islands or Madeira. LA is pretty good, isn't it? Chile, apparently, has a fantastic climate.

• 39:38Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, there's this, there's this kind of a propensity towards accusing things of being shit, which is so, it's almost like British people take pride in it to a degree, like they're, they're more patriotic about the fact that they think everything is shit than they are about their own country.

• 39:53Rory Sutherland?

  Well, I seriously worry about this and it's a weird one because if you look at all these statistics, which everybody believes, which is essentially all the gains have gone to the richest X percent. Okay.

• 40:06Rory Sutherland?

  And, um, uh, essentially the middle class have become completely trapped in a kind of income trap where they're earning no more than their parents were. Now, the interesting thing about this narrative is that according at least to Robert Frank, I'm sorry, not Robert Frank, Russ Roberts, sorry.

• 40:24Rory Sutherland?

  It's actually not true. Now let me just explain this in a second. One, it's perfectly possible to have a society where everybody's getting richer, but where every decile of the population is getting poorer, provided people are moving from poorer deciles to richer deciles. Now, part of the reason they're more poorer people is there are more students who are poor. And there are more, um, uh, there are more immigrants who tend to be poorer when they start, not necessarily when they end. And there are more retired people. Then household composition is smaller as well. Uh, divorce has affected things, smaller, you know, smaller numbers of people per household changes the whole balance of things. But actually, if you look at people, if you look at what's called panel data,

• 41:08Rory Sutherland?

  which is the same people researched over time, actually, the poorest, the people who start off poorest are very likely to become quite a bit richer. And the people who start off richer over a period of ten, twenty years are quite likely to drop out of that top decile.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  Really?

• 41:23Rory Sutherland?

  So the idea that there's no social mobility, if you look, now, the only, the only perspective that we care about, because I'm not an aggregate decile of the population, okay, I don't, you know. And the only thing we really care about is my life getting better. And for most people, except actually the richest, who tend to get a bit poorer. And for most people who start off poor, so students, for example, are notionally poor, but they don't think of themselves as poor in the same way that maybe retired people don't. Because they, you know, that, that, they, they see themselves as investing in their future.

• 41:56Chris Williamson?

  It's a byproduct of that particular area of their life, that particular period of their life, right?

• 42:01Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, it's, it's something you do in order to become richer later on, that's the logic line. Whether that, whether it's overblown, that's a separate, totally separate debate. Whether actually further education's become a bit of a peacock's tail. You know, kind of credentialist arms race, I think is probably true, to a degree. Uh, but I'll park that for now, because it's a whole separate discussion.

• 42:23Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, I, you know, I think it's become a bit, I, I, I think, you know, that you now get people who go, well, you know, if I want to get a really good job, I, I, you know, it's not enough to have a degree, I've got to have an M5. You need a fucking PhD, I'm cutting out for fuck's sake, you know, I mean, actually, you'll learn more in a job. I mean, part of the thing that annoys me is the implicit insult that when you're at a, at, at an institution of higher education, you're learning loads. And the second you go into a job, you become some sort of slack-jawed, mouth-breathing moron who never learns anything. I mean, you know, uh, you know, I, I went to Cambridge for three years, I then spent three years at Ogilvy, working with people like Drayton Bird and Steve Harrison, uh, you know, extraordinary kind of creative people and advertising people.

• 43:06Rory Sutherland?

  I learnt just as much in those three years at Ogilvy as I did in, you know, at, at university. And it's a, it's, it's a bit of a, it, it, the idea that somehow you need to be spending all your time acquiring these credentials strikes me as a, you know, pretty dubious.

• 43:20Chris Williamson?

  I'd agree. I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. When, when I went to university, I started, I sat next to my business partner in my first ever seminar, sat down, sat down next to him, complained about the fact that I was skinned. And from then we started working together and 12 years later, I've still not been able to get rid of him. But he'll be listening. Um, I'll, I'll receive a pay cut for that because he's the one that controls the accounts as well. Um, so.

• 43:42Rory Sutherland?

  What, what you do, by the way, is I've just read about this, this group detained in Dubai. You move to Dubai and then you get him to sign checks.

• 43:50Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 43:50Rory Sutherland?

  And then you cancel the check. So he gets sent to jail.

• 43:54Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic. Yes.

• 43:55Rory Sutherland?

  There you go. So that's the trick. You've got to move to Dubai. Yeah.

• 43:58Chris Williamson?

  Darren, mate, I'm going to take your expensive class.

• 43:58Rory Sutherland?

  So you get him to sign a few checks, which then you refuse to honour as the partner. And then he gets banged up in jail and you take over the company. It's apparently it works every time.

• 44:09Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, cool. I'll have to make sure that he doesn't listen to this one. So he's not expecting it, but that'll be fine. So yeah, we sat down, we sat down next to each other in our first ever seminar. And very quickly, we started operating a, a business from HR, advertising, marketing, dealing with suppliers, dealing with consumers, everything, front and backwards facing is vertically and horizontally integrated, as you can imagine. And at the same time, I was doing a business degree at Newcastle and I was dealt a fatal dose of contrast between what the real world was showing me.

• 44:39Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  And what my academics were showing me. And very quickly I became so disenchanted, disenfranchised with what I was learning. I think had I have been doing philosophy or psychology or something, it might have fed my passion a little bit more. But as I was sat learning about Henry Ford's scientific methods of like operations and Kaizen logistics and stuff like that, I just thought like, what am I doing? Like this does not reflect the business world that I am being exposed to. And then sure enough, I, I, I, I came out and I thought, well, it, the piece of paper for me, I'm the absolute avatar for got a piece of paper that I didn't need spent. And I spent, this was before the nine thousand

• 45:21Chris Williamson?

  pounds a year thing. I was like three grand a year and I've still come out with like 27 grand, 27 grand of debt for a degree that essentially facilitated me running a business.

• 45:30Rory Sutherland?

  If you offered people that twenty seven thousand pound loan and said you can spend a third of it, you have to spend a third of it on education. But the other eighteen grand you can spend on anything you like, starting a business, moving house, getting, you know, whatever, okay. Everybody would do a one year degree, wouldn't they? Or maybe two. Nobody would do three. You'd want nine or eighteen grand for the other shit.

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  Eighteen grand in two thousand and six was a deposit on a house.

• 45:57Rory Sutherland?

  That was a deposit, you're absolutely right, yeah. So that's not a market in education, saying here's money which we'll lend for you, just as the housing market isn't the market, because a mortgage is money they'll lend to you on the sole condition that you spend it on property. So unsurprisingly, houses are really fucking expensive. And a student loan is twenty seven grand they'll lend you on the sole proviso that you spend it all on education. Now, you know, I mean, to be absolutely honest, I would have spent two years at Cambridge and bought a fucking Mustang or something.

• 46:31Rory Sutherland?

  But I mean, actually, I mean, this is one of the most interesting questions, which is I would argue that it's one of the interesting ideas, which in a way interests people on the right and left, and as a result makes no progress because nobody gets angry about it, but actually, giving people money in lumps, and there's a whole load of experiments in the effective altruism movement, that the problem with welfare is partly, you know, it's partly right wing people are too reluctant to give it, which is one interesting question. But left wing people tend to have this view that if you give people a large sum of money, they'll immediately get pissed. Now, what's interesting in all the experiments where you give people not regular smalls, now if you give me a hundred quid a month, what really improves my life when I've got

• 47:16Rory Sutherland?

  a hundred quid a month, let's say I've got forty pounds of discretionary income a month, what improves my life the most? Answer, beer and cigarettes, right? Because if I've only got forty pounds a month of discretionary income, the best way of improving my life is to get pissed with my friends and to have a tap.

• 47:33Chris Williamson?

  On the highest, highest immediate return.

• 47:35Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, immediate return, it's fantastic. Now, if you give people three grand, they start asking different questions.

• 47:44Rory Sutherland?

  You know, five, should I move house? Do I really need to buy a car? Do I really need to get educated? And if you look at these experiments in Africa where you go around and they they find genuinely deserving people. Typically, if you've got a house which is entirely made of natural materials. It doesn't mean you're a hipster in Africa. It means you're genuinely poor. Okay. If you haven't got any concrete, you haven't got any corrugated iron, you're really poor. So they identify those people and basically send them through their mobile phone like a year's salary. Boom, like that. And the number of people who actually spend it on booze and cigarettes is unbelievably tiny. But what's fascinating is they don't spend it in the way the charity assumes is important. They all spend it on totally different things.

• 48:27Rory Sutherland?

  Educating their kids might be the priority. Actually getting a proper roof on the house might be the priority. One person actually did buy recording equipment, which looked a bit of an indulgence. But he then started a band and made quite a lot of money out of it. And so there's a real, there's some really interesting questions about welfare, which is the right tend to disapprove of it. The left tend to do it in a really patronizing way. And actually, if you say, look, to, and to some extent, right wing people are in favor of this because they go, well, the bastards want to get pissed. It's their own fucking fault, right? And so right wing people may be a bit actually, although for the worst of reasons, they may actually be right here.

• 49:06Rory Sutherland?

  But she's saying, you know, actually, if everybody at the beginning of their life, I had an inheritance from an aunt of a thousand quid when I was, bloody hell, I was twenty something, okay? That sounds a bit ridiculous now. It was at the time, it was life changing, knowing you had a thousand quid in the bank, which if you needed it, you could spend it. And then later on, another aunt died and I had about twenty, okay? And that basically enabled me to get a deposit on our flat, enabled me to furnish the flat, enabled me to, you know. Now, you know, a huge amount of my present property wealth is probably predicated on that twenty thousand quid, which enabled me to get started a bit earlier. So I'm starting to wonder, should the student loan be available for anything?

• 49:49Rory Sutherland?

  And you say, okay, you've got to spend one year of it in further education. If you spend eighteen thousand pounds and you want to start a cafe, or you want to start a business. And by the way, one thing about small businesses, I think we ought to, we ought to mention more is that, okay, there are areas where the business needs to be big. I don't want my broadband to be provided by a bloke down the pub. Okay, I get that. But small business activity adds an enormous amount to the well being of communities.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think?

• 50:17Rory Sutherland?

  You know, every time a shop opens, a cafe opens, you know, uh, you know, it, it more or less defines what's a successful, thriving community. Actually, one of the things, are you in Newcastle now or are you in Manchester?

• 50:28Chris Williamson?

  Newcastle still.

• 50:29Rory Sutherland?

  Now, interestingly, what I find interesting when you travel to other British cities is there are the, the cities that did really well in the kind of early part of the century. And Newcastle's probably one of them, isn't it actually? I mean, you know, you go there, Sheffield's another one, you come out of the station. I went to Sheffield in nineteen eighty seven and we missed the last train and we said to our host, where's the best place to stay overnight? Sheffield, he replied Leeds.

• 50:58Rory Sutherland?

  And, you know, the fact that people open, you know, whether it's hotels, plumbing firms, cafes, all that sort of activity, actually has an importance in human, day to day human life, which we can't really, you know, we shouldn't really understate. And so I, I would argue that you should change the student loan and just say it's a young person's loan. Everybody gets it.

• 51:21Chris Williamson?

  Spend it as you wish.

• 51:22Rory Sutherland?

  And you spend it as you wish, with the proviso that maybe I think a year should be spent on education.

• 51:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 51:27Rory Sutherland?

  Then, you know, if you want to go and do three years and do that stuff, well, okay, but you should pay the cost that that's eighteen thousand. You can't spend on something else.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I totally get that. Um, I wanted to talk about the recent UK advertising watchdog release that spoke about how it would be cracking down on what it termed sexist stereotypes in ads. Do you think this is a significant change or is it natural progression? What's, what's your view on this?

• 51:52Rory Sutherland?

  To some extent, the sexist stereotype.

• 51:58Rory Sutherland?

  In a sense, there's been a reverse sexist stereotype for quite a long time, which is, which a lot of men find very irritating, which is you have to portray the man as a bit of an idiot and the woman as the sage, font of all wisdom oracle. Because if you do it the other way around, you get massive complaints. And that can get a bit tedious. There is a problem, of course, with stereotyping in advertising in TV, which is simply that... If you only have 30 seconds, there is an element where, when you've got 30 seconds

• 52:40Rory Sutherland?

  or 60 seconds to tell a story, to some extent, you have to rely on tropes. Because things which are odd, okay, throw the viewer completely.

• 52:54Chris Williamson?

  You need the archetype, right? You need them to be able to infer so much more of the story.

• 52:59Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, changing ethnic stereotypes, I'm entirely in favor of that. I mean, it's worth remembering that you get some weird stuff going on in that there was that much applauded Nike ad about London, which is very, very ethnically diverse, except for a complete absence of Indians. Anybody of subcontinental origin seems to be completely missing. Now, maybe because people of the subcontinent are only really interested in one sport, which is cricket.

• 53:26Chris Williamson?

  Yes, fair point. A Nike aren't very big in cricket, so, yep.

• 53:30Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, and so there may be an element of that. But, I mean, good advertising, first of all, you can push at stereotypes, but you can only push so fast and so far. Because, you know, if you think about it, if you'd shown, for example, it would have been very good in 1970 to show a gay couple, in one sense, as an archetype, or, you know, creating a norm.

• 54:01Rory Sutherland?

  But the ad would have become entirely about, all discussion of the ad would have become entirely about that.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 54:09Rory Sutherland?

  So you didn't, you had the OXO family, because then you just said, default family, this is what families are like. Okay. And then the centrality of OXO was communicated in a way that would have been much more difficult if you'd set out to be an absolute, I mean, okay, you could have made Goodfellas not using, for example, Italian Americans or Sicilians.

• 54:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 54:30Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. But using, I don't know, Latvians, right? And it would have been less a stereotype, but it also would have been a bit of a weird film.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  You wouldn't have got, you wouldn't have communicated across the subtlety. I talk about this a lot when people mention Love Island to me, they talk about the TV show, and they say that there's a lack of diversity in terms of character depth and complexity in that. And I'm like, look, you've got 45 minutes of 14 people's 24 hour periods, like, it's like 350 hours of lived life every day that you need to try and fit in.

• 55:07Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Chris Williamson?

  And you're like, you do not have the time to convey the subtlety and the nuance of someone's very specific views about exactly what they want from a girl or a guy. It needs to be, that's the hero, that's the villain, that's the maiden, that's the redeemed, that's the nerd, that's the da da da da da da da da. Because it allows us to expedite the route from character introduction to character maturity.

• 55:30Rory Sutherland?

  No, I think that's, you're absolutely right. In terms of short storytelling under constraints, there's, there's the, first of all, you want attention to be attached to something where, you know, in one place. And so, anything too weird, David Ogilvy always said, look, if you just want your ads to gain attention, show a gorilla in a jockstrap. The point is, you can gain attention, right? But the danger is if you do anything too, now, Ford got into huge trouble, because when they reproduced an ad showing factory workers in Essex, in Poland, right? They replaced some of the black faces with white faces for the Polish market.

• 56:17Rory Sutherland?

  Now, I didn't go on TV to defend this because the whole thing had become a kind of PR nightmare. But you've got to remember that the population of Poland is probably, I don't know, 99.5% white. That if there's a car factory in Poland, the car workers are overwhelmingly Polish of ancestry. Now, if you had had a car factory with the correct ethnic mix, which was perfectly used in the British brochure, by the way. I'm not, now, you could say, okay, this is because Poland's a racist, which is not an implausible hypothesis. Okay, but equally, to have, let's say, 30% Afro-Caribbean employees

• 56:59Rory Sutherland?

  in what is supposed to be a Polish car factory would be like having a British car factory where there were seven Navajo Indians. The point is that you wouldn't, you'd be going, what the fuck's going on here?

• 57:10Chris Williamson?

  It's not representative, right?

• 57:12Rory Sutherland?

  It's simply not representative. And they got into huge grief about that. And I, you know, it was an insensitive thing to have done, but at the same time, I understand why they did it. Because simply, you know, if you're in Poland, the ethnic composition of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic or whatever is not the ethnic composition of London.

• 57:31Chris Williamson?

  Are you going to have to amend your approach as you move forward at Ogilvy? Are you, is this something that you're genuinely concerned about? Or is it something that you've been ahead of the curve on already?

• 57:40Rory Sutherland?

  Well, Ogilvy as an agency was definitely ahead of the curve in terms of female employment and female promotion. So I occasionally get a bit baffled by the kind of discussions the ad industry has beating up. Because every single division of Ogilvy I've worked with and for has probably in the last 20 years, if you split it up, it's been run equally by men and women. The ad agency has had female management for a significant time. The design component, the direct marketing component, all of them have had significant female management input. It's also worth remembering that to some extent, the composition of an ad agency's board

• 58:24Rory Sutherland?

  depends on the gender balance of who ad agencies recruited in 1988.

• 58:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's an upper ceiling that's moving up, right?

• 58:31Rory Sutherland?

  So looking, my contention is that the advertising industry and the communications industry will be majority female at all levels and in most departments.

• 58:42Rory Sutherland?

  Not necessarily the creative department, but that will grow closer and closer to 50/50 in about 20 years. Account management, planning, most of these disciplines will become majority female in a certain length of time. Creative department is slightly odd because what some creatives have said to me is if you recruited from art colleges, it tended to be guys who went to do the advertising course and women went to fine art and design or fashion. So you might have had a fashion department at an art college which was disproportionately female and you might have had an ad department which was just disproportionately male. And it's not entirely fair to say that's prejudice rather than preference. Having said that, I don't think creative departments will be overwhelmingly male nor will creative directors

• 59:27Rory Sutherland?

  be overwhelmingly male in another 20 years. What I do believe as a conservative is there's a natural, a small c conservative, is there is a natural pace of change. And one thing that sometimes annoys me about these movements is that I support the aim of the movement. I think the movement's completely right and I want to see, I share its aspirations. But if I ever step in and say, you know, I'm totally agree with what you're trying to do, but the way you're trying to do it is wrong, or the way you're diagnosing the problem is wrong, the assumption is not this guy is trying to help by suggesting there may be other explanations. Instead, you're treated as basically one of the enemy.

• 1:00:08Chris Williamson?

  The implication is that you're trying to deny, not trying to insist.

• 1:00:13Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, to some extent, you know, when I was recruited by Ogilvy, we were about 12 of us, maybe 14 graduate trainees, and I think the ratio was something like 2 to 1 males, female. Don't know why that was. It's worth remembering, by the way, that HR, which is responsible for recruiting, is in most companies a bit of a matriarchy.

• 1:00:36Rory Sutherland?

  So you could raise a little bit of a question, which is, well, HR has been a fairly well gender balanced, if anything.

• 1:00:44Chris Williamson?

  Or female dominated.

• 1:00:46Rory Sutherland?

  Female dominated discipline for quite a long time. What were you fucking doing for the first, you know, 10 years of this?

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, is it, is it that women are oppressing women here? Or I don't really get it.

• 1:00:56Rory Sutherland?

  It's not impossible. I mean, if you look at it from a very Darwinian point of view, of course, this was a slight bias for some, among certain men to recruit women.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:01:05Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, now.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  Which is also looked down upon. That's also not allowed.

• 1:01:12Rory Sutherland?

  But I mean, historically, you had advantages in certain forms of employment.

• 1:01:19Rory Sutherland?

  But I mean, by the way, that women bias against women is not an impossible. The point to make is that there are multiple variations here. There's, okay, the senior people are a product of who was hired in 1988. It's also a product of maternity leave. I accept the fact that actually my career wouldn't have, I wouldn't be vice chairman of Ogilvy if I had been at home looking after kids between, I don't know, 1999 and 2008. Okay? Right? If I'd gone home, looked after kids, effectively, I would have had to reboot my career. I totally accept that, by the way, as a, as a partial explanation. What I, what I'm not keen on is, is just this thing, which is anywhere where it's not 50 50, there is

• 1:02:04Rory Sutherland?

  therefore evidence of prejudice. That's too simplistic. It's not to say that prejudice doesn't exist. Of course it exists and that it exists in both directions and from both genders, by the way. That patently there is prejudice, but, and this is the big but, it's not fair to say there is prejudice, there is inequality or imbalance. Ergo, the only source of the, of the imbalance is the prejudice.

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Rory Sutherland?

  Because there are loads of, one of them is preference. Okay? Simply speaking, if you look at countries, very liberal countries, like Sweden or Norway, you will find that accountancy and perhaps being an actuary is disproportionately male.

• 1:02:46Rory Sutherland?

  And nursing is disproportionately female.

• 1:02:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, you can't scale a lot of the jobs that females tend towards in these more egalitarian countries like Sweden and such like, they scale more difficult, like a lot more poorly than STEM fields. Like, if you're a nurse, how many patients can you look after at once? Like, maybe 10, 20, I guess? I don't know. But if you are someone who's creating-

• 1:03:09Rory Sutherland?

  A software guy, of course.

• 1:03:10Chris Williamson?

  An app, yeah, there you go. You've got seven billion people at your behest. So, yeah, I totally agree.

• 1:03:16Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, none of these, none of these findings has any bearing on the judgment of an individual. Because what often isn't understood in this debate is the difference between aggregate and individual. So, you know, where you get considerable overlap, okay, the, what you will see is the very extreme tails, the kind of person who wants to become an actuary, okay, is, well, I mean, okay, if you want to get, no, I mean, they're going to be slightly teensy bit on the spectrum, maybe, which is, by the way, trends male as well.

• 1:03:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:03:53Rory Sutherland?

  It's a very extreme take. Now, nobody's saying for a second that there can't be female actuaries. I'm simply saying that if you expect actuaries and scaffolders and nurses to be 50/50 male/female, you're going to have a long wait.

• 1:04:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:04:07Rory Sutherland?

  Unless you impose social engineering of a level that most of us wouldn't find acceptable.

• 1:04:13Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and that's going to lead to more dissatisfaction longer term, right, as well?

• 1:04:16Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, there's an interesting theory, by the way, which is borne out by my own anecdotal experience, which is the main reason women, there are two problems with STEM and getting women, well, there are loads of problems about getting, about women in STEM. One of them is if you do STEM, you're more or less encouraged for A-levels to do maths, physics, chemistry. What that means is you haven't got room to do a nice humanities subject. Now, I think someone's got to change. I did maths, Latin and Greek, which was, I'm really glad I did that. Now, as an adult, it was a total pain in the arse at the time, because I'm only doing maths and physics. Effectively, it was the same shit with different diagrams, right?

• 1:04:55Rory Sutherland?

  Whereas I had to go from, you know, reading Homer to then, you know, I don't know, yeah, I don't know, students tea distribution or whatever it was. Okay, my memory is hazy on that one. And it was a bit of a mindfuck. So there's that problem, which is more women than men are going to be reluctant to say, those subjects I really enjoy. One of the theories is that, by the way, what tends to happen is that the reason more men go into STEM is simply that there are more men who are shit at history, English and languages. Now, modern languages was always a female dominated field at university. I don't know if you noticed that. Um, but it tended to be the modern languages faculty uh was the Playboy mansion of the

• 1:05:42Rory Sutherland?

  of the uh of the Cambridge.

• 1:05:44Chris Williamson?

  So that was the thinking man's, that was the thinking man's degree.

• 1:05:47Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah. And so what what tends to happen is that if you're, if you're, the men who do STEM tend not only to be men who are good at STEM. They tend to be men who are not very good at history, English, geography, French. There are fewer women who are shit at history, English, geography, French. Therefore, fewer women do STEM because men who are good at both tend to do art subjects as well.

• 1:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep, because it's less competitive.

• 1:06:13Rory Sutherland?

  Because well, and more fun. So interestingly, my brother, okay, well, my brother's okay at history, English and stuff. Didn't like it that much. He's an astrophysicist. He went and did a totally STEM career. His contemporary, who was equally good at both, in other words, he acted in the theatre. And, you know, he, he was, you know, a really keen actor. He actually went off and did history. Even though he was equally good, really, at maths. Maybe not quite as good as my brother, but he was very good at maths. He was very good at history. He did history. My brother was very good at maths. He was quite good at history. He did maths.

• 1:06:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:48Rory Sutherland?

  Now, what you'll tend to find is that if women are more naturally strong in humanities fields and therefore there's less need for them to find um a subject of study uh where their weakness doesn't apply.

• 1:07:02Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:07:03Rory Sutherland?

  And STEM is a fantastic escape for someone who basically goes, I hate writing essays, but I love solving quadratic equations.

• 1:07:08Chris Williamson?

  Fine, that's me all over, yeah.

• 1:07:10Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Chris Williamson?

  So I wanted to, I wanted to ask what your thoughts are on the future of the attention economy and whether or not people are going to continue to give away their attention and their data so readily.

• 1:07:22Rory Sutherland?

  It's very interesting.

• 1:07:26Rory Sutherland?

  On data, I'm completely messed up because

• 1:07:31Rory Sutherland?

  it's with my attitude to data, it's a bit like the attitude I have towards whether my children, what my children do on the internet. And that was always the problem, which is, look, I can either police them to within an inch of their lives, or I can just trust them. There doesn't seem to be a very easy middle ground that doesn't involve a huge amount of work. Do you see what I mean? So either I basically go and say to my kids, look, you know, if you see anything in the internet that disturbs you, or if there's a bloke being a bit pervy and weird, let me know, and I'm going to trust you. Otherwise, go and look at what you like. Which is what I more or less did.

• 1:08:04Rory Sutherland?

  Or you do this thing, which I often think backfires, by the way, which is you police every minute of their use, you put, you know, every single safeguard on their bloody internet access, which simply means they go around to their friend's house and look at Pornhub, as far as I can see.

• 1:08:18Rory Sutherland?

  It tends, those people whose parents are, the children I notice whose parents are most protective are also the most devious.

• 1:08:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it just drives it underground.

• 1:08:29Rory Sutherland?

  It just drives it, it kind of drives it, yeah.

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Did you see, there was a recent New York Times article saying that Silicon Valley tech workers make sure that their children's nannies keep them away from all technology? And that some of these nannies get sacked if they come home and find that their child says, oh, I played on an iPad today, or I did this, that and the other, which says an awful lot, like the same as.

• 1:08:51Rory Sutherland?

  Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs wouldn't let his kids have iPads.

• 1:08:55Chris Williamson?

  Well, yeah, it's the same, it's the same theory as drug dealers don't use their own supply, right? Which I think is super interesting. So what do you think about the attention economy then, as we move forward? How's that going to work?

• 1:09:09Rory Sutherland?

  So the data question, I think, is sometimes overblown, actually, in that the idea that this is the new oil.

• 1:09:18Rory Sutherland?

  The data question is assumed to be absolutely vital, when it's actually sometimes useful, sometimes useless. I think that a large number of people in tech, and indeed a large number of people in advertising and marketing, have misunderstood how marketing works, and they've tried to turn it into an efficiency game.

• 1:09:42Rory Sutherland?

  And I think a large reason why marketing works is precisely because it's inefficient. The costly signalling, in other words, the fact that you're talking to a large group of people simultaneously through media which are perceived to be expensive, using celebrities or creative talent or filmmaking skills or storytelling skills which are in short supply and therefore seen as scarce and valuable, is what actually gives advertising its meaning. Now, how do you send a wedding invitation? Now, you could send it by email, but that we really shit, wouldn't it? And actually, no one would come because they'd assume there was going to be a pay, a cash bar, you know. Okay. In order to send a wedding invitation that says, "I'm committed to this partnership",

• 1:10:24Rory Sutherland?

  you can throw money at it, you know, which is, you know, full page ad in Vogue, okay? It's gilt-edged wedding invitation, printed on hard card with engraved curly type.

• 1:10:38Chris Williamson?

  I've got one on my, I've got one on my fridge which has come with a fridge magnet that's got a heart and it's made on wood and it's engraved.

• 1:10:45Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, okay. Now, you throw a stack of money at that and you do it conventionally and everybody goes, "Ah, this is a serious wedding."

• 1:10:54Chris Williamson?

  No one's not turning up to that wedding, are they? When they've got the fridge magnet, yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:58Rory Sutherland?

  You could use craft and effort, which you can make something by hand. You could use humour, which is another scarce commodity. You could produce an email newsletter that was really, really funny. But what you couldn't do is just email the parents of Florinda so-and-so, "Request the pleasure of your company, blah blah", at the measure of their marriage with their daughter so-and-so, to Mr. Dave, whatever it is, okay? You can't just send that as an email. The meaning actually resides not in the textual informational component. This isn't really information theory, this is signalling theory, and they're different things.

• 1:11:37Rory Sutherland?

  And the obsession with data is all about how can we make this message really efficient. But in a way, there can be really clever, efficient messages. And I don't dispute that that's part of what advertising is about. But the real way you build trust in a brand is to make it is to make it famous in an expensive way.

• 1:11:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Do you think that this is people doing the avoiding doing the hard thing, which is the very, very creative copywriting, which is the subtle and nuanced approach to delivering a message to the market and stuff like that, and focusing instead on this slightly more kind of spectrum side use of the data where it's what frequency, what open rate, what particular kind of et cetera, et cetera?

• 1:12:21Rory Sutherland?

  I think Silicon Valley sees everything as an efficiency game. It sees everything as a time and money optimization problem. And it's now straying into fields where that doesn't apply. Don't get me wrong, in things like manufacturing and, you know, in in in certain areas, the correlation between efficiency and effectiveness is pretty high. You know, economists aren't totally insane about this. But in various things, marketing, military strategy would be another one. You know, there are quite a few areas of life where actually, the asymmetry between the sender and the receiver, or the attacker and the defender, the informational asymmetry requires you to do things which are irrational. And

• 1:13:03Rory Sutherland?

  it's very interesting, there was a case where a man basically tried to murder his wife by tampering with her parachute. I don't know if you saw this.

• 1:13:11Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:13:11Rory Sutherland?

  He was an ex military guy. And weirdly, he nearly got away with it because she wouldn't testify against him. And they thought, what the hell? He wasn't allowed to approach her. She he was obviously under a kind of order. How on earth did he get to her and persuade her not to testify?

• 1:13:30Rory Sutherland?

  And they found that he'd written songs, love songs, patently addressed to her, and placed them on YouTube, and somehow got her to watch them.

• 1:13:39Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:13:40Rory Sutherland?

  Now, why that strikes me as fascinating, okay, is if he'd simply emailed her and said, "I'm innocent, I'm innocent, I'm innocent," it wouldn't have worked.

• 1:13:46Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:13:46Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. Right, if you tried to use reason. If you, let's say you had no money, but you had a lot of musical talent. You wanted to send out a great wedding invitation. You could record a fantastic song about your wedding, or your love for your future bride.

• 1:14:00Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:01Rory Sutherland?

  And you could post it on YouTube, and you could email the guests an invitation to watch it. Okay? Obviously, you'd have to make it a kind of a private YouTube channel. Otherwise, you'd get thousands of gatecrashers.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:13Rory Sutherland?

  But that would be, that would be equivalent, because it's costly in terms of money, cost in terms of effort, in terms of talent. You know, poetry is, in a sense, more costly prose.

• 1:14:25Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:25Rory Sutherland?

  Poetry means more than prose, because it's harder to write. And in the same way, this effort to make everything efficient is a bit like trying to take, you know, keats and rewrite it in prose.

• 1:14:40Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:42Rory Sutherland?

  And, and I, I think it's a, it's a fundamental mistake. And of course, data, if you believe this to be true, data becomes absolutely everything, because, um, you know, all the human talents of persuasion and seduction are external to your model. So all you have to do is get the right information to the right person at the right time. And that's purely a data game. Now, of course, that suits Google and Facebook and everybody else to pretend it's a data game, because that's where they have a monopoly. They have a monopoly on that kind of data. They can't claim a monopoly on creative talent. They can't claim a monopoly over celebrity. They can't claim a monopoly over persuasive about ability or psychology. But they can claim a monopoly over what they know.

• 1:15:23Rory Sutherland?

  So they pretend advertising is the kind of game in which they are, they are unavoidable. Now, you can't blame them for doing it. We all do the same kind of thing. We all pretend that the areas where we're strong are more important than they really are.

• 1:15:35Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:15:36Rory Sutherland?

  You know, um. And so, but, but at the same time, um, the, the data question is unbelievably flaming complicated because we've been naive in the West because we've always had relatively nice governments. You look at what's happening in China with the business where everybody has a kind of citizens eBay rating.

• 1:15:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:16:00Rory Sutherland?

  And this is being developed in China. Now, it may be a terrible mistake because suddenly everybody below a three is identified as a group and they may rebel or revolt.

• 1:16:13Chris Williamson?

  You're just increasing tribalism a bit.

• 1:16:14Rory Sutherland?

  You're creating a kind of gilets jaunes for the people who are sub-three rated, aren't you?

• 1:16:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's like there's an actual episode of Black Mirror that, which is, which is about this and then it's somehow it's occurring in real life and no one's actually taking, well.

• 1:16:30Rory Sutherland?

  Now, and so it's affected by who you talk to, who your friends are, who your friends are on social media, who your parents were, all those things affect your rating and your rating affects whether you can travel, whether you can travel overseas, whether you can do this, whether you can do that. And of course with eBay, if eBay gives me a shit rating, I can just create a new identity or move on to Etsy or something. But with the government, that's everything. Where you can live, where you can move, how freely you can travel, where you can work, whether you get a job or not, is all affected by a kind of credit rating on steroids. Now, that's a terrifying, terrifying thing. I

• 1:17:11Rory Sutherland?

  mean, particularly when you automate it. So there's no, I'm not even comfortable. There's the great thing about there's data which is information and there's data which does things. I'm not very comfortable with the speed camera. I don't think we should have accepted it because I think in order to be fined, uh, it is not enough to say, I drove at forty and a thirty limit, therefore I should have three points and a hundred pound fine. I think a human should watch the footage.

• 1:17:42Rory Sutherland?

  And the human should have discretion over whether or not I'm fined.

• 1:17:45Chris Williamson?

  Were you overtaking someone? Were you swerving to avoid an animal? Were you doing?

• 1:17:49Rory Sutherland?

  Well, in one case, don't get me wrong, I've had about four of these in my lifetime. And three of them were totally deserved and I either just speed awareness course, so I took the points. One of them was where there was a driver who was either drunk or having a massive row with his wife, who is swerving all over the road. So I just waited for them to move into the left-hand lane of a dual carriageway and basically wellied it for 300 yards as the only safe way of getting past.

• 1:18:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Rory Sutherland?

  Now, any cop would have arrested them, not me. And anybody watching the film footage in the wider context would have said, I can see why this guy did that. No human.

• 1:18:26Chris Williamson?

  Should have had a dash cam.

• 1:18:28Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, well, interestingly, I never thought of that. They weren't really available then, I guess. No, this was, this is about eight or 10 years ago. So I don't suppose you could have got them. But that is a fair point, actually, which is you could actually say, look, these are the circumstances. I want you to take this into consideration.

• 1:18:43Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether or not they consider that. I recently got my first three points. I didn't know that a long wheelbase van, one up from a transit van, is classed as a commercial vehicle and means that it's got a national speed limit on a single carriageway of 50 miles an hour, not 60.

• 1:18:58Rory Sutherland?

  I didn't know that.

• 1:18:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, there you go. If at some point in the future you're driving. So I didn't know. So I remember I was going to go and pick up a couch with my dad. My dad's in the car and I'm driving along and the van didn't have one of these classic enterprise things, like the most basic of equipment that you can, no air conditioning and no cruise control, et cetera, et cetera. Because I'm driving to Leeds from Newcastle and I'm on this single carriageway and I remember seeing the mobile speed unit on the left and I looked down and I was like, 61, single carriageway, piece of piss, absolutely fine. I'll be laughing. What I didn't realise was that I was 11 miles an hour over.

• 1:19:35Rory Sutherland?

  Over the 50.

• 1:19:36Chris Williamson?

  The 50 limit for the vehicle. And I'm like, well, and I got the thing through and I've got, you've got to send off your licence. I didn't even know how to send my licence off. It didn't come back with a hole in it. I don't know why they need my licence to like, everything's done electronically anyway. But yeah, and that was a bizarre one. I think, well, there's more subtlety and nuance to that particular situation. Like, yeah, maybe before I drove the van, should I have? Looked at whether or not there was a different national speed limit. Yeah, but it's not that like, I don't know. I don't know.

• 1:20:04Rory Sutherland?

  No, no, I wouldn't. I never knew that. I had no clue. And then the other interesting one is it's not quite acceptable to impose a uh speed limit on um uh dual carriageways or multi-lane motorways because the very strong rule there is you've got to go a bit faster than the cars to your left.

• 1:20:23Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:20:24Rory Sutherland?

  Because if all the cars are travelling at the same speed at a high density of traffic, it's impossible to change lane and people can't actually get off the motorway.

• 1:20:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Rory Sutherland?

  So you have to have some degree of flow to prevent the whole thing becoming kind of gridlocked.

• 1:20:37Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:20:37Rory Sutherland?

  And so, you know, you have to accept that if the people in the left-hand lane are going fifty, the people in the lane to the right are going to be going fifty-four and the people in the fast lane are going to be going fifty-eight because that's just how we drive and it's an instinctive thing. You Americans aren't like that. They have a different way of driving. They'll sit they'll sit on an interstate side by side for half an hour.

• 1:20:58Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:58Rory Sutherland?

  You know, at the same speed.

• 1:20:59Chris Williamson?

  And then they'll also weave weave in and out of each other as well.

• 1:21:02Rory Sutherland?

  They'll weave in and out. They'll undertake a bit.

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Rory Sutherland?

  And also, of course, it's worth remembering in American, you know, parts of the American West, it's fifteen miles between intersections. You know, it's a totally different it's a totally different mode of driving anyway.

• 1:21:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:14Rory Sutherland?

  And um so, no, that's an interesting. I mean, that's an interesting question, which is, you know, the the so in the Chinese case, there's the question of context. You know, you could end up being marked down for talking to these suspicious foreign spies when all they were doing is asking directions to some tourist site.

• 1:21:32Chris Williamson?

  I want I want a coffee. Where's good for a coffee around here?

• 1:21:35Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And so the ability to actually get yourself out by saying, okay, explain, you know, I can explain this suddenly becomes totally impossible and and um you the the in a way, a really bad bureaucracy and automation will naturally lead to bureaucracy is worse than a tyranny in a way.

• 1:21:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, because it's automated.

• 1:21:57Rory Sutherland?

  It's totally automated and your ability to actually get anything expunged.

• 1:22:02Rory Sutherland?

  Is more or less impossible.

• 1:22:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, even in a tyranny, at least the tyrannical.

• 1:22:08Rory Sutherland?

  There's a tyrant, he's a human.

• 1:22:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the tyrannical notion is it's deployed by a human. There's an element, at least a small element of margin on either side.

• 1:22:17Rory Sutherland?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:22:18Chris Williamson?

  So, final question that I wanted to ask was your vision of advertising moving forward. I've got George, who is one of the guys that works on the Modern Wisdom Project, asked what you think the ROI in advertising will look like as we move forward.

• 1:22:34Rory Sutherland?

  The skills required won't go away, and I don't think they're nearly as different as the digital people are trying to pretend they are. Now, bear in mind, young people and digital people have a vested interest in pretending that everything's changed and everything old is dead, because it effectively means they can occupy the top jobs because the experience of people older than them has suddenly become worthless. And there's a no, no, I can't blame young people for going with that gig in a way. Because, I mean, you know, it's a very good story to tell, it's kind of plausible. However, I think that there are some really interesting questions to be asked about advertising, which is how do you do costly signalling in a digital medium?

• 1:23:19Rory Sutherland?

  Which is a really interesting question. In other words, we've got the digital equivalent of Yellow Pages, we've done that very well. And Google is, to some extent, the, you know, Google plus Amazon, whatever, is, you know, we've done digital Yellow Pages, Facebook is arguably, you know, the digital sort of AT&T, you know.

• 1:23:38Rory Sutherland?

  But we haven't got the digital equivalent, really, of the back page of Vogue. Now, maybe, maybe there are things like, you know, you actually create a Netflix series.

• 1:23:52Rory Sutherland?

  You know, with, you know, but what's the digital equivalent of sponsoring the Olympics, taking the back page of Vogue? Now, for small businesses, by the way, I want to make important caveat here. There's a difference when consumers ask how costly your wedding invitation is, right? They're also subconsciously factoring in how rich they think you are or know you are. Now, if you're worth, okay, um, ten million quid and you send the invitation out on photocopier paper, that's much, much weirder than if you're getting married as a student and you send the invitation out on photocopier paper. Now, it's worth remembering that my local, I forgot, I just went to the opening of the Deal Pier Kitchen, which is the new café at the end of Deal Pier.

• 1:24:37Rory Sutherland?

  And it's two young people in their twenties who opened it. And they post on Facebook and they post their menu and they ask for suggestions for what other breakfast dishes might be attractive. Kidgery, I think would be a good one, anyway. And, um, but in doing that, bear in mind, you don't have to do it. It involves a certain amount of effort. I get it, you're busy running a restaurant. The fact that a pub or a café or a restaurant posts on Facebook regularly and is keen to promote itself on social media or Instagram or whatever is to some extent a form of effortful costly signaling. That isn't really true if you're Nestle or Coca-Cola. Okay? Yeah. Because the difference is if a student buys his fiancee a five hundred quid engagement

• 1:25:21Rory Sutherland?

  ring, it's costly signaling. If Rupert Murdoch does, it isn't. Yep.

• 1:25:27Rory Sutherland?

  And so we've got to remember that the cost is also proportionate to the, our perceived cost in terms of discretionary effort, what you might call discretionary effort or expense. And, you know, as I said, I mean, I think Facebook's a very, very good local advertising vehicle. I follow every single pub, café, you know, whatever, and I'm impressed by the ones who make an effort to do this really well.

• 1:25:52Rory Sutherland?

  Um, but that isn't the same if you're, you know, Giorgio Armani or if you're Nestle or if you're Coca-Cola. You need a different canvas in order to display.

• 1:26:05Rory Sutherland?

  Discretionary cost.

• 1:26:06Chris Williamson?

  I get that. I think what's particularly interesting for me, looking at the internet marketing world and what I get exposed to a lot of the time, is that the, this, moving slightly back to the discussion about data, there's this obsession with getting the data right, as opposed to necessarily making the message resonate with the audience. It's that the very specific kind of Russell Brunson click funnel, if you use this kind of copy with a countdown timer, then you've retargeted them with an upsell in three days via email, then if they don't click through on that, then you follow this particular thing down. To me, the, the art and the subtlety and the actual connection that is made between

• 1:26:48Chris Williamson?

  consumer and brand, that is being replaced with an algorithmic, um, logic puzzle. And at the end of that, there is particular formula, forget about the message, don't bother yourself with the creative. And then what you get out of the other side of that is successful business.

• 1:27:10Rory Sutherland?

  Now, interestingly, unfortunately, I haven't got it because I've got British Gas smart metering. I haven't got it on my current app. But there are ways in which I think a really impressive thing you can do is, um, just show you understand consumer psychology very well. So there's the effort, which, which often is partly data driven. But isn't there, I mean, one of the things I loved is the British Gas app has a little thing where you submit a meter reading. Now, most gas meters in the UK are kind of under the stairs, or they're in a weird cupboard, or a shed, or some other weird thing. And the person who designed that app, all credit to them, just added a little switch which turned the torch on.

• 1:27:48Chris Williamson?

  Flashlight on. I've got one of my EON one. Yeah.

• 1:27:50Rory Sutherland?

  EON do the same thing. Okay. Now, that sort of thing is just really smart and lovely because it shows, we didn't have to do this. No one would ever go, fucking thing didn't even have a torch. Well load of shit, right? Okay. No one in research would have said it would help if you had a torch. But someone thought, now, that's an example of discretionary effort, or discretionary, you know, that someone made the budget available and had the, and bothered to put enough attention into this to think, actually, they're going to be loads of cobwebs. It's going to be dark and musty and they can't see.

• 1:28:23Rory Sutherland?

  And we're back to designing for the disabled again, I suppose, in a funny kind of way.

• 1:28:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Rory Sutherland?

  But it's just, um, that there is this weird thing, which is, the other thing I think that I noticed in as a criticism of digital is there's not enough attention to given to what happens when things go wrong. So they optimize a fantasy version of the customer journey. And they don't think of what happens when that journey doesn't happen to plan.

• 1:28:50Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:28:51Rory Sutherland?

  So now, I, I hate criticizing John Does, because generally I love them and I get the stuff delivered to my local Waitrose and it's fa- it's fabulous and, you know, uh, they, they, they do wonderful advertising. It's a great brand. It's a partnership. I love it. But I ordered a Dyson from, uh, John Does and it was supposed to be delivered the next day at Waitrose. And I never got a text saying it had turned up, but after about two days, it said it'll be dispatched and it'll arrive tomorrow. So I assumed it must have been there. So I went in and they said,

• 1:29:21Rory Sutherland?

  no, it seems to have disappeared. I don't know where the one of the drive me, but the Dyson disappeared. Okay. Now, they must have known that it hadn't, or they must have had the data to know that it hadn't arrived. Okay. So a bit of me, I rang them up and I said, why do I have to, they said, what you have to do is reorder, we'll refund you and you, you reorder and we'll send you another one. I said, why is this my problem? Okay. Because you should have noticed that it didn't arrive. You should have texted me to say, there's been a delay. You should have canceled that first order, sent out the second one and said, don't worry, it'll be there tomorrow. I wouldn't have even noticed because I wasn't, you know, I wasn't that desperate to have the thing.

• 1:30:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. Well, you know, right? I wouldn't have cared. Instead, I'm suddenly the second, this is where bureaucracies, I think, is so telling. The second something goes wrong, you find yourself in a spiraling nightmare of Kafkaesque, you know, total chaos.

• 1:30:21Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:21Rory Sutherland?

  Where there's nothing you can bloody do about it.

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:23Rory Sutherland?

  I did feel about that. Well, hold on. There should be a fucking algorithm that says, has it arrived? If no, forward to person.

• 1:30:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Rory Sutherland?

  Decide what to do.

• 1:30:32Chris Williamson?

  And it humanizes that, the company side, right?

• 1:30:36Rory Sutherland?

  If they'd said, if they'd run me up and said, look, we fucked up a bit.

• 1:30:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:39Rory Sutherland?

  Um, sorry about this, but it'll be, be with you tomorrow. I would have thought, what a great company.

• 1:30:44Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:30:44Rory Sutherland?

  You know, because you've actually taken an initiative and you're actually looking out for me.

• 1:30:51Rory Sutherland?

  And so I, I mean, I, I worry about all this stuff because I think there's this optimization thing, which is all based around a kind of fantasy of how the world's supposed to work. And in so many ways, A, the world doesn't work like that because shit happens and things go wrong.

• 1:31:08Rory Sutherland?

  And I wonder that when tech people are designing, they're looking for this naive Nirvana situation, which you can demonstrate, in which when it works to plan, looks really cool. But in many cases, they may be optimizing completely the wrong thing. So they may be obsessed with getting the thing there in one day rather than two. Whereas what I really want is just, you know, is actually really regular tracking to tell me.

• 1:31:33Chris Williamson?

  I just want to know when it's there, yeah.

• 1:31:34Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, that maybe what they're trying to do is actually optimizing what seems to be the, what might be the sort of operations element of optimization, not the psychological element of optimization. And then you get back to all my shit about trains, saying the point that actually making trains faster is relatively of secondary importance for many train journeys in the UK. Because you can now work on the train. Actually, the most important train technology in the last 20 years is wifi plus a table. Because if you've got wifi and a table, I mean, genuinely, if you ever invite me to speak in Newcastle, I always say to my P A, if it's in Newcastle, Liverpool, Manchester, basically say yes. She goes, well, it's an actuarial conference. What the hell are you going there for?

• 1:32:19Rory Sutherland?

  You know, I'm, you know. And I go, yeah, but I get four hours on a train, which is the most productive I'm going to be all week.

• 1:32:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're insulated in this hermetically sealed environment. No one's bothering you. You've got good wifi.

• 1:32:30Rory Sutherland?

  No one's really bothering you. They might bring me a bit of tea and coffee and.

• 1:32:33Chris Williamson?

  Laughing.

• 1:32:34Rory Sutherland?

  And so what's so interesting is that to some extent, every time you attach these kind of rational metrics to what you're trying to do, you pay a very large creative opportunity cost because maybe the thing you'll really need to optimize isn't actually numerically expressible. It's not, it's not a metric, it's a feeling.

• 1:32:54Chris Williamson?

  How would you scale that then?

• 1:32:58Rory Sutherland?

  I think what you do need is you do need just behavioural science to go in and say, we have quite a lot of evidence to show that A, people don't know what they want. They don't, they can't say what they want. But we have quite a lot of evidence about people's emotional state that they care actually much more than they think about X and much less than they think about Y. And therefore, if you optimise either what consumers say they want, or what economic logic seems to dictate, you might be missing where the real, where the real money shot is in this activity.

• 1:33:35Chris Williamson?

  I totally get it. Rory, today's been absolutely fantastic. I'm right in saying that within the next couple of months, you're going to have a book coming out, is that correct?

• 1:33:44Rory Sutherland?

  Three or four, it's called Alchemy, The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. And it's basically a plea for the world to abandon this need that everything needs a rational justification before we try it. In the real world, bonkers shit works and very logical things fail.

• 1:34:06Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:34:06Rory Sutherland?

  And we've just got to face, we've just got to face up to that.

• 1:34:08Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think we've got a good list of them that we've gone through today. So hopefully, if I can get a hold of you around about when the book comes out, I'd love to have you back on again. I'm sure that lots of the listeners will have absolutely enjoyed today's, today's episode. I really appreciate your time.

• 1:34:21Rory Sutherland?

  It's been a pleasure speaking to you. And the next time you're in London, or next time I may be in Newcastle on one of these train trips, I'd love to catch up.

• 1:34:29Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:34:29Rory Sutherland?

  Fantastic.

• 1:34:30Chris Williamson?

  Rory, thank you so much for your time.

• 1:34:32Rory Sutherland?

  It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much indeed.