19 Of Human Behaviour's Weirdest Quirks - Rory Sutherland - #587

Rory Sutherland is one of the world's leading consumer behaviour experts, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising and an author. Humans are an odd animal. Our behaviour sometimes makes very little sense, but when we exchange our money for products it can make even less sense. Thankfully Rory has spent decades studying the most fascinating parts of consumer psychology and today gives us some insights. Expect to learn why having a Japanese toilet might change your life, why I've become addicted to first class airline cabin reviews, how ChatGPT will impact the marketing world, how to increase your luck in life, whether vaping should be banned, why VR hasn't taken off, if I'm buying McDonald's grease-proof gaming chair and much more... Sponsors: Get the Whoop 4.0 for free and get your first month for free at http://join.whoop.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Go to my sponsor https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom for 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp and get matched with a therapist who will listen and help Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (00:26) Rory’s Thoughts on Liquid Death & Reverse Branding (05:04) Advancing the Ways We Watch Television (16:10) Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (20:20) Why Isn’t VR More Popular? (27:29) A New, Supersonic Jet to Replace the Concorde (35:43) ChatGPT’s Impact on Advertising (50:26) Rory’s New Purchases (1:01:01) The Current State of the Vaping Conversation (1:07:58) How to Increase Your Chances of Getting Lucky in Life (1:14:15) People No Longer Use Nuance (1:24:40) Why We Need to Stop Mono-Thinking (1:35:35) Typos that Turned Out to Be Successful (or Welsh) Extra Stuff: Buy Alchemy - https://amzn.to/3DyaBfo Follow Rory on Twitter - https://twitter.com/rorysutherland Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Episodes You Might Enjoy: This Is How To Master Your Life - David Goggins - #577: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Goggins⁠⁠⁠ How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs - Dr Jordan Peterson - #712: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Peterson⁠⁠⁠ The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain - Dr Andrew Huberman - #700: ⁠⁠⁠lnkfi.re/SN-Huberman⁠⁠ - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rory Sutherland?

  The gap between using a Japanese toilet and using a conventional toilet is roughly equivalent to the gap between using a conventional toilet and being in a bucket in prison. Okay, right, okay, that's roughly speaking, you know, the yawning sense of kind of reversion you feel when you go from using a Japanese toilet to a conventional one. It's barbaric, it's ridiculous, and it will just stop.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm drinking Liquid Death. Are you familiar with this, the can?

• 0:29Rory Sutherland?

  Yes.

• 0:30Chris Williamson?

  Can's water brand?

• 0:30Rory Sutherland?

  It's basically water. Is it sparkling water or still? I've never had it.

• 0:34Chris Williamson?

  This is sparkling, so the black can's sparkling and the white can is still.

• 0:38Rory Sutherland?

  Ah.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  I watched a very interesting advertisement, come analysis, that the founder put across, where he explained the branding strategy behind Liquid Death, calling something literally the opposite of what it is, having a very sort of unique brand position. It's got this skull on it there.

• 0:54Rory Sutherland?

  Yes.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts on Liquid Death?

• 0:58Rory Sutherland?

  What's interesting about it is that, funnily enough, A, something rather weird, is I pretty much dislike drinking water from a tap or any other shape or form. Weirdly, I quite like drinking water from a can, and I have no idea why that is. So I've started buying, drinking far more water than I did before. Now you can get it in canned form rather than bottle form. Actually, it's not quite true. I'm pretty happy drinking it from glass, but I don't like drinking water from plastic bottles.

• 1:30Chris Williamson?

  Do you know what my favourite brand of sparkling water is? Have you had Topo Chico before?

• 1:35Rory Sutherland?

  No, you'll have to, okay, you'll have to enlighten me on that.

• 1:37Chris Williamson?

  So it's Mexican sparkling water, and there is a carbonation grade, and I think a San Pellegrino is maybe at a 90-ish on this particular spectrum, and Topo Chico's a 140. So this thing just, it's like a fizzy battery. It just takes your face off.

• 1:58Rory Sutherland?

  It's insanely carbonated, yeah. Funny enough, the Germans have various sort of, often fairly cheap, sbrudelwassers, which are again insanely carbonated, which I've always really liked.

• 2:10Rory Sutherland?

  And...

• 2:12Rory Sutherland?

  It's generally quite interesting. There's a very good water, which funnily enough, you only seem to get now at Crown Plaza Hotels, which is a Welsh water, which I like very much as well, which I think is called, it's called something like Cambrian, but it isn't called that. But I think the idea, I mean, effectively, the branding will totally affect the experience because, you know, packaging affects taste.

• 2:43Chris Williamson?

  Is it conspicuous consumption, do you think, for an age where alcohol's less cool than it might be, it might have used to be?

• 2:52Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I mean, I like the sheer perversity of saying call something the opposite of what it really is. There was obviously a brand called Death Cigarettes back in the day in the early 90s, which was from the Ethical Tobacco Company, and they said, we're going to sell cigarettes, we're just not going to lie about them. And that was similar, that had a kind of black packaging and a skull on it. And, no, I mean, what is undoubtedly true is you can, I mean, you know, I mean, all alcoholic drinks brands know this, you know, that you're drinking imagery as much as you're drinking a drink. And, you know,

• 3:34Rory Sutherland?

  the associations are as powerful as the reality, essentially. And I haven't tried Liquid Death, I'll be intrigued to know what effect it has on me.

• 3:44Chris Williamson?

  Good quality. What's this? This is a 500ml as well, which is a nice sized can. I'll tell you what else I've been obsessed with recently. Have you watched first-class airplane cabin reviews on YouTube?

• 3:57Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I've watched quite a few of those.

• 3:59Chris Williamson?

  Why are they so compelling? What is it about them?

• 4:02Rory Sutherland?

  I don't know. It's, it's kind of interesting because...

• 4:09Rory Sutherland?

  In a way, when you think about it, an experience in an airline's first class is, other than the food, it's not all that fantastic, is it? Because you're still confined to a very small space. You have to share a toilet, okay? You know, you've got one seat to sit in. You can't actually, you know, I mean, some of the more elaborate cabins now, you have your own desk and a swivel chair and you just know what else, admittedly.

• 4:37Rory Sutherland?

  But it is surprisingly and weirdly interesting. I quite like the idea they have an Emirates, which is if you have a cabin in the middle, you have these windows which appear to be the windows of a plane, but in fact a video reproduction of what you would see if you were looking out of a window.

• 4:53Chris Williamson?

  No way. I haven't seen that yet.

• 4:56Rory Sutherland?

  That has interesting implications for, you know, airline design ultimately, because it's an interesting question, you know? It must be presumably cheaper and safer to build aircraft without windows, but you have to have windows to stop passengers going nuts. I did see once the most extraordinary thing, which was a, it was obviously a design project rather than a serious proposal, but it was effectively an airliner where, you know, more or less half the inside of the fuselage was video screens with, you know, effectively showing a picture of the exterior. So you almost felt you were travelling in a transparent plane.

• 5:35Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 5:36Rory Sutherland?

  Which would be almost magically weird, I suspect.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. That would make for, so I.

• 5:43Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, it does, it does. One of the interesting things actually is that 4K, for quite a lot of, for quite a lot of functions, 4K TV isn't that much better than HD. HD, I think most people can tell the difference between HD and standard definition. Certainly if you're in the United States, where the standard definition picture, which had fewer lines than the European picture, was particularly crap, actually. And, you know, American standard definition television was rubbish even compared to European standard definition TV. And HD is, you know, markedly better and clearer, particularly when it was playing something like text or data and that kind.

• 6:23Rory Sutherland?

  And 4K is quite interesting because it doesn't really make much difference if you're watching, let's say, soccer or football.

• 6:31Rory Sutherland?

  Because when you've got a lot of movement going on, A, I think there's a lot of blurring anyway, but actually your brain's doing most of the work. Your brain's effectively assembling the um the image from what information it has when things are moving very fast. So if you notice, whenever you go into a TV store and they have 4K or in extreme cases, 8K screens on display, it'll always show like a static close-up picture of an ant next to a blob of water or a flower.

• 6:58Chris Williamson?

  It's a jellyfish slowly moving in slow.

• 7:01Rory Sutherland?

  Very, very slowly moving or a night sky over, um, you know, imaginary city.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  Do you remember, do you remember when Joe Rogan first moved to Austin and he went into a studio that was this big red thing? It kind of looked like the inside of a flashlight. And the first few episodes that he released in this new studio, everybody was unhappy about it. They couldn't tell what was wrong, but they said, this is awful. We it it looks terrible and I can't work out why. It's because he was filming it in 60 frames per second. They'd moved there and they'd put it in 60 FPS instead of, I think, 25. And this, I learned this because this um YouTube channel did a great breakdown of what was wrong with it. And then they fixed it and switched it back to 25 or 30 perhaps. And the issue is that your eyes naturally see blur. So if you hold your hand up in front of your face and you wiggle it left and right, you actually do see this blur. You don't see every single frame of where your hand is.

• 7:51Rory Sutherland?

  No.

• 7:52Chris Williamson?

  And what that means is that 60 FPS is displaying a type of video that your eyes are not used to seeing in the real world, which is what makes it feel so artificial.

• 8:03Rory Sutherland?

  Ah, interesting, interesting. So um I wonder why, yeah, so nearly all TV is broadcast at 25, is it?

• 8:11Chris Williamson?

  25, yeah, 24.

• 8:13Rory Sutherland?

  Ah, interesting. Yeah, that that's that's fascinating. Obviously you have, you know, things like the the Mac, uh, the Apple Retina screen, where there's no point in making a screen that's uh any finer since we wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Um, what is interesting about 4K is that it does get close enough if you if you've got a reasonably slow-moving image. And there is that interesting, you know, hypothetical debate, um, uh, which is, you know.

• 8:43Rory Sutherland?

  Ultimately, either through virtual reality or just through really good streams, is there a perfectly acceptable form of virtual tourism? Now, I must admit, I'm glad you're a YouTube fanatic. Uh, the thing I always recommend people do is subscribe to YouTube Premium.

• 8:58Chris Williamson?

  Oh, Rory.

• 9:00Rory Sutherland?

  Almost before you subscribe to.

• 9:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. You are among friends here. I'm also.

• 9:05Rory Sutherland?

  And we must be on a tiny minority of people because I've got a friend at YouTube and I keep asking, how many people actually subscribe to Premium? And it's a pretty vanishingly small number. I did it, I think more or less by accident and it was practically the best thing that ever happened to me in life. And we're reaching a point, I think, where the volume of content on YouTube has become so vast that it's only, well, maybe it, maybe it's already happened, but it's only a smidgen away from becoming effectively Wikipedia with video.

• 9:38Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 9:38Rory Sutherland?

  In other words, it becomes so comprehensive, uh, this extraordinary kind of, um, assemblage of virtually every conceivable, um, uh, you know, uh, subject treated to on video, that you'll reach a point where effectively there'll be a film on everything.

• 9:57Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 9:58Rory Sutherland?

  Um, and, and I, the two things I really recommend with YouTube is I said, first of all, um, watch it on your telly, you know, because we, you know, we all have this very early memory of YouTube where it was all, you know, handheld, slightly pixelated, all a bit crap. And you, there was no point in watching it on TV because it would have, you know, effectively pixelated. And actually, you know, the vast majority of the content actually is, uh, if not professionally produced, it's, you know, sort of broadcast quality. And I do spend occasionally, one of the things I really love is really, really slow TV. So you get these 4K walking tours of Cebu in the Philippines, for example. You know, that was one of them.

• 10:40Rory Sutherland?

  And it's just someone with a 4K camera wandering around Cebu for an hour and a half. And it's surprisingly worthwhile, in fact. Um, uh, you know, that obviously, um.

• 10:53Rory Sutherland?

  One of my favourite ones is Virtual Rail Fan, which is basically an American YouTube channel, often live webcams for train spotters. And when I'm working at home, I leave this on in the background. And effectively, you just get a tiny amount of, if it's in a station, you'll get a tiny amount of background noise or cars driving past. And then you get on with your work. And then about every half hour, a train goes past, and you kind of take a break to stare at it for the seven minutes it takes to pass the screen.

• 11:23Chris Williamson?

  There's a guy that does city tours walking at night, and a lot of the time in rain. And there's something about that, which is oddly very, very therapeutic. I saw an article that I wanted to bring up, actually. Fifty percent of Americans watch content with subtitles most of the time. Fifty-five percent say it is harder to hear dialogue in shows and movies than it used to be. Nearly three in four respondents claimed muddled audio from their content. Sixty-one percent use them when accents are difficult to understand. Twenty-nine percent prefer to watch their content at home quietly, leaving subtitles on so as not to disturb their roommates or family. And twenty-seven percent of Americans rely on subtitles to keep them focused on what they are watching, while juggling the

• 12:08Chris Williamson?

  distractions of multiple screens, children, pets, work, the news, and more.

• 12:13Rory Sutherland?

  So interestingly, if you go back to the 1970s, not that they broadcast many of them, but Americans would impose subtitles on Australian content in particular. Which seems, you know, I think if I've got this right, Prisoner's Prisoner Cell Blockage was the first Australian sort of soap, if you can call it that, to be broadcast in the US without subtitles.

• 12:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, you'll always see this, even in the UK, especially for us, because we have such a panoply of different accents that you could get stuck into. What I always find hilarious is when they hard code subs onto certain people, perhaps in a documentary or whatever. The policeman, there's no subtitles, but the criminal with a very strong Scouse accent, he's been forced to have this because they've just made a decision, like, look, no one is going to be able, the cohort of people that can understand this man is like five. So we're just going to put them on the screen for everybody.

• 13:11Rory Sutherland?

  So funnily enough, it's another of my friends who also has YouTube Premium, who was one of the first to point out that actually subtitles have...

• 13:21Rory Sutherland?

  Are generally preferable in all kinds of ways and is it and of course Brits got used to it probably with Scandi drama unless you're into French art house or something. It was probably Scandi drama that really got Brits into subtitle watching. It's it does force you to pay attention. It stops you dozing off because you have to look at the screen to know what's going on. I find the diction and enunciation of a lot of modern actors pretty poor. You know, I mean, you you one thing you can say what you like about Cary Grant, but he didn't exactly mumble. You know what I mean? I mean, you know, it was OK, it was a bizarre hybrid of a Bristolian, English and American accents. You know, we can probably all accept that.

• 14:03Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, the one one thing that Brits are very talented at as linguists, and it's through necessity, is being able to understand English spoken in a very wide range of accents. So we're always said to be very bad at languages. Well, yes and no. I mean, one thing we're pretty good at is being being able to understand more or less anybody speaking English. And it's partly because our own regional accents give us practice. The one you'll love, if you're from the northeast, is that the elder Stevenson, inventor of the steam locomotive, had such a strong Geordie accent that when he presented the locomotive in London, he was accompanied by an interpreter.

• 14:42Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 14:43Rory Sutherland?

  So you actually have, yeah. And what was it? I'm just trying to remember. There was James and there was the elder one, the father. I mean, I think I think the father sent, you know, the son to a lot of fancy schools was presumably he'd made enough money by then. But the elder Stevenson would apparently go to London for demonstrations and go, right, you're a great boy, you're a bastard and fuck you know. And then they go, what Mr. Stevenson wants to say is that the addition of a boiler to the locomotive will facilitate the air, right? Right? I always think it's just utterly fantastic.

• 15:16Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 15:16Rory Sutherland?

  Very interesting, actually, when you think about it, that most, I was making a joke suggestion for the electric car the other day, which is to say that the actually the internal combustion engine is unnatural and evil because it's the only form of motive power not invented in the UK.

• 15:33Chris Williamson?

  Ah, yes.

• 15:34Rory Sutherland?

  So that both diesel and the petrol engine are basically continental inventions. Pretty much everything else, electric motor, probably Faraday, stirling engine, steam engine, watt, et cetera. And what's quite interesting is actually that, and so many of these things were kind of invented, I mean, watt being one obvious case, Faraday himself to a degree, although he was, he became an assistant to Humphry Davy, but they're actually uneducated people, which is kind of interesting. Um, you know, they were tinkerers and fiddlers in, you know, and they had access to the right tinkering equipment.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Have you read Winston Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare?

• 16:16Rory Sutherland?

  I've, I've heard of it, but tell me more.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  This is, if I could give you a single book that I think is the most Rory book that I've read over the last 12 months, this would be it. So, um, in the build up to the beginning of World War Two, a bunch of bigwigs in the UK government realised that war seems to be afoot and they realised that we are woefully

• 16:37Chris Williamson?

  unprepared to be able to fight a war with this level of brutality. And the reason that he calls it ungentlemanly warfare is that there was a point where guerrilla warfare, sabotage of key bridges and, and stuff was seen as being such an uncouth military strategy that a British military general was actually quoted as saying, if this is what it takes to win the war, I'm prepared to lose. He basically saw that he had this sort of stiff up a lip type of discipline with regards to the way that.

• 17:07Rory Sutherland?

  It's absolutely okay to fight combatants. But to crap people's general quality or it was sort of crop burning.

• 17:15Chris Williamson?

  Correct, would be too much. So what they did, the reason that the tinkerer thing got me onto this was that he, they try and create this web of miscreants, basically. So this garage inventor who'd created a three stories high caravan that was only able to go across certain roads because of the bridge clearance he needed, he made the world's first limpet mine. So the limpet mine that was deposited into a sea and would then attach with a magnet and would then blow up U-boats and stuff. And the way that they did it was so cottage industry. This is why you love it. So for instance, they needed to find a primer that would dissolve at the exact right rate.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  And the solution that they came up to, having gone through everything, was aniseed seed balls. So the aniseed sweets that you would have. And the reason they needed that, they needed something to separate out the two electrical contacts so it wouldn't fire too quickly, it wouldn't fire too slowly. And they tried everything. They also tried-

• 18:13Rory Sutherland?

  And the aniseed ball was perfect, was it? Because in salt water it would be what, sort of a number of minutes?

• 18:18Chris Williamson?

  Yep, thirty, thirty minutes exactly, let's say, for this particular type. So, and then they wrapped it, they wrapped the entire thing to make sure that this aniseed ball didn't start to dissolve too quickly in condoms. And I can't remember where it was that they were doing this. It was maybe in, let's say it was in like Sussex or something like that, some little village in Sussex. And the guy that wrote the book says, it's unclear whether or not there was an increase in the number of children born nine months later after this, the town of Sussex noticed that every single condom was being bought out. Yeah, because they were trying to do it subversively. They needed to go into little village stores and buy. But yeah, that's, that's fantastic. And the tinkering thing makes a lot of sense as well.

• 18:56Rory Sutherland?

  But the gentleman warfare thing is interesting because one of my sort of favourite characters, I think, I'm fairly sure it was Admiral Coburn, who almost started the War of 1812 for the United States. And he was part of the group which, along with, you know, a bunch of Canadians as well, who burned the White House down, which is why it's the White House to cover the smoke damage and so on.

• 19:23Chris Williamson?

  Oh, it wasn't the White House before?

• 19:25Rory Sutherland?

  I've got a vague idea that it was painted white thereafter because of smoke damage, but I'll have to double check on this. But he was certainly the guy who burnt the Senate and the Capitol down in this war of 1812. And he was a kind of libertarian military man who was absolutely insistent that you could you could damage national property because it was, you know, the property of the seditious Yankee state, but you must not damage private property. And he only made one exception. There was a newspaper that was very rude about him. And I think he just broke into the newspaper and destroyed all their letter

• 20:06Rory Sutherland?

  K's so they couldn't write about him. That was the case. But his troops were under strict instructions, you know, town halls, that's fine, you can burn those down. But if it's private property, you don't touch it. Which is kind of quite interesting.

• 20:19Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think, you mentioned earlier on about VR. Why do you think that VR is not necessarily taken off mainstream adoption the way that some people might have predicted?

• 20:28Rory Sutherland?

  Well, there's also a strange one, which is why we don't use computers wearing goggles as well. I mean, just regardless of any 3D-ness, even in 2D, you could presumably have a fantastic and enormous screen as an interface, you know, an interface which possibly had, you know, but I mean, okay, we need to see the keyboard, I guess, would touch typists be better off? But it always strikes me as strange that just watching a film with using goggles, which of course you can do on Oculus device or Metta devices now, isn't more popular because it's a very cheap way of getting a huge screen in a way. And, okay, some of

• 21:13Rory Sutherland?

  it seems to be sort of slight feelings of vertigo or sickness. And I'm not sure they've actually tracked that. There are certainly a large number of cases where I wouldn't use it. So I probably feel pretty comfortable using VR goggles on a plane, but not on a train. Because on a train, I'd be convinced that either someone was going to nick my briefcase, or that I might be stabbed from behind, you know, that you'd actually just, if you think about it, I mean, the whole thing's very interesting on the headphones question.

• 21:45Rory Sutherland?

  Because I bought before Christmas, as a pure experiment, these bone conducting headphones, which you don't wear over your ear at all. I can't wear in-ear headphones. I genuinely, whether it's the shape of my ears, just age, habits, it just strikes me as completely bizarre, you know. And I've struggled with in-ear headphones, and I've bought them, and I've tried different sizes of the sort of butt plug device and so on, right, you know. But I can't make them work. And also, on a plane, for example, I'm terrified they'll just fall out, get trapped in the seat mechanism, and, you know, the whole thing will be a disaster. And so I'm always a big fan of over-the-air headphones and noise-canceling headphones,

• 22:28Rory Sutherland?

  which work for me very well, as you can see. But these bone conductings are interesting because they don't actually cover your ears at all. And so your ability to hear things in the outer world is, well, it's not completely unimpeded because obviously you have a lot of noise coming from something else. But they were intended for joggers, but actually they're also brilliant for old people with hearing loss because the sound goes straight to your, effectively straight in through your cheekbones. And so if your ears have become generally damaged through, you know, what you might call the subtle, what is it, the anvil and the stirrup and so forth. If they've become a bit clogged up and less flexible,

• 23:09Rory Sutherland?

  it bypasses that part of your ear which has been damaged and kind of goes straight into sensation. Now, my experience with bone conducting headphones, and I think Which magazine's review kind of bears this out, is that for music, it's a bit shit still. I mean, I have to say, it's not brilliant.

• 23:27Chris Williamson?

  The fidelity is just not there?

• 23:28Rory Sutherland?

  It's the, I suppose the sort of warmth, the timbre, it's just not there. It's missing something. I mean, you can hear all the lyrics, you can enjoy it to an extent, but it doesn't really do it. But for spoken content, particularly podcasts, I'd say it's absolutely brilliant.

• 23:49Rory Sutherland?

  You know, I I find it, because one of the things is, A, you can walk around wearing these things for ages because they just hook over your ears, okay, and then there's a little thing which makes very mild pressure against your cheek. So, um, for answering phone calls, having a phone call, you can forget you're wearing these things. Now, that's not true of over the ear headphones where your ears will overheat, and you also have that mild sense of disorientation. Yeah, I'm I'm I do see young people walking around with noise cancelling headphones, or as I call them to the fury of my wife cancelling headphones. Um, but but I, you know, I see people walking around. I couldn't do it myself, I think,

• 24:32Rory Sutherland?

  because I'd I'd feel some sort of loss of, almost a loss of sort of balance. In other words, they're they're too immersive in that sense. So these bone conducting things are definitely part of the solution, you know. If you wanted to just wander around London listening to a podcast without getting hit by a van, um, I have to say they're a pretty good idea. And actually, what's a bit tragic is, of course, because of that whole thing of traffic and awareness, they're being marketed to young joggers, when I would say that 50% of the market is actually people over 50.

• 25:04Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:05Rory Sutherland?

  You know, whose hearing just isn't quite so good.

• 25:08Chris Williamson?

  Am I making this up, or about 20 years ago, was there a brand of lollipop that was released for kids that came attached to something that looked a lot like the base of a electric toothbrush, and it would play a song while you sucked on the lollipop by going through the lollipop in terms of vibration? I swear that I'm not making this up in my mind. If it's not the case, though, imagine this. Let's say that you need to get kids to brush their teeth, and they need to use an electric toothbrush. There must be a way that you could induct a song as opposed to just the vibrations of the actual toothbrush through the mouth of the child, so that they would actually enjoy the one minute and 20 seconds, or however long an infant needs to brush its teeth.

• 25:51Rory Sutherland?

  I think two two minutes, I think, might be the optimal time for an electric toothbrush.

• 25:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, a two minute long song, and maybe they could, you know, dance around while they're listening to it. I don't know. That seems like a a potentially cool solution if you could somehow blend both of these technologies together.

• 26:06Rory Sutherland?

  Because they they must be very closely linked, because when you think about it, when you are cleaning your teeth, particularly with an electric toothbrush. Is impossible to hear anything on the radio, anything that's being said to you. Yeah. So, so in other words, you know, the vibration must be effectively drowning out all use of your ears.

• 26:23Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 26:23Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, I, I love, I love the Japanese road organ, which you probably know of, which is a series of kind of um uh corrugated strips on the road.

• 26:34Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yes.

• 26:38Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly. If you drive at the legal speed, it plays a nice tune.

• 26:42Chris Williamson?

  And if you drive too quickly, presumably it's, it's absolutely awful.

• 26:46Rory Sutherland?

  So if you imagine lots of, uh, uh, those of you who know the southwestern quadrant of the M twenty three, M twenty five, which is this most appalling stretch of ribbed concrete still, which was, which was never tarmacled. And where you have to drive along, funnily enough, that actually has a rather negative, rather negative effect because the vibration is less unpleasant the faster you go.

• 27:08Rory Sutherland?

  Really well, it's just to make that, uh, just to make that stretch of the M twenty five tolerable. It's a bitter and cobbum.

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, but the Japanese one is quite sensible because it's, it's various little different vibrations, which plays a cutie little tune in terms of your tyre noise, it provide, and the tune only sounds only good if you're travelling at the legal speed.

• 27:29Chris Williamson?

  Have you heard about this new jet that's going to come and basically replace what Concorde would have been? So a transatlantic supersonic jet that's going to get people across from New York to London in no time at all?

• 27:42Rory Sutherland?

  It's an interesting one, isn't it? I mean, uh, it's still, by the way, there are still weird problems that always struck me with supersonic travel.

• 27:53Rory Sutherland?

  One of which is that unless you can actually make it work across land and on a wide variety of routes,

• 28:04Rory Sutherland?

  it isn't that big a time saving to any one given individual. You know, unless you, you know, unless you cross the Atlantic, you know, practically weekly.

• 28:14Rory Sutherland?

  So unless you can actually create a network of supersonic jets rather than just one route. But the other thing that always strikes me as fundamentally flawed with the idea is the eastbound leg.

• 28:27Rory Sutherland?

  Because everybody goes Concorde, absolutely marvelous. You used to wake up in New York before you'd taken off in London, which was true. You could leave London at 10 o'clock and you'd basically arrive in New York at something like 8:45 in time for breakfast.

• 28:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, Phil Collins once played Live Aid in the UK and then flew to the US and played the same time slot, I think.

• 28:49Rory Sutherland?

  You're right. I think that's right. Yeah, that would have been, yeah. And the interesting thing there, though, is that eastbound, it really doesn't work. Because the best way to, there are only, I think there are only about three or four day flights between New York and London. The airlines don't like them because you have a plane sitting on the tarmac overnight, not making any money. Okay, so the airlines really don't like day flights. I think they just do it out of necessity with what you might call the last flight of the day to land. And the interesting problem is that, if you think about it, I think Concorde's return flights, let me get this right, I've got a vague idea, there was one which, where you

• 29:33Rory Sutherland?

  left at about nine in the morning and it landed at about five. And I might have the idea there was another that landed that went at 11 in the morning, was there one that went at seven in the morning? There were two flights that used to come in. I always remember there was one around about the sort of five, five o'clock, five thirty, six. It would land in Heathrow and you'd hear it coming over London.

• 29:55Rory Sutherland?

  But that's a singularly useless return journey because A, you've got to have a totally pointless night in a hotel where you get up really early and have to get to JFK by, I don't know, seven something or other, right?

• 30:09Rory Sutherland?

  And then effectively, you'd lose a complete day while you're awake flying back.

• 30:18Rory Sutherland?

  And most people I would have thought for the return leg would have preferred to have left the evening before on a 10 o'clock flight and woken up the following morning in London.

• 30:28Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, especially if you're not staying in London. Once you arrive there, if you're going on somewhere from London, you're going to have to probably get a hotel in London.

• 30:36Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly. Yeah. So you're absolutely right. So the, what would you say? The onward flight. Okay. You know, you might have missed the last flight to Milan or whatever it might have been, but I did to that. So there are some, it always strikes me that everybody always bigged up the glories of Concorde going east to west, which seemed to me fairly, I agree, is there's something rather wonderful about leaving London in the morning and having a full day in New York. But at the same time, I suppose you can still do, I suppose you can still, you can still kind of leave London fairly early and get into New York at, what would it be noon?

• 31:17Chris Williamson?

  Didn't they need to reinforce runways? Wasn't there an issue with runways that the tyres were sinking into them because of the pace that, or the weight perhaps?

• 31:28Rory Sutherland?

  It was a, it was a very high landing speed, if I'm right. I'm fairly sure that it landed at a much faster speed than most other planes did.

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I was talking to a friend who is a, he was doing civil engineering at uni and he was telling me about the project was remapping Newcastle's International Airport. And one of the things that they needed to do is you need to, your planes that are allowed to land are limited by width, length, density of the tarmac and concrete underneath. There's a whole bunch of things that actually restrict the type of planes that are able to land. So I imagine that somewhere at Heathrow, there must still be a Concorde compatible, but slightly aged runway, perhaps?

• 32:11Rory Sutherland?

  I think, I think the main runway at Heathrow would probably be reinforced to that level, given the volume of traffic it takes.

• 32:17Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 32:19Rory Sutherland?

  I know that the the the space shuttle had um obviously a number of emergency runways around the world uh where it could land. And you also get this slightly weird thing where you get freakishly long runways where you don't expect them in places like, I think, St. Morgan, which is Newquay Airport. Uh has an incredibly long runway because it was originally a military airc- uh airport.

• 32:43Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 32:44Rory Sutherland?

  Um I've got a big idea that here here, Manstone in Kent, the runway is the runway is incredibly long. And so I know the space shuttle had to have this various kind of, there was this worldwide network of places it could land in an emergency. It never actually, I don't think it ever took advantage of any of them. Um because with the space shuttle, when things went wrong, they went really wrong.

• 33:07Chris Williamson?

  Yes, the emergency landing is not the biggest.

• 33:09Rory Sutherland?

  The emergency landing was never never an issue.

• 33:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 33:12Rory Sutherland?

  Um but no, I mean, I mean, the other thi- the other thing in a sense is that um the time saving is not quite as pronounced with um supersonic flight as you might hope. Si- uh and it doesn't work either if there's no reliable way of getting to the airport on time. And if if JFK doesn't build a train to the airport, you basically have to leave two, you know, two and a half hours before your flight to be confident of getting there. Okay, that's one problem. And then the amount of time now, obviously with the Concorde, they reduced the amount of time you had to spend dicking around at the airport to some degree and the amount of time you had to spend dicking around at arrivals. I know, I don't think you went through the standard US immigration procedure because

• 33:56Rory Sutherland?

  imagine how maddening that would be to go on the Concorde for, you know, pay a fortune to go on the Concorde and then to be detained in an immigration queue for two hours. So they did at least cut down other parts of the journey as well as the parts in flight. But I mean, you know, the the pain of getting to an airport really adds three hours to the beginning of any long haul flight, unless you live spectacularly close to Heathrow and you're happy really dicing it.

• 34:23Chris Williamson?

  Tell you what, have you ever done the journey to America through Dublin, where you immigrate into America in Ireland?

• 34:32Rory Sutherland?

  Well, I've done I've done the equivalent, which was the which still is actually, the British Airways flight from London City, where you land in Shannon to refuel, you clear immigration in Shannon, and then you do an onboard flight.

• 34:43Chris Williamson?

  Where's Shannon?

• 34:44Rory Sutherland?

  It's west coast of Ireland. It's actually very beautiful. I mean, it's unbelievably, and it's you come in right next to the River Shannon, and it's unbelievably green and lovely. The reason is that the seven five seven couldn't take off from London City with a completely full fuel load. And so what they did is they combined, if you like, they made a virtue out of necessity, which is they said, okay, we'll take off with a partial fuel load. It was business class only seating. It still exists. There's one flight a day, I think, or they may have killed it under Covid. London City, and then you you you land in Shannon while they're refueling the plane,

• 35:25Rory Sutherland?

  or rather topping the the plane up with fuel to the full load in Shannon. You then clear US immigration, which you can do in Dublin, Shannon, and Knock, and if you, you know, wherever else. And then then when when you arrive in New York, you basically walk straight out.

• 35:40Chris Williamson?

  It's an internal flight, yeah, it's so wild.

• 35:42Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 35:43Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about ChatGPT and how it's going to impact advertising and the behavioural science world?

• 35:51Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, God.

• 35:57Rory Sutherland?

  At some level, it's it is unbelievably impressive, okay? In that it kind of passes a sort of Turing test, doesn't it? In that you wouldn't know it wasn't written by a human. And, you know, in some of its things, like, you know, mimicking other writers and so on, it, you know, it's not fabulous, but it doesn't do an atrocious job by any means. You know, Bob Dylan song lyrics, or P G Wodehouse, or whatever else you try and get it to emulate. But.

• 36:30Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, no, how would I describe it? I, uh, one alarming facet it had, which is that um, a colleague of mine in New York called Chris Graves, and he's made a big scene about this on LinkedIn. He asked it to explain a couple of cognitive biases in the social science literature uh, around human behavior.

• 36:55Rory Sutherland?

  And ChatGPT came up with an extremely good and intelligent description of what these biases are. And he said, well, that's handy. You seem to know a lot about this. Please can you cite academic sources? This is when it got really weird. It made up academic papers that don't exist.

• 37:14Rory Sutherland?

  It just took a few academics to, some of whom had published in the field and some of whom hadn't. And it somehow, instead of saying, okay, here are the reliable sources from which I derive my knowledge of, uh, you know, human psychological biases. It's just said, okay, what, what do citations look like? What, what, what do um, academic references look like? Um, I will create a plausible version of these. And in the process, it effectively invented completely non-existent academic papers. Which, which was, when you think about it, is really weird. What do you think it's doing? So. But cheating, I think. I think it's, you know, it's essentially suggests that it doesn't know what the truth is.

• 37:59Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, in a funny kind of way, and it merely goes, how can I say this in a way that looks plausible? I mean, I mean. It could. Uh, I mean, you know, two or three of the academics cited in these papers, which they'd never written, um, were actually social science academics. In one case, it was a bit weird because the person seemed to be an expert on magnetic resonance, nothing to do with social science at all. But it's not safe. It's interesting. And to use it as a curiosity seems absolutely fair, but equally it's not totally safe.

• 38:34Chris Williamson?

  I read an article that was very interesting and said that the prediction, this particular author's prediction was that ChatGPT will become the biggest search engine in the world. Because what you're doing when you go to Google is you're looking for an existing article to be discovered by Google that will give you an answer to the question that you're posing, whereas what you do when you go to ChatGPT is to just get the answer directly. So you say, I want to make a Manhattan cocktail and Google would bring you up 400 million different results from blogs explaining what a Manhattan cocktail is, whereas you type in the actual query to ChatGPT. Now, one of the problems here is that if there are biases, if there are some sort of predisposition, if it's been trained on a particular type of language,

• 39:20Chris Williamson?

  you're going to potentially impact because there's no crowdsourcing, right? It just gives you a single answer. So yeah, that's a concern as well.

• 39:31Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I mean, that, you know, well, you know, it's very heavily reliant on Wikipedia. And I personally find Wikipedia pretty okay, but a lot of people accuse it of political bias.

• 39:45Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, it was interesting in a sense in that I didn't write my own Wikipedia page, someone else did. But for various reasons, I mean,

• 39:57Rory Sutherland?

  it was very, very difficult getting a Wikipedia page because once you work in advertising, there are a load of people who basically assume that anybody working in advertising is doing this for reasons of self-publicity. And so people who have no idea who I was, they were, I think, Chinese or Japanese or something of that kind. You know, somebody wrote a page for me and then it kept getting deleted.

• 40:21Rory Sutherland?

  And the person will go, this just looks like advertising to me. Well, and that was partly because I work in advertising, so very obviously. And it, you know, you can argue that, you know, I don't know how impartial Wikipedia is politically. It doesn't seem atrocious to me. I mean, it doesn't seem nakedly biased. But it would surprise me equally if the people who are the most active Wikipedia contributors or editors are a realistic cross section of society.

• 40:54Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 40:55Rory Sutherland?

  It takes a pretty damn weird, it takes a pretty damn weird person to want to do that, to be absolutely honest.

• 41:01Chris Williamson?

  Very correct. I saw a visualization of the difference between GPT three and GPT four. And the amount-

• 41:10Rory Sutherland?

  GPT four is the one that's not yet released, is it?

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not, it's not out yet. However, apparently GPT four is going to be able to write a 60,000 word book from a single prompt in less than a minute because of the amount of data that it's being trained on. It's some obscene amount of data.

• 41:30Rory Sutherland?

  And they're too frightened to release it, is that right?

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  Not ready yet. Not ready. I think it'll still be being, still be being trained.

• 41:38Rory Sutherland?

  I've heard, I've heard a contrarian view, which it isn't actually set to replace the search engine. The proper place where this belongs is kind of inside Microsoft Office.

• 41:49Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 41:50Rory Sutherland?

  Well, you have people who, I suppose the idea is you have people who have work to do. And you could say, okay, if you could actually talk to, because what, what has to say actually, for all its faults, its comprehension is very good, isn't it?

• 42:07Rory Sutherland?

  Its level of comprehension of a question or of a request is remarkably good compared to Alexa, for example. I haven't yet tried it on banal things like train times, which always strikes me as one of the weirdest Alexa failings. That you can't say, can you tell me the, the times of the next trains from this station to somewhere else?

• 42:31Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's it. Or how long is it going to take me to get to this particular-

• 42:35Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah. I don't know, in fact, because, I mean, the interesting question is-

• 42:42Rory Sutherland?

  Because there are two, in a sense, there are two components to it. There's the output, which is very interesting in terms of being grammatically written with what has to be said is a remarkably low, low level of total garbage. Okay. Um, well, except in that even when these academic papers were fake, the whole reply looked plausible. Okay. But its comprehension of the question does seem pretty impressive to me.

• 43:14Chris Williamson?

  A tool that a friend I was out for dinner with last night uses it for is if he writes quite advanced nutritional advice and he puts his entire blog post or whatever into it and says, please rewrite this at the third grade reading level. So he uses it to dumb down very complex, technical talk. And apparently that is very, very successful. I haven't tried that, but.

• 43:40Rory Sutherland?

  So I would, if you asked it to, we all know that thing PowerPoint Shakespeare.

• 43:47Rory Sutherland?

  But if you asked it to take something you'd written as an argument and to condense it into PowerPoint, certainly somebody else sent me the thing where they'd asked me to ask ChatGPT to summarize, you know, my books or work or something. And it did a pretty damn good job, I have to say. And then there's the second question, which is, you know, are we nearing a point where the speech interface, or at least we actually, we're typing four sentences, to some extent replaces what you might call the push button, point and click interface?

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Everything would just be speech commands.

• 44:29Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah. So, I mean, it is interesting in that, okay.

• 44:35Rory Sutherland?

  One of the things that's a sort of interesting finding, and I'm not quite sure what the explanation is. I think there are multiple reasons, but in customer service, for example.

• 44:46Rory Sutherland?

  Even though live chat ordinarily slower than speech. Okay. Okay, sorry, are you back on? Can you hear me?

• 44:56Chris Williamson?

  I can, yep.

• 44:58Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, for some weird reason, it's it's bit, okay, hold on. Uh, let me try this. I I need to get back onto the headphones. Why does it drop the headphones?

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  I think you might have poked it with your hand.

• 45:08Rory Sutherland?

  Ah, shit. Okay, well, don't worry. Um, uh, people, people weirdly really, really like, um.

• 45:18Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, people really, really like. What the hell is going on here? Um, hold the the the snapshots there, Sweden. Uh, damn, I will never mind. Okay. Um, people really like live chat as a form of customer service.

• 45:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:31Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, the way you make it work economically is the people who are doing the live chat. Both use sort of boilerplate answers, which they can just cut and paste in many cases. They don't have to type the whole thing from scratch. And they're also handling three customers simultaneously.

• 45:49Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, which is how you make it work economically, but it's much, much slower than a spoken phone call. And yet the levels of customer satisfaction, even though it's slower, are much, much higher.

• 45:59Chris Williamson?

  Is that because you can do something else whilst you're chatting to them?

• 46:03Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I I think I think there are probably multiple reasons. A, I suppose, if they have to pass you on to somebody else. Uh, the, you know, the transcript can get passed on to the next person. So you don't have that infuriating thing of having to repeat yourself.

• 46:19Rory Sutherland?

  That must be part of it. There is an interesting question, which is, are people actually happier with, you know? We obviously defaulted to this point and click interface. Uh, for a time when it was much, much faster and pleasanter and gave us an illusion of control. Whereas one of the things that makes voice interfaces absolutely hopeless is when. You know, I mean, Alexa is by no mean, you know, I mean, for example, local train times. Um, uh, in voice, uh, my local station from which I nearly was traveling to London is called Oxford. Which is spelled O T F O R D. Well, I mean, forget about asking about trains from Oxford, because nine times out of 10, you'll get a list of trains going to Didcot from Oxford. Um.

• 47:02Rory Sutherland?

  But there is, there is, there is an element where if the voice or text perception was good enough and didn't generate absolutely nonsensical responses, you know, or responses that were totally blind to context, like the time when I used, might have been Google in this case, I was driving home from work and I wanted pharmacies that were currently open, and it gave me a list of pharmacies in Atlanta, Georgia, which were indeed currently open, but were a limited use to me. Okay. And so there may be, I suppose, you know,

• 47:40Rory Sutherland?

  there may be a kind of component where, where strangely, we go back to command prompts with our interaction with, with computers. We're actually just using spoken language or typed language is so much easier than going through some weird routine of button pressing and menu pointing.

• 48:01Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether there's a concern about the amount of control that people have. So we've spoken about this on the show before, where someone would much rather be killed by a person driving than injured by an automatic driving vehicle. Because there's just something, if you were to put a vocal prompt into some sort of word processor or some sort of computer, and it got it wrong, you would feel so aggrieved, you would feel completely hard done by. If you'd meant it to order from this particular restaurant and it ordered from somewhere else. Whereas if you pressed the button, at least you feel culpable for it. And I wonder whether, it might just be a case of acclimatizing to your level of.

• 48:41Rory Sutherland?

  Or in other words, that, you know, the thing would have to repeat, you repeat the booking word for word.

• 48:48Chris Williamson?

  Do you mean the last days of the Raj Indian restaurant? Yes.

• 48:52Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 48:53Chris Williamson?

  What have you been, what have you been obsessed by?

• 48:55Rory Sutherland?

  It's worth noting, it's worth noting that when you go back to my childhood, you know, the most of, you know, ORAC, you may remember from Blake Seven, no you don't do, you don't remember Blake Seven at all. Okay. But the, one of the common interface, well, HAL for that matter, okay, the interface with a computer was assumed to be speech. You know, HAL did not have a graphical user interface, right?

• 49:20Rory Sutherland?

  And so there is something really, really interesting there, which is that you can,

• 49:25Rory Sutherland?

  and I mean, you know, the great problem you have with Amazon Alexa is they've spent billions on the thing and 90% of the requests are basically for the time, the weather or something, you know, there is one huge benefit, by the way, of Alexa, which I discovered, which is that when you're half awake early in the morning, now uncomfortable as I am about having Alexa in the bedroom for obvious reasons, okay, when you're half awake, you can find out what the time is without opening your eyes. Now, once you open your eyes to look at a digital clock, there's a danger that you then wake up. But if Alexa replies while your eyes are still shut, then it's actually, you know, 4:57, then you can basically doze off straight back to sleep

• 50:10Rory Sutherland?

  again without that slight problem of searing off your retinas by looking at a digital clock in the middle of the dark.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  It is a, it is a game of chicken when you wake up on a morning to know.

• 50:21Rory Sutherland?

  When you wake up, it is absolutely a game of chicken. Yeah.

• 50:23Chris Williamson?

  How much light do I want to light it? What have you been obsessed by recently? Have you had any new purchases? We've spoken, I think, in the past. I want to say you tried to get me to buy a glass sided toaster. I didn't, I didn't become a part of your movement there, although I did get my parents to buy a air fryer and then they upgraded to an air fryer with pressure cooker in one.

• 50:50Rory Sutherland?

  Wow. And they went to the whole ninja thing, didn't they?

• 50:53Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:54Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah. They're happy with it, aren't they?

• 50:56Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they are. I don't think that they use anything else. I don't think that they, it sits on top of the cooker and now is, is the cooker in itself. So what else? Has there been anything else? You afford Mustang Mackey, glass sided toaster and.

• 51:10Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, that's very, very interesting. So the, I have to say, the, the air fryer continues its magic. The Japanese toilet never loses its magic. I'm down here in Deal where I don't have a Japanese toilet. And the gap between using a Japanese toilet and using a conventional toilet is roughly equivalent to the gap between using a conventional toilet and shitting in a bucket in prison. Okay? Right, okay, that's roughly speaking, you know, the yawning sense of kind of reversion you feel when you go from using a Japanese toilet to a conventional one. It's barbaric, it's ridiculous, and it'll just stop. The air fryer maintains its magic. I mentioned

• 51:53Rory Sutherland?

  these bone conducting headphones, which I think for A joggers, B the elderly, and C people who don't want to become disoriented by, you know, walking around with no knowledge of what's going on around them, okay, which tends to happen with noise cancelling headphones. I like the fact that they cancel noise, but it's also kind of disquieting in a way. You can turn it on and off, I'm glad of that. So those are interesting in that they have an application, and for certain people, I think, could be very, very useful. My father's stairlift, I strongly suspect to anybody elderly listening to this, or anybody with a long memory listening to this, that almost everybody leaves getting a stairlift too

• 52:38Rory Sutherland?

  long, too late. Because they want to resist, they have all this whole thing about the exercise of going up and downstairs is good for you, they want to retain independence as long as they can. Well, there's no compulsion to use a stairlift simply because you have one. But to my father, that's been absolutely transformative. What I also didn't realise is you don't need to put any, you don't need to drill into the wall at all. The whole track for the stairlift is a fairly discreet strip of metal that just goes up the flight of stairs, and is basically screwed into the wood of the stairs, not into the masonry of the wall. So as an employee, I think what you might call Gerontotag of how you manage

• 53:19Rory Sutherland?

  aging and caring through technology will be an enormous source of progress in the next 10 years, and a very worthwhile area for investment, I think.

• 53:29Chris Williamson?

  Geront technology, yeah.

• 53:31Rory Sutherland?

  Other things which, because the things that, where the magic never really goes.

• 53:42Rory Sutherland?

  I've gone back to using a tablet again after about a four year hiatus.

• 53:48Chris Williamson?

  What tablet have you chosen?

• 53:50Rory Sutherland?

  I've got the Samsung Galaxy S8, the eight inch thing, which I have to say is absolutely excellent.

• 54:00Rory Sutherland?

  And that's mainly for reading and reading newspapers and reading books, et cetera, and watching films occasionally. I'm happy to have gone back to a tablet after, as I said, after a long period making do without one.

• 54:20Rory Sutherland?

  The other point I would make about the electric car is that the... Well, I've had one now for, I guess it must be a year and four months or something. One, I don't have charging at home and I'm shortly to get charging installed at home, but I delayed and fudged around and needed to liaise with the neighbours about having a new three-phase supply put in. And oddly, given that that's a period of about 15, 16 months, I have found it surprisingly non-problematic to actually have an electric car without home charging. So for any Londoners listening who go, well, we can't get an electric car

• 55:02Rory Sutherland?

  because there's nowhere for us to charge at home, particularly given the utterly feeble distances London has managed to drive.

• 55:12Rory Sutherland?

  I don't think that there is actually a problem. I genuinely don't think there is an issue in the slightest. And also, the weird pleasure of driving an electric car with regenerative braking and single pedal driving is a pleasure that never goes away or hasn't yet.

• 55:29Chris Williamson?

  I drove my first Tesla Model Y. Is that the big one? Y is the big one?

• 55:39Rory Sutherland?

  The taller one, yeah.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  Correct. But it was the...

• 55:43Chris Williamson?

  Ludicrous or the plaid edition of this thing or whatever. And for the first time ever, I was just pulling it after going from not to 16 some terrifying amount of time. I then was trying to pull around a corner and took my foot off the accelerator like you would to allow it to coast around a corner.

• 55:57Rory Sutherland?

  Yes.

• 55:58Chris Williamson?

  And the fucking thing stopped. I thought, hang on a second. I take my foot off of the accelerator and the brakes get deployed. Yes. Okay, right, this is an entire new type of driving that I need to learn.

• 56:09Rory Sutherland?

  Most of the braking will actually be regenerative. So that's it. So in a conventional car, particularly in automatic, when you take your foot off the accelerator, the car continues to coast.

• 56:19Chris Williamson?

  Creeps.

• 56:20Rory Sutherland?

  Because it would be wasteful for it not to coast, in a sense, because you'd be throwing away momentum, okay? Whereas in electric car, because the momentum actually gets recaptured by the battery, there's no particular reason why you shouldn't just decelerate with the accelerator with no particular need. I mean, I go for miles at a time without using the brakes in any shape or form. You just anticipate by throttling off, the car slows down, the brake lights come on even if the brakes aren't deployed sometimes to notify cars behind you that you're going to be accelerating at a faster pace than they might typically expect.

• 57:03Rory Sutherland?

  But it's actually, it's a lovely way to drive, partly because you don't have a feeling of resentment when you lose speed. What makes cyclists wankers, okay? I tried an electric bike, that strikes me as quite an interesting technology for two reasons, which is that the dirty secret of bikes, as I said, is that when you cycle uphill, it's no faster than walking. Secondly, there is only a limited range of demographies and levels of physical fitness who can really cycle. Thirdly, acceleration is painful and slow, okay? Fourthly, very large areas of the earth's surface are totally ill-suited to cycling.

• 57:46Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, Lisbon, for example, or Bath, okay? Or one of those hillys, or Durham, you know, okay? You know, having a bike in Durham, Newcastle wouldn't be terrible, but there would be chunks of Newcastle which would be awful, I imagine, right?

• 58:01Rory Sutherland?

  And so, you know, when you factor that in, the electric bike, which basically means that uphill and accelerating, and for people who are less than, you know, Lance Armstrong fit, okay, it actually becomes a viable mode of transport, assuming the weather's good enough, or assuming that you design a completely different kind of bike, which actually has some sort of protection from the elements, which I suppose is another consideration, because the great advantage there is, A, you'll be able to make bikes slightly inefficient, fatter tyres for comfort, wider seats, also possibly some sort of rain shielding, because the electricity will basically counterbalance the aerodynamic

• 58:46Rory Sutherland?

  inefficiencies of those things, so that you can actually cycle in something which isn't absolutely optimised around titanium and narrow tyres, which are hopeless in urban environments, for example, you know, you hit a pothole at the wrong angle, and, you know, there's total carnage and disaster. So the electric bike is interesting, I have to say, and I gave one of those a brief test drive and was quite impressed, in fact. It took a little bit of mastery, but that's partly just bloody years since I've cycled

• 59:22Rory Sutherland?

  at all. And other things, but that does strike me as quite significant, because one of the reasons, and this is why I come back to the electric car and regenerative braking, okay, one of the reasons cyclists are assholes, is that because accelerating is really painful, they have this mentality of maintain momentum at any cost, which causes them to sort of leap onto the pavement, ignore red lights, go at precipitous speed through roundabouts without paying much attention. I don't totally blame them for that, because, you know, if you imagine driving a car where every time you press the accelerator, you know, electrodes

• 1:00:03Rory Sutherland?

  in your testicles gave you a sharp burst of pain, you know, we'd all drive like assholes. And in the bike, you know, because it's painful getting up speed and it's slow, they have this sunk cost problem, which is they're desperately unwilling to slow down unless it's absolutely necessary. But the great thing with the electric car and regenerative braking is because you feel you're getting your energy back when you slow, you don't have that same resentful feeling if you're forced to slow down a bit. Instead of going, this bastard by turning so slowly has robbed me of my hard-won kinetic energy. You just go, oh, okay, energy back into the tank for later and then off you go again.

• 1:00:46Chris Williamson?

  What's happening?

• 1:00:48Rory Sutherland?

  Electric vehicles are very, very good for things like delivery vehicles, which do a lot of stop-go motoring.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, that was the original milk float, right? In the UK, that was a Tesla before it was a Tesla. What's happening? You're moving through different vapes here. What's happening with the vaping debate at the moment? I've seen certain companies have been cracked down on for making flavors that are basically too tasty, that kind of entice young, younger kids to get into vaping and stuff like that.

• 1:01:16Rory Sutherland?

  My own view is this is a total nonsense. Okay. And that this, um, uh, what, uh, watch if, I know it's not the world's most common, you commonly use streaming service, but Plex, which you can get on smart TVs and so on, and Google Chrome TV.

• 1:01:34Chris Williamson?

  Someone once gave me an illegal login to that where I could watch every movie ever created. Someone gave me like an access code to, it's like a hard drive. It's like you can stream hard drives and stuff, right?

• 1:01:44Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, absolutely right. But Plex has on it a film called One Billion Lives, which is obviously made by vaping enthusiasts, but it actually,

• 1:01:55Rory Sutherland?

  um, co-op some pretty hard-ass, serious medical scientists, talking about the fact that, you know, because in middle-class Western milieu, the number of people smoking is small, um, then people tend to think of the smoking problem as having been solved. But if you take the world's population as a whole, they would, their argument is that, look, the wider legalization.

• 1:02:21Rory Sutherland?

  Um, the deregulation of vaping and other forms of nicotine delivery device has the potential to save a billion lives. And their accusations sometimes levelled at Big Pharma. Something of not Big Tobacco. Big Tobacco is oddly, in a sense, because they've invested in vaping technologies, they're not actually the um, uh, the evil presence you might have expected. But Big Pharma, which had invested in a lot of fairly ineffectual patches and sprays and gums, only to find that at the last minute, some hipsters came up with a better idea. Um, has played dirty. And the, the extent to which governments have been persuaded to ban flavours,

• 1:03:05Rory Sutherland?

  to ban disposables, for example, there's an environmental case for banning disposables. Um, and also the endless um, recurrence of this argument, oh, but children have been doing it, okay? Well, my argument there is I've got two children aged twenty-one at university, surrounded by a pretty active drug culture and a lot of booze, okay? Worry number four hundred and seven on my list is they might take up vaping, okay? Of all the things they could do, you know, something which has actually pretty trivial, short, medium, and I would argue, long-term effects, that has very few negative externalities on the people around them.

• 1:03:45Rory Sutherland?

  Um, you know, the demonisation of nicotine as distinct from um, burning tobacco has been one of the most extraordinary kind of wasted human efforts or misdirected human efforts uh, of the last twenty years. Because it's, you know, it's coffee, basically, and as a drug, it's that kind of thing. Now, um, the children argument, that one of the great things is that flavours, by getting you hooked on a flavour that's very unlike the flavour of burning tobacco, is a great way of getting people off smoking, right?

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  Because switching back to smoking cigarettes would be pretty untasteful.

• 1:04:24Rory Sutherland?

  And kind of horrible.

• 1:04:26Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:04:26Rory Sutherland?

  Um, does it, you know, do I care that twenty-three-year-olds who can get hold of ecstasy, you know, LSD, cocaine, et cetera? Do I care that they're buying elf bars? Not really. And I, I always think it's a, you know, that, oh, the children, oh, the young people. It's kind of bullshit argument, actually, because, um... I mean, off, you know, I shouldn't say this, I won't say it actually, because I prefer not to share the information. But actually, I mean, even smoking cigarettes below a certain age, provided you quit, and that's a very big provided, by the way, doesn't have massively deleterious effects on on health.

• 1:05:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, the concern is the gateway, right? I mean, I've noticed this, especially since being in Texas.

• 1:05:10Rory Sutherland?

  It's a gateway out. It really is a gateway. Is it a gateway to cigarettes? We've seen absolutely zero evidence of that, I would have said.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point, actually. And it is.

• 1:05:22Rory Sutherland?

  It's definitely a gateway out. So what's happening? So you're in Texas at the moment?

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  I am, yes. I live here now. I've been here for just under a year. And because of the existing culture of dip, dipping tobacco over here, snuz, those little pillowcases that you slot in between your lip and your gum, those are insanely popular over here. This is absolutely, everyone hammers these, and they come in all manner of different flavors and different sizes. They they do a two milligram all the way up to a 20 milligram nicotine dosage. Yeah, yeah. I mean, 20 milligram would make me immediately want to throw up. But yeah, that's that's something that people use. But it's so interesting, because the culture's

• 1:06:07Chris Williamson?

  already been primed here through the existing heritage of dip and using dipping tobacco, which this is the cooler, less disgusting, I don't need to have a bottle and into it every 30 seconds or whatever, because I've got some awful buildup in my mouth. That's that's incredibly popular over here.

• 1:06:26Rory Sutherland?

  So how is Texas more liberal than most states in regulating vaping as well?

• 1:06:31Chris Williamson?

  I'm not sure about that. I mean, the vapes are everywhere. They're sold on the street, they're sold in corner shops, people are using them indoors, in comedy clubs, in gigs, in bars, everywhere that I go.

• 1:06:43Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, this is this is where I like Texas, actually.

• 1:06:47Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what people said. Before I moved here, everyone was like, oh, you're going to kind of the diluted down like PG version of Texas by going to Austin. It's a blue

• 1:06:56Rory Sutherland?

  Yes, that is true.

• 1:06:57Chris Williamson?

  It's a blue dot in a red ocean. And I don't know, it might just be a selection effect for the people that I hang around. But I'm like, I see no, no hints of blue here at all. Like there's, I don't see a massive amount of progressivism or liberal overreach or, you know, the, the woke tards in the street. Like, there's none of that that I see in Austin. It just seems like, it just seems like Texas with young people.

• 1:07:21Rory Sutherland?

  It's a university town, a great music town. It's fantastic food town. It's a brilliant town. And actually, also, people tend to take on, to an extent, the mores of the, of the pre-existing culture. And I, I've only been, I've only been to Austin once. I absolutely loved it. But I, but I also, I also love Houston, Dallas, everywhere I've been in Texas, I've found people absolutely charming. I like that thing of screw this, I'm gonna vape at the comedy club. You know, that's like kind of independence of my independent mindedness.

• 1:07:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:57Rory Sutherland?

  Is really, really healthy.

• 1:07:58Chris Williamson?

  Talk to me, you've been big into this ergodicity thing for, for quite a while. I was thinking about how that and Bayesian updating and all the rest of it kind of applies to people's life design. Have you got a, a good way that people can increase their chances of getting lucky in life?

• 1:08:17Rory Sutherland?

  One thing I think that you might say is an intelligent evolutionary adaptation is that the young are more experimental than the old for a reason, which is that they have less experience to draw on. So they need to experiment more. But they also have more future life to profit from experimentation. So if older people become more conservative, it's partly a perfectly rational response, effectively summed up in the phrase, I know what I like. Okay. And they have more experience to draw on. And therefore, you know, the likelihood that they'll suddenly discover a new holiday destination, which is 200%

• 1:08:58Rory Sutherland?

  better than their best current estimate of what a holiday destination would be, is low when you're 70. Whereas when you're 25, it's, it's by no means impossible, right? You can discover something which is sensationally better.

• 1:09:13Rory Sutherland?

  That's interesting. The fact that when you're old, even if you do deserve something sensationally better, you've only got five years to enjoy it, also probably makes older people conservative because the lifetime remaining gains to experimentation are also shorter. So the fact that we see that decline in openness as people go on through life is to some extent probably a sensible evolutionary mechanism in all kinds of ways.

• 1:09:41Chris Williamson?

  So is the applied solution there for younger people to say yes to more new experiences, to go on adventures, to try new things?

• 1:09:48Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, but not to get massively angry with older people for not doing so. There's another book which I really recommend actually to everybody listening called Algorithms to Live By, which is by I think Brian Christian and somebody Griffiths, or Griffiths actually. And one of the most interesting things which if you're old was one of the best things I've read in terms of generally uplifting information. The reason when you get older that you find it often slower to retrieve information is not because of deteriorating mental faculties, it's because you know more, okay, or you've accumulated more information and therefore more of what you know needs to be stored

• 1:10:33Rory Sutherland?

  in kind of the slower access parts of the brain. So that one of the reasons why, you know, I mean, you notice this extraordinary if you see there's a university challenge programme in the UK and then there's the kind of, there's the celebrity university challenge around Christmas where people tend to be in their 40s and 50s. And the people in their 40s and 50s kind of know more, but they're much, much slower at extracting the information. And the reason is that the amount that can be stored on kind of RAM is finite and therefore more of what you know as an old person actually takes time to retrieve.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  So much wisdom that you've got to dig through.

• 1:11:11Rory Sutherland?

  And actually, if you told old, you know, because a lot of people when they hit their 40s and 50s are convinced that this phenomenon is a sign of mental deterioration. You know, you know, you go, you know, French chap, ate a cake, dipped it in, you know, Marcel Proust, right? Whereas the 22-year-old at university challenge just goes, eh, Marcel Proust, okay, is deeply disquieting, I think, to a lot of older people. And if you told them this, it would massively cheer them up. Just as actually, I think it's quite important to tell people that, is it particularly men, that your level of happiness weirdly tends to be a little bit U-shaped, that people

• 1:11:53Rory Sutherland?

  in middle age have the lowest level of life satisfaction, and then it actually rises again more or less continuously after you pass through sort of middle to, is it middle to late middle age? I can't remember, but there's some period.

• 1:12:06Chris Williamson?

  The biggest, the biggest suicide risk for men at the moment is forty to forty-five.

• 1:12:09Rory Sutherland?

  Is that forty? Really? It's no longer young men?

• 1:12:13Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:12:13Rory Sutherland?

  It's forty, forty-five.

• 1:12:14Chris Williamson?

  It seems to be. This was Max Dickens and Matt Rudd, both two separate books last year. One was Billy Nomates, and the other from Matt Rudd, who is the guy from the Sunday Times, I can't quite remember the name of it, but he was good, and he was on the show. Was Algorithms to Live By, the book where Brian suggested that if you were trying to find a partner, you should go thirty-three people in, and then once you find a person who is better than those first thirty-three, you just go with them?

• 1:12:48Rory Sutherland?

  Stop.

• 1:12:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Rory Sutherland?

  Because you probably don't have to have an extensive relationship with all thirty-three, you know, because that would, you know, living with people for a year and then ditching them thirty-three times would not make you popular, perhaps. But the, it's known for, in a very sexist way, as the secretary problem, because it was first posed as a, you could only interview secretaries one at a time. You, once you've rejected someone, you have no chance of following up. So it's slightly artificial, artificial depiction of the problem. And the question is, how, you know, how many should you interview before you reach this point where you go, okay, the next one who comes along? And it's partly

• 1:13:33Rory Sutherland?

  the explorer exploits trade-off, and it's partly the trade-off between having too little information to benchmark what a good secretary might be like, versus having too few secretaries left that you're in danger of running out. And so I think it is if you have a hundred secretaries lined up, I think the optimal strategy is something, is it sixty something?

• 1:13:54Chris Williamson?

  I think it was thirty, I thought it was in the thirties.

• 1:13:56Rory Sutherland?

  It could well be thirty, yeah.

• 1:13:57Chris Williamson?

  I think it might be in the thirties.

• 1:13:59Rory Sutherland?

  You interview the first thirty and then you've you've set your peak, the best of the thirty you've seen. And then the next, as soon as one comes along who's better than or as good as that, you choose that.

• 1:14:13Chris Williamson?

  Away you go. One of the things that I've been noticing online, especially in the post-Trump world, this allure of black and white thinking, which has been quite reductionist, people seem to be ever more seduced by

• 1:14:28Chris Williamson?

  low nuance.

• 1:14:32Rory Sutherland?

  Yes, and actually, so for example, it even expresses itself with being unwilling to accept that something might be acceptable in a comedy club, which is unacceptable in a business meeting or a church meeting or whatever it may be.

• 1:14:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:47Rory Sutherland?

  So the unwillingness to acknowledge the fact that the rules change according to context.

• 1:14:55Rory Sutherland?

  And therefore demanding that you can, and the thing, the thing about it is, I think, it is characteristic of people in their late teens and perhaps early twenties. I think there's something kind of slightly sophomoric about it in that most older people, once they've been, particularly if they've spent any time working in an office, know that the answer to a hell of a lot of questions is it depends, okay?

• 1:15:25Rory Sutherland?

  And there's something fundamentally wrong with our education system if it isn't effectively showing people

• 1:15:33Rory Sutherland?

  that a very large number of questions should be answered with, I don't know, I need more information. And this need to be able to make an absolute pronouncement on almost anything, regardless of context,

• 1:15:49Rory Sutherland?

  is is fundamentally a bit weird. So if you take the transgender question, you know, well, here's an example, okay?

• 1:16:00Rory Sutherland?

  In every single social situation, I can imagine, okay, you would treat a transgender person uh uh uh as a member of their preferred gender and in accordance with their identity. But as a doctor, it would be completely wrong to treat transgender person as though they were female, okay, because obviously you have to make an acknowledgement for special circumstances. And therefore, it doesn't seem to be impossible that you can say, well, maybe in prisons or women's refuges, we need to actually rethink this general principle. In other words, you have a principle which is true to the extent that it is possible to make it true, but where you may have to actually make concessions according to certain

• 1:16:44Rory Sutherland?

  particular situations. In the same, but I had a, it's a very simple thing, which is, um, I'll give you the classic example of this, which is something which divides a completely different group of people, i.e. not, you know, TERFs or militant feminists, which is in the UK, apologies to Americans, because the general patterns of behaviour are totally different in the US, okay. Is it okay to drive in the middle lane of the motorway? Okay, the answer to that is actually, and people, people will take an incredibly strong view, and the answer to that is has to be, it depends, right? Because given that

• 1:17:24Rory Sutherland?

  cars can only travel at a slower speed when you have a high level of traffic density, okay, if you had everybody travelling at sixty miles an hour and insisting on all travelling in the left-hand lane of the motorway, leaving the other two lanes empty, okay, that would massively slow down traffic and be an incredible waste of road, okay? So it is not actually wrong to use the middle lane of the motorway under all circumstances. You should obviously be fairly attentive to what's happening behind you and so on and so forth. But what people want to do is they don't accept this fact that in a complex system, you occasionally need to take account of more than one or two or three factors in making a decision.

• 1:18:07Chris Williamson?

  What is this, what's this allure towards black and white thinking or the displeasure that people have with more subtle or complex or nuanced opinions? Where's that come from, do you think?

• 1:18:21Rory Sutherland?

  You get a lot of people, well, you could argue that a lot of people found that clarity in religion a hundred years ago. That people who wanted that, I need to be told, you know, a series of good heuristics by which to live life without having to work everything out for first principles, which isn't a totally ridiculous requirement, okay. They would, you know, they would have found a religion to accommodate that, or, you know, something of that kind. Whereas, the one thing that does worry me is, does it come from our education system, which is leading people to believe that there must be a right answer?

• 1:19:03Rory Sutherland?

  There is, in other words, you know, one of the interesting things when you get curious about decision science is not everything's an optimization problem. There are an awful lot of human behaviors which make no sense to people who are inverted commas rationalists, because they assume that what the person is trying to do is to optimize, when actually what they're trying to do is to decatastrophize. The same Taleb and I, the observation that people in Milan railway station are eating at McDonald's, okay? They're not trying to get the best meal they can find in Milan, okay? What they're doing is, basically, you know, there will be search costs and everything else attributed to that, granted, but what they're trying to do is to get something to eat which has a very, very low chance of making them ill or being disappointing or

• 1:19:48Rory Sutherland?

  a ripoff. And McDonald's is absolutely brilliant at not being crap. And so, depend, you know, it's very, very dangerous to declare people irrational unless you know deep down, both consciously and unconsciously, what they're really trying to do. Brand preference, I always give the argument that a large part of brand preference is not, I want Samsung TVs because they're better, but it's, I'll happily pay a hundred bucks more for a Samsung TV, because I'm fairly confident it's not going to be shit.

• 1:20:20Rory Sutherland?

  And when you think about it, the reputational mechanism works because if you've invested billions in your brand as a massive sunk cost, you have much more to lose in terms of future revenue and profit through selling a shit television than someone who nobody's ever heard of. You know, when you go on Amazon and search for TV and you get all those kind of Scrabble rack brands called Wujagoo or whatever, right? Well, why should they care? Why should they invest in quality control? Because they don't really have a reputation at stake in the first place.

• 1:20:52Chris Williamson?

  I heard that Sky Glass, which was Sky's attempt.

• 1:20:56Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  Was, I saw a bunch of reviews as it was coming out and then once it came out from tech people and it just got smashed, it got completely annihilated as the protein pancake problem, which is what I've referred to. When you try and blend two products that previously were very well optimized on their own into one product which is shitter than either of them were and worse than they both would be separately. So protein powders have been pretty well optimized, they're quite tasty, they're pretty much a Nesquik that's got 30 grams of protein in. Pancakes for almost all of time have been fantastic. If you try and make good protein pancakes, they usually end up being a clumpy horrible mess. And what Sky's tried to do is integrate your Sky membership into a television so that it is

• 1:21:42Chris Williamson?

  a one-stop-shop, but the TV underperforms, the Sky system that interacts with it is bad and it's trying to beat a Kindle Fire Stick which is absolutely blazing fast and already people's existing fantastic Samsung TV which they know and the interface is optimized as well.

• 1:22:02Rory Sutherland?

  It's very interesting, isn't it? Because I mean, one of the things I talk about with television, by the way, which is fascinating, is that there is an amount of money and nobody knows what it is, I imagine you could get it through a Freedom of Information request, that the BBC has to pay Samsung to put iPlayer in a prominent position and the Samsung Smart Hub. And Samsung has in its power, indeed has already done so, to make the hub the default starting point for all viewing periods. When I first got a Samsung TV years ago, you could activate the hub, but it was by pressing a very weird button on, which was one of about forty seven buttons on the remote control.

• 1:22:44Rory Sutherland?

  As we all know, you never press the weird buttons on your remote control because they can make your TV go weird. A recovery for, you know, the next half hour.

• 1:22:54Chris Williamson?

  The aspect ratios are for all of the blacks have gone white.

• 1:22:57Rory Sutherland?

  Or an enormous green number two appeared, which I mean literally a number two, appears in the top left of the screen, you know, and you can't make it go away, you know, that kind of thing. And the modern Samsung TV comes with two remote controls, one of which is blissfully simple, and that's the one you use all the time. And every time you you're not sure what to do, you press a button with a house on it, which is something we feel incredibly comfortable doing. You either press back or house and surprise, surprise, that takes you to the Samsung Smart Hub. Previously, we turned on a TV and probably it was broadcast TV by default, then it was Sky by default. And now it's whatever Samsung wants it to be.

• 1:23:39Rory Sutherland?

  And the power they enjoy in that is absolutely spectacular.

• 1:23:43Chris Williamson?

  Yes, so there will be at some point later this year, I haven't signed a contract yet, but this podcast is going to be featured on a number of airlines and it's going to be able to be used in in-flight entertainment. And as the discussion has gone on, I asked this particular guy that is handling the acquisition of the content on the library, what he intends on doing with it, and he said, some insane percentage of what gets viewed on in-flight entertainment is based on the first screen's tiles of what shows up. So if you want everybody to watch Bullet Train with Brad Pitt, and that's tile number three of six, it's going to get, it's the same as being above the fold on Google, right?

• 1:24:26Chris Williamson?

  It's like you're on the first page of Google or basically you're not on Google because everybody's going to click on something on the first page, usually the first result.

• 1:24:35Rory Sutherland?

  So it's a power law distribution, the thing that appears first gets 50%, the thing that appears, yeah.

• 1:24:40Chris Williamson?

  Hundred percent. Going back to the thing that you said about young people, I learned a concept that I gave a term to from a friend, Gwinda Bogle. And he said, you can gauge someone's ignorance by the number of phenomena they explain with the same answer. Those who blame many different issues like war, poverty or pollution on just one cause like capitalism are recycling explanations because the demand for answers outstrips their supply. And I referred to that as mono-thinking.

• 1:25:09Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, funnily enough, a friend of mine calls it, who's Indian, interestingly, he calls it mono-theorism.

• 1:25:15Chris Williamson?

  We're not far off, we're not far off.

• 1:25:18Rory Sutherland?

  And as a Hindu, he always jokes that people in the West have a particular propensity to mono-theorism because they need one god to be behind everything. Whereas he says, as a Hindu, they're completely happy with ambiguity.

• 1:25:31Chris Williamson?

  Very good, very good.

• 1:25:32Rory Sutherland?

  And they're poly-theoristic. I mean, you know, one of the interesting ones is that, you know, all social ills are down to social media, which strikes me as a bit too fucking easy. And I've always said, one of my mischievous ones is that some part of what might be more obnoxious behaviour in people may be down to the decline in smoking. Now, if you think about it, if you have a society, if you have a society where, which 20, 30 years ago, 50 to 60% of people regularly took what was a kind of relaxing drug. Okay.

• 1:26:11Rory Sutherland?

  And now that's down to 10%, you would expect, and of course, the effect could be magnified through social network effects. You would expect some change, just as if you put everybody on, you know, well, opiates, okay, you'd notice a change in general behaviour. Surely mass withdrawal from drugs is going to have some visible effect. And yet it has been assumed that that, that effect can't be there. Well, why not? I mean, one of the weirder theories is that, you know, there's an equal body of belief, which suggests a very eccentric opinion that, you know, tobacco, tea, coffee were major contributors to the Enlightenment.

• 1:26:54Rory Sutherland?

  And so, you know, it is, it is kind of, I have to say, but you're right, the, the, um, the need to go, yes, because capitalism, or, you know, there's a wonderful sketch about this that dates back to, you know, where you, you recite something bad that had happened and go Thatcher, okay, right? Now, you know, it's, it's, it is slightly amusing to me, which is, that, um, to people born long after actually Thatcher left office, okay? It's seen as this absolutely pivotal, changing point in British history, where beforehand, everything was supposedly absolutely lovely. It was like the Beatles and flower power and free love, completely forgetting the 1970s altogether, okay?

• 1:27:38Rory Sutherland?

  And then you had Thatcher and it all got nasty ingredients, self-interested. And I actually, you know, I, you know, I mean, pre-Thatcher, there was a lot of extraordinarily human unpleasantness of all kinds. Maybe it was less greedy, that possibly is true, but there were all forms of manifestation of genuine, really malicious nastiness and unpleasantness, which if anything diminished in the 1980s. Um, and it, but it's so easy to have, you know, as you said, that stupidity, I mean, actually creativity is also trying to imagine, um, things that could be much more important factors than that they're generally given credit for.

• 1:28:21Rory Sutherland?

  You know, is this because, um, uh, you know, uh, and actually, you know, I mean, uh, it's a classic case of wanting the rules of a simple system also to apply to a complex system. And I've been talking to doctors recently about obesity and it looks as though there may be a group of people who are fat, very largely simply because their, um, their biome, uh, the microbiota, uh, in their guts are just very good at extracting energy from food.

• 1:28:59Rory Sutherland?

  And so you eat the same. Some people have, for whatever reason, a mix of microflora, which just aren't that great at extracting calorific value from food. I mean, things like, you know, I mean, that's another classic case, the whole mind-body dualism thing is a classic case of saying, you know, okay, in order to make the world comprehensible, I'm going to pretend these things are entirely unrelated and that you have willpower and that, you know, your body and your bodily state, your digestive state and so forth, has no influence on your behaviour. And that's again, an attempt to say, okay, what we'll do is we'll divide the world into watertight compartments for purposes of tractability and comprehension

• 1:29:42Rory Sutherland?

  and proceed from there. And, you know, it's great in high school physics to do that shit. It doesn't really work anywhere else. I mean, the extreme case is to say that science is a bit of a con because it hives off that very small proportion of big decisions that can actually be solved definitively with a single right answer and where you have all the data you need to make the decision at the very start of the process. Okay. And it hives those off. Poynter is extraordinary success in areas like engineering.

• 1:30:20Rory Sutherland?

  And effectively lays the, effectively claims the credit for writing the exam first and then solving it. It's marking its own homework to some extent because anybody can be clever if they give them 5,000 exam questions, okay, and they're asked to solve the 10 they like the best.

• 1:30:42Chris Williamson?

  What can people expect from you next? What are you doing for the rest of this year?

• 1:30:47Rory Sutherland?

  I'm going to be writing a book called Slogan, I think, which is how, you know, it takes sort of 30, 40, 50 of the world's best advertising lines and then dissects them from a kind of behavioural science angle to say what they tell us about ourselves, our unconscious and our society.

• 1:31:03Chris Williamson?

  That's cool.

• 1:31:04Rory Sutherland?

  So looking at persuasion, I think that can be quite interesting. I'm a big fan of this business of taking something and just looking at it through a peculiar lens. There's a wonderful thing on YouTube, which is, I don't know if you've ever seen the YouTube channel Ask Your Mortician, have you?

• 1:31:22Chris Williamson?

  No, what's that?

• 1:31:23Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, so Ask Your Mortician is a woman who works as an undertaker or mortician in the United States. And there's a film she made about 30 minutes long, which is, why didn't JFK have an open casket? Or why did JFK's casket stay closed? Now, you know, the whole Kennedy assassination thing is the most, you know, overraked period of, you know, three days in 20th century history, pretty much. Okay, you know, every single thing, every single person in the crowd in the Zapruder film has been subject to kind of microscopic analysis. But this is just taking the whole thing and telling the story from the point of view of, you know, the morticians, you know,

• 1:32:06Rory Sutherland?

  going, obviously, where they got the casket from, the fact that the, the fact that the Secret Service commandeered the hearse from the local mortician to drive to Love Field, I think it was, where Air Force One was waiting, had no idea how to operate the detaching mechanism that has allowed you to remove a coffin from a hearse. And so, in order to get the coffin in the plane, there were basically loads of Secret Service guys with crowbars, basically tracking this thing to bits.

• 1:32:37Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:32:38Rory Sutherland?

  To get it out of the hearse. Because they refused to take anybody, they refused to take anybody from the undertakers with them. They just commandeered the vehicle.

• 1:32:47Rory Sutherland?

  And so, it, it, what it is, is it takes a very, very familiar, well-worn story and just adds a completely new perspective on it, you know, sheds completely new light.

• 1:32:58Chris Williamson?

  That's where mono thinking becomes interesting, right? If you have a single optimizing function that's someone is looking at it from.

• 1:33:04Rory Sutherland?

  It's, no, no, absolutely. So that what you might call that nerd thinking, where you actually take a very, very different point of view.

• 1:33:14Rory Sutherland?

  What you're doing then with mono thinking is I think complementary to the main dialogue.

• 1:33:19Chris Williamson?

  It's orthogonal, right?

• 1:33:20Rory Sutherland?

  If all you're doing is taking everybody else's mono thinking, okay, you're just contributing to the two dimensionality of the whole field. But if you actually go over at 90 degrees orthogonally and say, okay, what shadows are cast if we point the light over here? That's when it gets interesting.

• 1:33:38Chris Williamson?

  Amazing. Do you know?

• 1:33:39Rory Sutherland?

  Because no one's stating that ask a mortician is the complete definitive answer.

• 1:33:45Rory Sutherland?

  But what it does, it's a completely fresh light on what was going on.

• 1:33:49Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:33:49Rory Sutherland?

  A very interesting, very interesting thing. There was a Texas, I guess he must have been, what do you call it? What do you call it when you have the guy, the guy who is the Texas coroner in Dallas? Okay. And one of the reasons there was such a massive conspiracy theory is they refused to let this coroner perform the autopsy. And he's often portrayed as being a bit of an ass because he refused to let the president's body go and be flown back to DC. But he was entirely correct in that if a death occurs in Texas in his jurisdiction, it's on him. Absolutely his responsibility to do it, whether it's the president of the United States or someone found dead in a shop doorway. And so it was very, it was very

• 1:34:34Rory Sutherland?

  interesting from that point of view because I'd always heard of this guy as like being like Mr. Difficult trying to muscle in. Absolutely not, not that case at all. He was entirely correct in what he was trying to do and they were entirely wrong.

• 1:34:46Chris Williamson?

  And this is ask a mortician?

• 1:34:48Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, ask a mortician, I think it's called. Yeah.

• 1:34:51Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal. Do you know Richard Shotten? He wrote The Choice Factory a few years?

• 1:34:54Rory Sutherland?

  Brilliant. I know Richard very well. He's absolutely fantastic behavioral scientist.

• 1:34:58Chris Williamson?

  He's got a new book out this year. He's got a new book out. I've got it coming on the show.

• 1:35:01Rory Sutherland?

  If I've got it right, it remind me what the book's called. It's called.

• 1:35:05Chris Williamson?

  Give me one second. I'll get it up in my calendar. You might get it before me though.

• 1:35:10Chris Williamson?

  Um, where is he on? Is it next week? No. Is it the week after? No. Is it the week after that? There it is. Oh, no, that's Richard Wrangham, the guy that wrote, uh, who is also great. Richard Shotten is coming on. Where the fuck is he? Uh, anyway, he's in, he's in here somewhere. Anyway, there's, I'm very excited for that. I know that you and him have a lot of crossover. Um, do you know the story of how his, uh, what's it called? Astro 10, his company name?

• 1:35:37Rory Sutherland?

  No, I, I, cause I've, my wife was just asking about that, saying, what's this Astro 10 thing? So, so go on, tell me the story.

• 1:35:45Chris Williamson?

  You'll have to ask him for the full, the full description. However, he found online some, uh, company that had used a behavioral insight in a very smart way and he loved it. He then registered astro10.com and all of his email addresses and went to company's house and maybe got the trademark as well and all the rest of it. And then only later realized that it was actually called Astro Teng or something. There was a G on the end.

• 1:36:12Rory Sutherland?

  I see.

• 1:36:14Chris Williamson?

  He'd typo'd the entire thing. He'd actually misspelled this, uh, but preferred the version of it that he came up with. And now he's lumbered with it for the rest of time.

• 1:36:24Rory Sutherland?

  Oprah Winfrey is a similar case where actually the Old Testament character is called Orpah, not Oprah. And the cleverest one of all, which was a deliberate kind of perversity, Cliff Richard, who will be probably not well known to American listeners, but was a massive kind of, uh, pop star and still is indeed in the UK. He's kind of the, I suppose you might sort of vaguely call him the British Johnny Halliday. Okay. But he was originally, I can't remember what his real name is, but it's not Cliff Richard. Okay. He's originally going to be called Cliff Richards. And I think it was his manager who said, no, no, we'll call you Cliff Richard. Why? Because then every time you get interviewed

• 1:37:06Rory Sutherland?

  on TV, the interviewer is going to call you Cliff Richards or call you Mr. Richards. And you get a chance to correct him, which means everybody gets to hear your name twice.

• 1:37:17Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:37:19Rory Sutherland?

  So that was the, I mean, the surprising, actually, a surprising number of names arise through complete, there's another name which also arose through a complete misunderstanding.

• 1:37:32Chris Williamson?

  Do you know the story, do you know the story of Salvador Dali, of why?

• 1:37:36Rory Sutherland?

  Go on.

• 1:37:36Chris Williamson?

  So Salvador Dali's parents had a child born about nine months before Dali was, and they named him Salvador Dali, and he died only a couple of days after he was born. They then basically almost immediately conceived again and had another child that was born nine months later, and they were adamant that he was a reincarnation of their dead son. So they called him Salvador Dali, called him the name of the son that had already gone.

• 1:38:04Rory Sutherland?

  Elvis is interesting because it's widely believed that the middle name of Elvis, Aaron Presley, spelt A R O N, okay, is an ignorant typo or misspelling, either by the parents or by the whoever registered the birth. In fact, it's the Welsh spelling of Aaron. And whether Elvis is Welsh or not is open to debate.

• 1:38:30Chris Williamson?

  Stop trying to, you have a lot of affinity with the Welsh people and country. Stop trying to adopt everybody for your slow takeover of the Welsh.

• 1:38:41Rory Sutherland?

  His dad was convinced, I think, that they were Welsh. I was convinced that Presley came from the Pruselly Hills, where there is, wait for it, a church of St. Elvis. There's only one church of St. Elvis anywhere in the world. It's in Pembrokeshire, not far from the Pruselly Hills.

• 1:38:58Chris Williamson?

  His.

• 1:38:58Rory Sutherland?

  I think what might have been happening is Vernon, was it Elvis's dad? I think, I think it was Vernon. Vernon was convinced of the family's Welsh, in the same way, by the way, that Johnny Cash seemed to be absolutely convinced that he was part Native American, even though his ancestry was entirely Scottish.

• 1:39:15Chris Williamson?

  Here's a question for you. Here's a question. As a proud, loosely associated Welshman. How how has it become that Irish has a cultural impact on the world? You've got Irish areas in New York, people understand St Patrick's Day, they've they've generally got themselves a a cultural foothold. The Scots as well, the bagpipes, they've got the hats, they've got the tartan, they've got everything.

• 1:39:40Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, the Welsh of the United States, funnily enough, they were fair, Thomas Jefferson, okay, basically Welsh. But the they seem to assimilate faster. You get Welsh communities in Pennsylvania, mining communities, you get all those places called Bethesda and so forth. You also get those places, Bryn Mawr, which I think is in Connecticut, isn't it? It must be named after the Welsh Bryn Mawr. But so you you do you do get Welsh communities, and obviously Patagonian in in in in in South America.

• 1:40:16Rory Sutherland?

  What am I doing? What? Okay. But they haven't done as good a job of marketing themselves as because the Welsh, I think the Welsh, what you might call diaspora, and Hillary Clinton, for example, is part Welsh, will agree to differ on Elvis. I have no idea, to be absolutely honest, about Elvis Presley's bloodline. And I'm sure that people have researched it in absolutely enormous depth. But, you know, whereas Trump would mention his Scottishness, I don't think Hillary Clinton ever mentioned her Welshness.

• 1:40:58Chris Williamson?

  I want to know what the branding problem is with Welsh.

• 1:41:00Rory Sutherland?

  Of course, it would have been absolutely no electoral value to play on your Welshness.

• 1:41:05Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:41:06Rory Sutherland?

  Hillary.

• 1:41:07Chris Williamson?

  Branding problem.

• 1:41:08Rory Sutherland?

  And I mean, I've also, you know, and Franklin Wright was conscious of his Welshness, interestingly. So, you know, Taliesin is.

• 1:41:21Rory Sutherland?

  A Welsh phrase meaning shining brow and Frank was was pretty conscious of his Welsh ancestry. Were there other, there was also an absolutely fantastic mafioso character in Chicago who was kind of a number two to Al Capone called Murray the camel Humphries. Whose parents I think came from Kano in Powys or somewhere. But so you have this kind of, you know, I mean, undoubtedly they're pretty well represented proportionately. Although Davis is always spelt I S in the U S rather than I E S. Jefferson Davis, I guess, is actually, I think, you know, he's actually Welsh origin.

• 1:42:02Rory Sutherland?

  But it, but the, the interest in promulgating or promoting it versus the Irish or the Scots. Seems to be much, much lower, I have to say.

• 1:42:15Chris Williamson?

  Maybe, maybe you could try and appeal to the Welsh government. And speak to them and say if you could do a rebrand perhaps for Wales.

• 1:42:26Rory Sutherland?

  No, so let me, I'll think of a few more there. Actually, the early presidents were disproportionate, Washington, I don't think was. But I've got a vague idea that Adams and quite a few of the early presidents. Were were fairly heavily Welsh. And then there's also an interesting intimation, which may or may not be true. That Welsh surnames are quite common among African Americans because of a Welsh Quaker thing. Where things like Underground Railroads and so forth tended to be run by Quakers who tended to be Welsh. But I, I, I've read that, how plausible that is, I don't know, it could be entirely fanciful.

• 1:43:10Rory Sutherland?

  But no, it is, it is kind of interesting because, oh, you could, I suppose you could say, you know. Do Anglo Saxon Americans have a particular sense of identity too? Which is an interesting question, you know, and so that the Scots and the Irish, and there's a little, you know, you think, you're absolutely right, that the small country syndrome. Where people tend to be slightly more proud of ancestry from a less populous country.

• 1:43:39Rory Sutherland?

  But again, I suppose, you know, German Americans have never, you know, I mean, the population of the US is probably more German by ancestry than it is British, not quite. Interesting question.

• 1:43:53Rory Sutherland?

  Possibly more than English, but if you include the whole of the British Isles, no. But you get the odd, you get the odd thing in Milwaukee, places like that, just as you get the Swedish thing in Minnesota.

• 1:44:06Chris Williamson?

  I would love to hear a Welsh, American blended accent. That would be, that would be one hell of a cacophony coming out.

• 1:44:15Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I mean, one theory I did hear is that the Welsh being fairly sort of easygoing,

• 1:44:22Rory Sutherland?

  you know, would within one generation basically completely blend in.

• 1:44:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, they just allow themselves to dilute down into the local culture.

• 1:44:29Rory Sutherland?

  Just dilute down. There's a very funny comedian who I think you'll enjoy called Andrew, is it Schultz? Have you come across him?

• 1:44:36Chris Williamson?

  He, yeah, he's been on the show.

• 1:44:38Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, he's been on the show.

• 1:44:40Rory Sutherland?

  I thought what was absolutely hysterical is I was watching him on YouTube doing a show in Hawaii, taking the piss out of people who moved to Hawaii because he said, his mother's Scottish, okay, was born in Scotland and she's lived in New York for almost all her adult life, but she is still completely Scottish in her speech and her behaviour and mannerisms. She said, you don't get my mother going fuck you, et cetera, right? But people move to Hawaii and three weeks later, they're all there going aloha and using Hawaiian phrases. He was kind of calling out bullshit.

• 1:45:14Chris Williamson?

  Calling everyone a howly. That's what they call the people that are from out of town. Look Rory, let's bring this one home. I always love speaking to you, mate. I'm going to be back in London at some point this year, so I'll definitely give you a note.

• 1:45:25Rory Sutherland?

  Catch up. Absolutely splendid. Yeah.

• 1:45:27Chris Williamson?

  Thank you, mate. Catch you later on.

• 1:45:29Rory Sutherland?

  All the best.