How Your Brain Gets Tricked By Clever Marketing - Rory Sutherland (4K)

Rory Sutherland is one of the world’s leading consumer behaviour experts, the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Advertising and an author. The advertising industry creates a unique intersection between psychology and creativity. By looking at what works in the world of ad campaigns, we can learn even more about the human mind and Rory might have the best insight on the planet for this. Expect to learn what dating apps can learn about advertising from property websites, why women actually wear engagement rings, Rory’s thoughts on Jordan Peterson, how you can become more creative every day, what Rory thinks of Twitter changing their name to X, how hotel rooms have residual sexism baked into the design, why rational people ruin creativity and much more... Sponsors: Get a Free Sample Pack of all LMNT Flavours with your first box at https://www.drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) - 00:00 Comparison is the Enemy of Happiness 03:27 Choice Architecture in Online Dating 23:18 The Philosophy of Comedy 30:57 The Biggest Problem With the Purity Spiral 43:45 What Happened to the Welsh Identity? 47:36 Why We Buy Engagement Rings 51:38 How to Think Like Darwin 59:45 The Convenience of Tribal Thinking 1:08:27 Is David Ogilvy a Genius? 1:21:49 Should HS2 Be Abandoned? 1:30:20 Rory’s Advice to Cultivate Creativity 1:35:11 Why Rory Didn’t Move to America 1:41:58 Rebranding Twitter to X 1:53:25 Being an Air-Fryer Pioneer 1:56:03 Rory’s Opinion of Jordan Peterson 1:58:50 Rory’s Current Obsessions 2:09:30 What’s Next for Rory - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  I heard a quote from you. A mutual friend, George Mack, sent me a quote that said, "A rich man is anyone who earns more than his wife's sister's husband."

• 0:09Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, that actually isn't me. I wish it were me because I would have retired on the basis of that quote. I think it's, what's the chap called? Brilliant American humorist called The Sage of Baltimore. The Americans will know.

• 0:22Chris Williamson?

  No idea.

• 0:23Rory Sutherland?

  A fantastic comic writer, and I've briefly forgotten his name.

• 0:26Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 0:26Rory Sutherland?

  But it is interesting how, interestingly, I was having a conversation yesterday with someone at an addiction clinic in Switzerland, which I can't name. I wasn't there as a patient, just in case you. I was there as a very, very interested outsider. And he said that, you know, comparison is the enemy of happiness. That, you know, one of the things that seems to be a curse for all humankind, and you've obviously read, you've probably interviewed the author of The Status Game.

• 0:52Chris Williamson?

  Will Stor. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 0:54Rory Sutherland?

  Will Stor, which is a fascinating book because it's this kind of terrifying invisible force that drives us. And we're in denial about it. And in some ways, the game only works because we pretend we're not playing the game. You see what I mean? And that comes down to other, other phrases about status seeking, which is, I think, the famous one of Aristotle and Isis, where he said that if there were no women, all the money in the world would be worthless. I think he's probably overstating that. I mean, you know, they're presumably pleasures to be derived from sort of jet skiing and I'd like to have one of those yachts, not for the yacht, but just for, I know it's not called parking, it's called mooring.

• 1:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:32Rory Sutherland?

  But the actual business of sailing around on one of those yachts wouldn't appeal to me at all. But docking the fucking thing, that must be an absolute joy.

• 1:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39Rory Sutherland?

  Do you ever watch that guy called Super Yacht Captain on YouTube?

• 1:42Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 1:43Rory Sutherland?

  Now, what they do when they dock those things is they actually send up a drone. So they've got an aerial view of the ship.

• 1:49Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:49Rory Sutherland?

  And then they use the bow thrusters and the stern thrusters to actually maneuver the thing in.

• 1:53Chris Williamson?

  I mean, you get that now on cars, right? The fanciest Range Rover gives you what appears to be an overhead shot.

• 1:59Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, mine does it. Actually, I've got the electric car and they tend to come with more.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  Are you still in your Mackie?

• 2:03Rory Sutherland?

  Fantastic car. Absolutely delighted with it. Yeah.

• 2:05Chris Williamson?

  Right. Have you, are you going to upgrade to something similar?

• 2:09Rory Sutherland?

  Possibly the Mackie GT next time because then I'll be well into a midlife crisis. And so I'll need a car with stripes on it.

• 2:16Chris Williamson?

  Uh. Interesting that you said earlier on, I just attributed, misattributed a quote to you. There's something called Churchillian drift. Did I teach you about this before?

• 2:22Rory Sutherland?

  Which is where quotes, there's also a famous thing which is called somebody's law, which is that the quote is never attributed to the original person who said it.

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 2:32Rory Sutherland?

  And it also applies to scientific laws. So if you take Bayes' theorem, it wasn't actually Bayes, it was someone about fifty years earlier, who's a blind mathematician at Cambridge. In fact, I can't remember his name appropriately enough. We can all remember Bayes's name, but we can't remember the person who actually came up with it. And so quite often, it's the second person, the person who popularizes or makes famous, who actually gets the law or the discovery credited to them, not the person who is the original discoverer.

• 3:02Chris Williamson?

  Well, it's a stickiness game, right? It's all about who manages to capture the mean best. Me and George were talking about this yesterday.

• 3:07Rory Sutherland?

  H.L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore. There you go.

• 3:10Chris Williamson?

  There we go.

• 3:11Rory Sutherland?

  You know that Americans, don't you?

• 3:12Chris Williamson?

  Taken. Yeah, yeah. It's only, it's only taken fact that Newton's kicking in.

• 3:15Rory Sutherland?

  He's one of those people who probably is, you know, there's certain people who are, you know, much more famous in America than they are in Britain, and undeservedly so, because he was extraordinary. Yeah.

• 3:27Chris Williamson?

  What have you learned about the choice architecture of online dating sites and how it relates to property websites?

• 3:33Rory Sutherland?

  Well, this is, this is kind of interesting because one of the reasons, one of the reasons I like working in advertising and marketing is I think the correct way to solve problems and to understand what's going on is really bottom up, not top down. By which I mean, actually, open-minded inquiry and observation of all kinds of things, okay, tends then, over time, patterns start to emerge. And I think the better way, what we try and do in politics in particular, is we start with a theory. We then impose the theory on reality.

• 4:14Rory Sutherland?

  We trumpet the areas or the scale at which that theory succeeds. And we sweep under the carpet those areas where the theory basically fails. Okay. So if you take something like, okay, if you take something like the efficient market hypothesis, it probably has an application in a few fields. And those are well celebrated and measured by economists. It's a complete nonsense to apply the same rules of a market to, say, the property market or the dating markets as you do to the market for a commodity like iron ore or something of that kind. Okay. They're fundamentally different. In particular, if you look at the property market, there's a problem.

• 4:54Rory Sutherland?

  Because when people go and buy most things, you know, if you went out to buy a car, I've got to ask you about your car. I'm a big Machi enthusiast. Have you gone electric or in Texas, does that get you vilified?

• 5:06Chris Williamson?

  It will, it would get me killed.

• 5:07Rory Sutherland?

  Not in Austin, though.

• 5:08Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, Austin sufficiently.

• 5:09Rory Sutherland?

  Austin, yeah, okay.

• 5:10Chris Williamson?

  It's sufficiently progressive. I think I'll get Camaro, a Camaro for my first car in America. FYI, there's no license equivalency between the US and the UK, which means that I need to retake my theory test 18 years after I took it in American.

• 5:26Rory Sutherland?

  Which is weirdly difficult.

• 5:28Chris Williamson?

  It's going to be, it's all the road signs are different. What does this particular thing mean? All of my knowledge about roundabouts is totally fucking useless, obviously.

• 5:35Rory Sutherland?

  My car, which is obviously American, has an interesting American feature, which is you can set the cruise control to effectively go at the speed limit, plus or minus X miles an hour.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  So it's using this sat nav?

• 5:48Rory Sutherland?

  It uses a mixture, I think, of sat nav and actually optical character recognition, reading the road sign. Which does raise the question that people in residential areas are going to put up fake seven miles an hour signs along their streets so that electric cars all automatically slow to a crawl.

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  How hilarious.

• 6:03Rory Sutherland?

  But, um, so I imagine, you know, you noticed that wonderful thing where people, as I predicted, were hacking autonomous taxis in San Francisco.

• 6:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, putting cones in specific.

• 6:12Rory Sutherland?

  You put a cone on the, on the hood, as they'd call it, and the thing was basically immobilized in a state of complete confusion. And I predicted that, I'm proud to say, five years ago. I said, people will hack self-driving cars and they'll discover that all you've got to do is put a pattern of weighted balloons on the road and the things will go absolutely dilali. And sure enough, someone discovered that.

• 6:31Chris Williamson?

  Okay, dating sites.

• 6:32Rory Sutherland?

  So dating sites, okay. So let's look at something here, which is, so to go back to my original point, the market for property is highly problematic because what most people do when they buy, they look for property to buy, is they work out how much deposit they have, they then work out how much they can borrow, they add those two together and they start looking for houses around that price, okay? So the basic heuristic question they're asking is how much can I afford? And then they start looking. Now, if you notice, we don't buy anything else like that, we don't buy cars that way, okay? If you went and said, okay, how much money can I raise as a deposit? How much can I borrow? People will be driving around in Bugattis and, you know, Bugatti Veyrons and Bentleys all over the place.

• 7:17Rory Sutherland?

  We don't do that with cars, we kind of take a balance on how much property, how much car do I actually need? How much do I care about cars, et cetera? But because we have this heuristic that effectively property is the only tax-free big bet you can make in your life, okay? With huge tax advantages in terms of the capital gains, everybody maxes out. Now, unsurprisingly, people who sell property have noticed this fact and consequently, property prices go up and up and up because everybody's effectively, so as interest rates go down, it doesn't make anybody richer, it just means that they set their target price for the property they're prepared to buy even higher than before. Sellers of property aren't complete idiots, so they basically put their price up to get

• 8:01Rory Sutherland?

  whatever they can get, and so consequently you end up with an absurd spiral, okay? So the property market is fundamentally unlike, say, the market for, as I said, whether it's iron ore or indeed whether it's, you know, a high-quality energy drink. Yeah, there it is. Doing some implausible product placement. There it is. Now, it struck me also that there's a fundamental problem in three things which actually is the same in all three cases, and it's the market for graduate recruits, the market for first, in other words, employees for first jobs. The market for property and the market for dating, okay? Which is that two problems.

• 8:45Rory Sutherland?

  When you recruit someone straight out of university, or you recruit anybody for a job in which they have no experience at all. Okay. You don't know anything about them realistically, but you need a proxy. So the proxy seems to have become, you know, Russell Group University, two, one or above. And everybody uses that as the first stage filter for their search. And everything that doesn't meet those criteria, or everybody who doesn't meet that those criteria effectively disappears out of the marketplace. Despite the fact that they may be possessed of unbelievable talents, they just either had a good time at university. Or a part of that very large part of the population who are very, very clever, but don't feel motivated doing academic hypothetical things.

• 9:30Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. You know, if you think about it, I know people, people who are good at chess are probably quite bright in some respect. But you can't say someone who's bad at chess is thick, right? You know, my brother's an astrophysicist, he's shit at chess, right? Okay. Um, you know, I mean, they, they do actually record games that sort of Einstein and Oppenheimer played in the Manhattan Project. And they're kind of okay chess players, but they're nothing amazing, right? So, you know, there are quite a lot of things that are all one way proxy. Necessary but not sufficient. In other words, exactly, necessary but not, or sufficient, you know, but, but actually not necessary. So actually, you know, now what's happened here? As a consequence is that we're automatically just discarding.

• 10:14Rory Sutherland?

  Now, let's take dating as a parallel. There, what's your first filter? Okay, the HR person's first filter is two, one and above, you know, and then they interview them. But, but the first filter is that two, one and above, they've got to have a degree. In fact, increasingly, I noticed my daughter's generation are doing master's degrees. Because even if you've got a first class degree for a Russell, Russell Group University, it's that positional good thing where you create hyper competition. And it's really a kind of peacock's tail signaling effect. Okay. So what you're really proving is not ability or human capital, it's just commitment to the area in which you're invested. Okay. Now in dating sites, it strikes me that what you have, now I got married long before

• 10:55Rory Sutherland?

  there were online websites. And as a contemporary of mine said, who also got married before there was online dating, he said, I feel like I caught the last helicopter out of Saigon. You know, genuinely, I wouldn't know where to get started in online dating. But what's the first criterion you use, accept or reject? Now, I'm assuming here you're a guy. I don't quite know, it works slightly differently, I think, for women, because obviously the demand is completely asymmetric. Okay. But it's a still picture of them and some words of text. All right. Now, how good, just as two, one or above is not actually a brilliant proxy for how valuable an employee this person will be.

• 11:36Rory Sutherland?

  It's all you've got. Okay. I don't think a still photograph and a few words of text are in any way a proxy for who you might forge a long term relationship with. Okay. Because what you're doing is you're making a series of decisions, you're going, you're working your way down the decision tree, to use the language of choice architecture. And because every decision you make, you're happy with, you think therefore that a series of seemingly rational decisions will reach an optimal outcome. But actually, I mean, for example, there are people who are extremely attractive actresses who wouldn't make it as a model, because their attractiveness is to do with motion, humor, wit, present, you know, all those things which matter more in a relationship than how you look in a

• 12:20Rory Sutherland?

  static photograph. You know, I mean, I'm showing my age here, but Cameron Diaz probably wouldn't have made it as a Vogue model. Okay. But, you know, Jennifer Aniston, I don't know. Okay. But what I mean, what I'm saying is what makes them attractive is a whole mix of things like humor, deportment, movement, you know, subtle things which cannot be captured at all in that initial filtration phase. Same goes for employment. What makes a good employee cannot really be very well captured by that initial filtration phase. Same goes with property. Okay. Which is, what do people do when they look for property? They go, okay, first of all, how much can I afford? And they start looking at that point. Then they ask the second question, which is where is it and how many bedrooms?

• 13:04Rory Sutherland?

  Now, all I'm saying, okay, is that it seems rational. While we're going through that process, it seems perfectly sensible because each stage we're filtering. What we don't see, the dog that doesn't bark in the night, is what we're rejecting that might be great. Okay, now, here's where the problem really gets acute. Okay, everybody's going through this decision tree, starting at the same place and working through in the same order. That's what online choice architecture does. Now, if you look at how people chose houses, or for that matter girlfriends or boyfriends, back in the pre-internet age, there was a lot of noise in the system. You know, I mean, the conventional British way, you know, the New York way is you go

• 13:47Rory Sutherland?

  out with people and first of all find out how much they earn, as far as I can see. Okay, I mean, dating in New York always strikes me as like a weird Jane Austen kind of transactional field, okay. But in Britain, basically, you went to a rugby club and got pissed with your friend's sister, okay, and then you discovered you really liked each other. Now, it's messy. I'm not suggesting it's optimal, there's a lot of choice you're missing out, but everybody effectively found a house, found a partner in a different way. The choice architecture was different, the starting point was different, the initial filter. In many cases, people found a house because they walked past an estate agent's window, they drove down a lane and saw a for sale side.

• 14:25Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 14:27Rory Sutherland?

  And in many cases, they didn't start searching with eight hundred thousand and down, right? And it was messy. So people had, houses had lots of opportunities to appeal to people, and partners had lots of different strengths which they could deploy, depending on the circumstances in which the meeting took place. Because, I mean, guys aren't that shallow. Men are a bit shallow, but there are a hell of a lot of personality features, okay. Now, if everybody chooses according to the same criteria, it's a much less efficient market clearing mechanism than if everybody's a bit messy. So let's assume that you had, you know, I, I, I mentioned this earlier because I was talking to a kind of recruitment firm.

• 15:09Rory Sutherland?

  I said, let's imagine where you had a world where weirdly everybody's HR director was like oddly prejudiced, okay, but they're all prejudiced in completely different ways. One person was obsessed with hiring Oxbridge graduates, another person was obsessed with hiring Jamaicans, a third person was obsessed with hiring Scousers, okay.

• 15:29Rory Sutherland?

  Over time, multiple differing prejudices, or what you might call diversity of opportunity rather than equality of opportunity, would provide a more efficient market for talent than the one we have now, which is regimented and identical. And it seems to me there's a conflict here, which is in recruitment. The need to look fair means you have to apply the same criteria to everybody, which means as that kind of consistency of selection spreads out across the whole of industry, okay? It actually means that there's a ludicrous undersupply of certain people who meet those initial criteria, while the fifty percent, eighty percent of people who don't meet those initial sortation criteria effectively go to waste. Yeah, it's like a cartel selection. There must be a hell of a lot of girls who are single, because they just don't

• 16:14Rory Sutherland?

  look that great in the stills photo, right? Now, there's this further thing, which is, now, I've got to be really careful because my wife's going to watch this, okay? But actually, you don't want a wife or a house which appeals to everybody, right? If you, you know, if you marry a supermodel, right? Basically, they're going to run off with your tennis coach and take your house, right? What, what you want is someone who's disproportionately attractive to you. Yeah. All right? That's the sort of game theoretic approach of house hunting. So my, my approach to house hunting, I'll stay out of dating because my wife might be watching this, okay? It's to some extent a form of, and I've often said that estate agencies would be a lot better if they actually were forced to list the downsides of a property as well as the

• 16:59Rory Sutherland?

  upsides. Because the shrewd way to choose a house is not to say, what's my perfect house? It's to say, what do other people hate that I don't mind? Yes. Okay? So an example in my case would be next to a railway line, absolute bonus. You know, I love trains, right? They stop at midnight, they don't keep you awake, I never go to bed before midnight anyway. I, I'd actually pay extra to have trains going past my house, okay? Equally, my children have left school, so the school catchment area can be, you know, some crackheads academy, doesn't bother me, right? Because, okay, my kids are twenty-two, right? And the other, the third one, which will be a massive bonus to me, I couldn't believe my parents-in-law once didn't buy a beautiful Georgian house. Wait for the reason, because

• 17:41Rory Sutherland?

  he was next to a pub, right? I think, oh, sorry, I'm totally confused here. That's the best garden in the world, right? It's not Sissinghurst, it's a beer garden, right? Because it's a garden and it's got beer. Now, I actually knew some people who lived next to a pub and they had such a good relationship with the landlord, they could actually order over the fence. So if they had a barbecue, they could just go, you know, four pints of the usual. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, to a lot of people, being next to a pub is an absolute nightmare, you know, flight path, okay? If you're, if you're completely deaf, go and buy a place in the Heathrow flight path, because it's not going to bother you, but it's going to bother everybody else. So the other thing about this very regimented mode of choice is that it prevents you from gaming the system. Yes.

• 18:23Rory Sutherland?

  Now, to be honest, what makes someone initially attractive at first glance and what makes the relationship enduring, okay, are not the same thing. They're not the same criteria. Therefore, using what you might call first glimpse criteria in a house, in an employee, in a potential partner, okay? If you're, if you're seriously after a long-term relationship, which after all, you are with a house and you are with an employee, you may or may not be when you're on an online dating site, that varies, okay? The first glimpse criteria are totally unreliable as a guide to long-term enjoyment. So, this is why my wife's going to kill me for this, okay? The kind of person you want to marry,

• 19:07Rory Sutherland?

  right, isn't something that everybody wants. It's something the value of which you only discover on repeated familiarity, on, on long-term familiarity. Hmm. So you want, what you want is an air fryer girlfriend or a Japanese toilet girlfriend, okay, right? Not a Corvette girlfriend, do you see what I mean? Right? You want something which actually you know the value of fully because over long-term exposure, they're actually technically called in economics, they're called experience goods. Okay.

• 19:36Rory Sutherland?

  What's interesting about an experience good is that it's something the value of which only becomes apparent with use. Hmm. Okay, I'm sorry, this is terrible using that economic term to refer to relationships.

• 19:47Chris Williamson?

  It's not the worst thing people have said about relationships on the internet.

• 19:50Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, you're probably right.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:52Rory Sutherland?

  But that is, that is fundamentally interesting that what the internet has done, that the two things are, is that in many cases, the thing it yields up as the first filtration point is not a very good proxy to begin with. But secondly, and this is, I think, the worst problem, if everybody is using the same first stage filter because everybody's on Tinder or whatever it may be. Okay. Then effectively, it's going to create a totally inefficient market clearing mechanism because demand disproportionately goes towards those people who happen to meet those initial, those initial proxy criteria. Now, that strikes me fundamentally as a problem in all three of those markets.

• 20:33Chris Williamson?

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• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Head to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom to get a free sample pack of all eight flavors with your first box, plus there is a no BS, no questions asked refund policy, so you can buy it 100% risk free. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Did you read Seth Stephens Davidowitz's book, Everybody Lies? So he was an ex-data scientist at Google, and then he did another book called Don't Trust Your Gut.

• 21:39Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, no, I haven't read that.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  So the second one, Don't Trust Your Gut, looks at this specific problem. It looks at what is the issue? By the way, nicotine plus that is like just going to be the supercharged. Yeah, I know, yeah, beautiful. What flavors that?

• 21:54Rory Sutherland?

  This one's, I think, cherry, I think.

• 21:55Chris Williamson?

  Very good.

• 21:56Rory Sutherland?

  With my cataract, I can't bloody read this. This is, this is gonna be the first ever guest Chris has had where half of our conversation is about medical problems.

• 22:04Chris Williamson?

  That's totally fine. Yeah, in his second book, he looks at people who basically haven't been priced into the market when it comes to dating and.

• 22:14Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, who's single makes no sense, does it? If you actually go around the world and meets people who are single and meet people who are in relation.

• 22:20Chris Williamson?

  Highly educated women. Highly educated women, one of the most overrepresented single groups. You've got women who can contribute a ton of money to a household, et cetera, et cetera.

• 22:30Rory Sutherland?

  I'm married to a highly educated woman.

• 22:36Rory Sutherland?

  My God, my God, the arguments, never mind. Okay, but no, no, but also because historically, effectively, this may change. Okay, so women are more reluctant to marry down at an education level than men are.

• 22:51Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 22:52Rory Sutherland?

  Interestingly, probably because men are shallower and they'll just go, well, you know.

• 22:57Chris Williamson?

  That 21 year old barista that can't spell her own name.

• 22:59Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, it's your atrophy wife, as I call them, you know, very thin second wife. Yes, exactly.

• 23:07Rory Sutherland?

  But you know, you notice that the people, you have that very weird breed of people who are sort of very rich and very, very thin, you know.

• 23:14Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 23:16Rory Sutherland?

  But, but you know, so, I mean, Chris Rock did a whole routine on this, didn't he? Which was, what was it? Men can't go backwards sexually, women can't go back in lifestyle, was I think the Chris Rock routine. One thing that I think deserves study, which is interesting, is a huge generation of the most successful comedians are also amateur or amateur, effectively evolutionary thinkers, aren't they?

• 23:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Rory Sutherland?

  So if you look at Gervais, absolutely fascinated by kind of Darwinian evolution and so on, absolutely true of, say, Andrew Schultz, true of Jimmy Carr. Jimmy Carr actually wrote that, co-wrote that book with Lucy Greaves, The Naked Jape, which is a absolutely fascinating kind of investigation into the evolutionary origins of comedy. And actually, there are a few more than that. I mean, you know, I think you can see it in Dave Chappelle, you can see it in Chris Rock, a lot of that stuff. There's a huge influence, and there seems to be a significant correlation between interest in kind of evolutionary psychology and comedy.

• 24:16Chris Williamson?

  Well, ultimately, it tells us why we are the way we are, right? And that is one of the insights. To say the thing that everybody knows but no one has named, or no one dares say,

• 24:26Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 24:26Chris Williamson?

  is one of the greatest forms of comedy that you can find. There was something else. I remember,

• 24:31Rory Sutherland?

  but also, I suppose it's all about, I mean, I suppose, you know, recontextualisation. So comedians are going to be very, very open to different ways of looking at the world, because it is, to some extent, the source, you know, that contextual flip is at the root of quite a lot of comedy.

• 24:46Chris Williamson?

  Misdirection.

• 24:47Rory Sutherland?

  Misdirection, exactly. But it is fascinating, because like music, we have this debate, what is the evolutionary function? And one of the things that strikes me as odd is that we don't look at comedy as a source of inspiration for wider problem solving. So I did an interview with Jimmy Carr at Adweek, which was a kind of advertising festival, which, by the way, is, as you must have found, I mean, people like him, for example, the, what you might call brain-to-mouth speed is extraordinary, isn't it?

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  Terrifying.

• 25:18Rory Sutherland?

  There's that great phrase in television, which is called brain-to-mouth, and, you know, Jonathan Ross, or whatever, people like that are very, very good as interviewers, because they can basically form a thought and speak it more or less in parallel. And I found that really interesting in terms of, you know, talking to Jimmy Carr, because it's rather like, you know, you fancy yourself a bit. There was a wonderful thing I saw, actually, on, I think it was the A299 in East Kent, which was one, you know, you know, those sort of hoted-up Citroens, which are like the hot hatch with enormous kind of

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  Unnecessary tailpipes.

• 25:51Rory Sutherland?

  Unnecessarily large tailpipes, and a ludicrously large woofer that takes over the whole of the boot. And one of those on the A299 decided to take on a McLaren F1. Okay. And I have to say, it was comical to watch. The guy actually, you know, acquitted himself in the first sort of five seconds reasonably well. But I felt a bit like that, you know, talking to Jimmy Carr, because, you know, you work in a business where...

• 26:16Chris Williamson?

  You were the Citroen with the big subwoofer.

• 26:17Rory Sutherland?

  I was the Citroen with the unfeasibly large tailpipes. And similarly, I've always been in awe of Andrew Schultz for the crowd work. Just has just has a speed which is just terrifying.

• 26:30Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, mate. So someone asked me the other day, who are the easiest people to speak to? And who are the most difficult people to speak to on the show? And I definitely find that comedians are the ones that I need to be the most switched on for. Mark Mark Norman, in particular, Mark is so it's such a game of it's not a game of tennis. It's a game of ping pong. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. But it's that it's that kind of pace. And you're right, he rides the crest of now. It's oddly a some Harassian sort of type thing. He's just living in the perpetual present and just deploying thoughts as they come to him. And the lack of filter and the precision of his speech just allows him to just things just fall out of him.

• 27:14Rory Sutherland?

  And there's always this weird debate about creativity, which is it kind of comes in two forms. One of which is what you might call sheer innate genius. And the other one is hyper accelerated rationality, which is just in the same time that the other person is getting from A to B, you're already at F.

• 27:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Rory Sutherland?

  But I mean, what interests me also is if you look at political movements, given the fact that psychology is often quite oblique, the way to solve a problem. This is this is what really, really bothers me about politics at the moment, which is in fact, it's what my next book is about, if I can give a taster, which is the question is, do you want to win arguments or do you want to solve problems? Because the mode of thinking you adopt, if you want to solve a problem, is much more open minded, much less dogmatic. Okay, it's much more oblique and creative than the mode you would adopt if you want to win an argument. And what we've done is we've selected for our leadership, for our politicians,

• 28:15Rory Sutherland?

  in some cases for our business people, and we've educated for, and we've promoted for the ability to win arguments. Okay. And actually, winning an argument and solving a problem are two completely different skill sets, I'd argue. So there's what always fascinates me about Andrew Schultz is, okay, if Andrew Schultz said, you know, five percent of what he says on stage in a corporate environment or at Yale, okay, you know, if you consider, you know, Rob Henderson's experience at Yale, okay, you know, they practically have the place shut down for defumigation, okay?

• 28:51Chris Williamson?

  The contaminated zone.

• 28:53Rory Sutherland?

  And yet, his audiences are completely mixed in every sense. I mean, if you want a really, if you want a really, really diverse group of people, genuinely representative and diverse, and Andrew Schultz's audience is pretty much as good as it gets. And he solves the problem, which is interesting, okay, not by pretending, say, race or gender don't exist, okay, but by highlighting the distinctions and then taking the piss at them. Yeah. Okay. Now, from an oblique kind of creative point of view, you have to ask the question, is that actually a better way of solving the problem than, for example, the extreme dogmatism of, say, the politically correct movement? I don't like using the word woke particularly. Okay. Now, you know, is

• 29:37Rory Sutherland?

  part of the solution that, you know, in other words, do you actually make people pretend not to notice ethnic differences and as a consequence, become incredibly anxious in the presence of any of those differences? Okay. Or do you actually acknowledge them, make light of them?

• 29:54Chris Williamson?

  But both of them are trying to tune down the seriousness. Both of them try to say, okay.

• 29:59Rory Sutherland?

  But one of them works.

• 30:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes, precisely.

• 30:02Rory Sutherland?

  Now, here's a question I want. I want to do some empirical testing on this. Okay, you do occasionally at comedy clubs, you do occasionally get a pissed guy who heckles, and everybody gets really angry. Okay. But do you get violence ever outside comedy clubs?

• 30:15Chris Williamson?

  Outside?

• 30:16Rory Sutherland?

  Well, inside or outside?

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  I once, I've seen one video in the last few years where a heckler has tried to start on a comedian, but unbelievably rare.

• 30:25Rory Sutherland?

  It's unbelievably rare.

• 30:27Chris Williamson?

  Especially given that you're pointing out people and saying stuff about them or their wife or their relationship or their chastity or whatever.

• 30:35Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, I recommended, I couldn't make it to Andrew Schultz at the Royal Albert Hall, but I recommended people went for the limited visibility seats, not only because they were cheaper, but because, given his crowd work.

• 30:45Chris Williamson?

  The blast radius, they were safer.

• 30:47Rory Sutherland?

  The brilliant thing is, I could hide behind a pillar and it's very unlikely I'd be singled out as like the whitest guy he'd ever seen, or whatever it might have been.

• 30:54Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 30:55Rory Sutherland?

  And so, you know, what's interesting is those comedy audiences are really fascinating just in terms of their demographic constituency.

• 31:03Chris Williamson?

  It's teaching people a sort of a degree of intellectual humbleness, being able to cast off the tension that you have when watching something occur by laughing. So I've noticed this, I'm preparing for my first live tour, which is happening around the UK and Ireland in a couple of weeks' time. And as a part of this, I did a ton of work in progress shows and we could feel, I could see in the room and feel in the room tension arising as I'm talking about, whatever the thing is that I'm talking about, this section about confidence, or this section about regret, or this section about whatever. And there was bits where you needed a laugh, almost kind of like how a dog shakes its coat when it's wet. It needs to just cast it off.

• 31:45Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah. So here's an interesting analogy, okay, in terms of being right versus solving the problem, okay? Now, if you want to win arguments, or if you want to win the respect of a peer group who hold a particular set of political views, what tends to happen is you get into a virtue spiral, I think that's what it's called in the book.

• 32:03Chris Williamson?

  Purity spiral.

• 32:04Rory Sutherland?

  Purity, thank you, purity spiral. You become absolutist. And then, because conflict is inherently interesting, an argument is inherently interesting. So if we hear outside some people having an amicable conversation, we won't even bother to get up. If we hear a fight starting to break up, or two people shouting at each other, we'll have our noses pressed to the window to see what's happening. And journalists and newspapers and media know this, so they focus on those areas where there is the greatest polarization, which means you're focusing on the part of the problem which is most difficult to solve. So the example I give, because I'm going to move away from politics, because when you mention politics, everything suddenly drives people to this polarization. I try, I aspire to be the most left wing person on the alt right.

• 32:49Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, which is, which is, which is, I find the conversation of the alt right inherently interesting, but I try not to become part of it. And I occasionally, you know, I write for the spectator, but I occasionally write about the virtues of Henry George or the insights of Karl Marx, just to shake the whole thing up. Bloody interesting guy, Marx, by the way. Okay, right. I mean, the, I think, I think the actual, the, the way I put it is the diagnosis is fascinating and the prescription is terrible. Correct. Okay. Correct. Now, okay, the perfect exemplar of where this problem goes wrong, and this is very difficult if you work in advertising and marketing, because quite often you're not criticizing the intentionality or the aspiration of the person. You're merely saying that

• 33:34Rory Sutherland?

  the way you're going about this isn't working very well. Okay. So, yes, you know, nearly all the aspirations of, say, the diversity and inclusion movement are those which we should all generally support. And I don't want to ever get into that kind of weird, you know, weird thing where you start getting angry about trigger warnings, because if you give it about 10 minutes thought, you realize that trigger warnings, although they're a bit funny, and it's a bit weird when Netflix says may contain nicotine use, okay, which, you know, never put anybody off going to the cinema in 1946, you know, imagine if you had to do that, Casablanca warning nicotine use. It's a bit weird, okay, but it's a great idea. Okay. Some people may be deeply upset by certain forms of content, and you

• 34:18Rory Sutherland?

  should at least give them the opportunity to kind of opt out or to avoid it. I don't, you know, yeah, okay, we can debate what is triggering, but nonetheless, it's broadly speaking, an intelligent principle, I think. Now, so the example I'll choose won't be from politics, because politics automatically leads people to become tribal, and therefore they have to take a side. Okay. And the example I think is perfect is Cycling Mikey. Cycling Mikey is a YouTuber, okay, and he goes around, he stands at a place in London called Gandalf Corner, and if he sees a car ducking around the wrong side of a Keep Left island, he just stands in front of it and refuses to let them move, takes a photograph, reports them to the police, he's, he's.

• 35:02Rory Sutherland?

  He's got Guy Ritchie, I think he got, did he get Guy Ritchie banned because he photographed him using a mobile phone while stationary waiting for a set of traffic lights? And he sends his film footage to the police, he puts it up on YouTube, okay? Now, I basically support what he's trying to do, okay? Because I think cycling safety is incredibly important and these people are doing bad things, okay? We've all done it, let's be honest, okay? We've all used a mobile phone when driving, we've just been lucky enough to get away with it and I wish I'd never done it, okay? Where cycling, like, is less effective, however, is his mode of delivery, which is so combative and so effectively polarizing, okay, that it actually becomes counterproductive.

• 35:47Rory Sutherland?

  Now, where he, you know, he, he, he's, he's well-intentioned, which is he wishes to increase cyclist's safety, no, no one's disagreeing with that, okay? Where he's less effective is in disabusing people of the well-established stereotype that all Africanas are bastards, because he does things which are inherently, first of all, he's a little bit unfair because when he catches, when cyclists misbehave, one, you can't report them to the police because they don't have a licence plate. Secondly, he claims that if you stand in front of a cyclist or a motorcycle, they might fall off, so he can't actually stop motorcyclists and cyclists performing egregious and illegal acts, so he concentrates entirely on the motorist. But then he basically goes, stands in front of them on the road and then effectively

• 36:30Rory Sutherland?

  does things which are, I mean, we don't really have a massive culture of vigilantism in this country. Reporting other people to the police is something we're pretty reluctant to do. You know, it's not a hallmark of a nice culture when people are bragging, you know, basically, you know, lagging to the screws, as it used to be called in Prisoner of Cell Block H, right? Okay, it's something you just don't do. But secondly, I'm there as a marketing guy going, look, I support what you're trying to do, but you've been driven into this extreme position where your purity spiral is so extreme that actually it's counterproductive.

• 37:05Rory Sutherland?

  And so, you you know, you're very, very good at feeling confident in your own opinions, but actually, your ability to bring, now, if you notice in advertising, it's very rare that you're nasty to users of your competing product, okay? You don't get Ford ads going, if you drive a Vauxhall, you're a twat.

• 37:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Rory Sutherland?

  Okay? Because genuinely, people want to win over people who are either undecided or in a rival camp. And it's not a good idea, and you won't see much advertising that does that. To patronize them or to effectively become incredibly sanctimonious, as he does. I mean, extraordinarily sanctimonious. And I think it's, I think it's a kind of example of a pattern you see, where people's desire to be entirely on the right drives them to practice counterproductive behaviours. Because, I mean, uh, this, you know, for example, I think, as a marketing guy, I can't help watching this thing and say, if you're actually very nice to those people

• 38:03Rory Sutherland?

  and you handed them a leaflet which you produced yourself, you know, just warning them of cyclist safety.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 38:09Rory Sutherland?

  I think it would probably be quite effective.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:11Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, I was actually, I went on a speed awareness course, I don't know if you ever had that.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  I've had to do it once, I had the pleasure.

• 38:16Rory Sutherland?

  I turned up thinking, this is total arse, but I'm doing it to avoid the points. It was pretty worthwhile. At the end, at the end of it, I went away going, okay, I have rethought quite a bit of my driving pattern as a consequence of what I learned.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  It's re-education.

• 38:30Rory Sutherland?

  Now, if you turn, so there's this huge problem, okay? Which is that everything, now, I think Douglas Murray says this, which I thought was interesting. It was actually at a dinner, which he said, his, the real reason he gets angry about the culture wars, which I think is the right reason to be angry about them, is not because somebody's wrong and somebody's right and goodness knows what. It's the extraordinary opportunity cost. That while we are arguing about these things that are very difficult to decide and which automatically polarize people, there are a hundred problems we we could solve, okay? Which would actually appeal to everybody.

• 39:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, as he says, while the barbarians are at the gates, we'll be debating about what gender they are.

• 39:05Rory Sutherland?

  Well, this is an interesting one, because I'd also argue, let's take cyclists and motorists, okay? Every, it's in everybody's interests to effectively foster hostility between these two groups. Even though, of course, quite a lot of people straddle both groups. Outside London, it's quite rare to be a cyclist who doesn't also own a car.

• 39:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 39:23Rory Sutherland?

  Okay, not, not, not totally rare, but most people outside London, most households have access to a car in some shape or form. And Martin there is that imagine what you could have done if instead of fostering cyclist motorist hostility by focusing on the areas where there's the most discord and the most disagreement, imagine if you both said, okay, there are two things that most, one thing that motorists hate and cyclists hate even more potholes, right? Now.

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  Bind them together.

• 39:53Rory Sutherland?

  Bind them together and say, look, potholes are really annoying to car owners because you've got to get your tyres replaced, which by the way is environmentally bad as well.

• 40:00Chris Williamson?

  Fucking mortal terror to a cyclist.

• 40:03Rory Sutherland?

  Total terror to a cyclist, particularly if you're on one of those narrow, tired, you know, titanium-rich thingy wabs with your Elytra and everything else. And so it's, it's kind of interesting, which is, the point is that the opportunity cost of this focus on problems that divide, you know, problems where the solution acutely divides people is, has a huge creative opportunity cost, because the thing to do if you have two people who disagree about something is to change the question. Okay, obviously we're not getting anywhere here, so let's just solve something else.

• 40:38Chris Williamson?

  There's a quote, there's a quote from Scott Alexander, which is really great. It says, "If you're interested in being on the right side of disputes, you will refute your opponent's arguments, but if you're interested in producing truth, you will fix your opponent's arguments for them. To win, you must fight not only the creature you encounter, you must fight the most horrible thing that can be constructed from its corpse."

• 40:58Rory Sutherland?

  Well, let me, I'll, I'll, I'll come back to you with a quote, which is Thomas Sowell. As I said, I'm the most left-wing person on the alt-right. I'm, I'm a very big admirer of quite a lot of the people, Sowell included.

• 41:10Chris Williamson?

  Thomas Sowell's phenomenal.

• 41:11Rory Sutherland?

  Absolutely phenomenal guy. "Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." Okay, now, one of the weirdest things about this movement, okay, and one of the most tiring things about being politically correct as a Brit is weirdly you have to pretend you're American.

• 41:35Rory Sutherland?

  Because, okay, if you think about it, okay, there are loads of problems you can solve at the local level, this place here, okay, sort out the fucking signage, right? I mean, first of all, you come into a place to find it, and it's like the Saint Valentine's Day massacre, you know, you come into this weird news, okay, where the only thing you can imagine happening there, you know, it looks as if, you know, the interior decor has been done by Pete Doherty, right? And then you go, the signage and the numbering is completely batshit insane, and you can only read the actual number of each door if the sun is at a particular angle, okay? So there are all these things we can do to solve problems locally at a smaller level. But if you want to feel self-important, you concentrate on the problems at the top, you know, things like, effectively, politics.

• 42:17Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, if you look at actually even things at the level of kind of, probably not London, actually, but if you look at, I don't know, why do we never get any coverage of, say, the mayor of Manchester or the mayor of the West Midlands? We get a load of coverage of Scottish politics, right? Okay, because why? Because there's a massive divisive issue there, which gets people worked up, which is Scottish independence. Where, by the way, we're asking the wrong question anyway, the question should be what kind of independence do we want? Not, do we have independence or don't we? Completely lacking in nuance, anyway, okay? You never get any coverage, no coverage. Now, bear in mind, the population of Scotland is smaller than the population of Yorkshire, okay? Most people don't realise that, they think because it's kind of large geographic area, that there are about fifteen or twenty million people living in Scotland.

• 43:00Chris Williamson?

  Abandoned.

• 43:01Rory Sutherland?

  It's very small population, because all the really talented ones moved to Wales in the nineteenth century.

• 43:08Rory Sutherland?

  Sorry, that's just my, that's just my own ancestry, sorry, you know, in search of people who weren't permanently angry about nothing in particular. And so my great-grandfather moved from Caithness to the South Welsh Valleys, because it was kind of, in fairness, Cardiff was like the Dubai of the, of late nineteenth century.

• 43:25Chris Williamson?

  Cardiff was like the Dubai of the late nineteenth century.

• 43:28Rory Sutherland?

  First place in the world where a million pound contract was signed was in Cardiff Dock, it was coal, so it was effectively the largest coal exporting port in the world.

• 43:36Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 43:36Rory Sutherland?

  And by the way, not your shitty German coal, proper quality coal.

• 43:40Chris Williamson?

  Right, here's a question.

• 43:41Rory Sutherland?

  Sorry.

• 43:42Chris Williamson?

  Here's a question for you, why is it that when we look at the exports of national identities from the UK and Ireland to the rest of the world? England, English people, we have a position although we get referred to as being British.

• 43:58Rory Sutherland?

  Yep.

• 43:58Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Northern Irish people kind of do, Southern Irish people absolutely definitely do.

• 44:04Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Chris Williamson?

  Even Scottish people do.

• 44:06Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, Scottish marketing is brilliant. I mean, as a nation brand, it's absolutely potent as hell. Yeah.

• 44:11Chris Williamson?

  Why does no one, what's happened to Wales? Why has Wales not managed to establish itself on the global geopolitical branding?

• 44:20Rory Sutherland?

  There's an interesting debate about this. One Welsh commentator, I'm not, don't shoot the messenger here, suggests that Welsh people who move somewhere else very rapidly kind of lose their Welshness and assimilate anywhere. That's his argument. So if you look at the contribution of Welsh Americans, okay. Now, you've never heard, you've never heard that hyphen before, have you? Okay.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  Irish American, Scottish American.

• 44:43Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, absolutely. You've never heard of Welsh American. It includes like Thomas Jefferson, okay? It includes arguably Elvis, about 50% of country singers. Tammy Wynette, real surname Pew, okay, right? If you actually, Hillary Clinton, funnily enough, is I think half Welsh, okay? So you have this, but there is, I mean, if you ask people who are American about their Welsh ancestry, they may dimly know that they have some Welsh ancestry. It barely extends to knowing where it is. Whereas if they've got Scottish or Irish ancestry, it informs every fucking cell of their being, even if they're like a 16th Irish.

• 45:22Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 45:22Rory Sutherland?

  They start wearing green things.

• 45:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, uh, and you know, um, to the slight annoyance, by the way, of real Irish people, I might add, okay? To be honest, okay. And quite a few people who are very proud of their Irish heritage are actually descended from Northern Irish Protestants, what's sometimes called in the United States Scots Irish, but they don't even know that. Okay? So, you know, I think Henry Ford, there's a huge Irish American contingent of people who are effectively from Northern Ireland. Um, but again, that distinction isn't really made.

• 45:59Rory Sutherland?

  There's an argument that it was at the time of the American Civil War where people tended to take sides on that basis. I'm not quite sure. But generally, that doesn't, that hasn't pervaded until the, you know, 2023. But the Welsh have done a bad job. And there's actually a group called Global Welsh, which I belong to, which looks at this question of kind of, I mean, the greatest Welsh American, by the way, was a guy called Russell Camel Humphries, who was number two to Al Capone. Okay, I'm not making this up. Okay. So this guy, who was, by the way, he was known by the, by the various feds and people out for him as the nicest man in the mob. Okay. And big Welsh from, I think he was from Carno, which is in kind of the middle, you know, kind of mid Wales, tiny little bit, his parents

• 46:43Rory Sutherland?

  were. Okay. And he was entirely Welsh. And, sorry, did I say Russell? Murray, Murray the Camel Humphries. And, or Murray the Hump, he was known as, which is either to do with Humphries or to do with the fact that he wore a camel coat. But I think, I think, he effectively, he would occasionally kill people, but he'd only negotiate, he'd always negotiate first. And I think one of the senior feds who was supposed to arrest him, actually refused to turn up to arrest him because he liked him personally. Okay. And didn't want to be part of the arrest. And he was also violently against cussing, by the way. Okay.

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. So he's a killer, but not a swearer.

• 47:26Rory Sutherland?

  A killer, but not a swearer. No, no, he didn't, didn't like any of that, any of that.

• 47:28Chris Williamson?

  Very puritan.

• 47:29Rory Sutherland?

  But, but research him because it's really, really, it's comically funny, the idea of a Welsh guy in the mob.

• 47:34Chris Williamson?

  I looked at a study recently that showed an inverse correlation between marriage length and cost of engagement ring and wedding combined. That the more that is spent on the engagement ring, and the more that is spent on the wedding.

• 47:48Rory Sutherland?

  Which you almost, in pure economic terms, you'd expect it to be the other way around because the sunk cost of wedding.

• 47:53Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Skin in the game.

• 47:54Rory Sutherland?

  Should, skin in the game should ensure the duration of the wedding. Equally, what are you trying to prove?

• 47:59Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 48:00Rory Sutherland?

  Okay.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What, what have you learned? You must have some insights about engagement rings and their heritage and their history.

• 48:06Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, what is, what is interesting is that. Uh. There is a degree where what you're practicing there is a form of commitment device. In other words, it's an unrecoverable sunk cost, which is upfront expense being proof of long-term commitment. And I've made that point that some advertising works that way. Okay. In other words, you wouldn't spend a fortune advertising this car if it were a waste of time for me to test drive it.

• 48:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 48:33Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. So, once you've spent the money on advertising, it's gone. Therefore, the only possible value of advertising is that it leads to a sale. Therefore, if you are advertising a new product heavily, you are confident, rightly or wrongly, but it doesn't matter, you yourself, who know the product better than the buyer does, is confident in terms of its long-term appeal and desirability when test-driven. And so, you know, some part of advertising undoubtedly works through sheer

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  Costly.

• 49:02Rory Sutherland?

  expenditure, sheer costly signaling.

• 49:04Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't it, you, you guys did a study where heavyweight paper was the most effective thing to increase charity donations?

• 49:11Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, that's right. Yes. Now, you'll never, ever get any. What's so interesting about some of this research is it uncovers things which people feel but don't even think or say. So there's this quote, probably wrongly attributed to David Ogilvy, that he said the trouble with market research is that people don't think what they feel, they don't say what they think, and they don't do what they say. Now, no, everybody would say that a charity donation should be sent out on the cheapest paper possible because you should minimize your marketing cost. What we found is that when you put slightly more expensive paper in the donation envelope, it was for Christian Aid Week, actually, slightly more people give, but people give much more large donations. So the volume of donations over fifty or a hundred pounds was significantly increased. Now, that's unconscious. It's

• 49:56Rory Sutherland?

  probably, you know, if this thing is flimsy, there may be a certain degree of reciprocation in that, which is they've sent me a bit of, nice bit of paper, I owe them fifty quid. I mean, you know, how it works, by the way, why it works, you could come up with four or five different possible explanations. But those kind of things are really fascinating because they are, they belong to that field of activity which you can only prove through testing. Market research won't tell you the answer. Pure theory won't tell you the answer. You have to test.

• 50:26Chris Williamson?

  I'm not a very prejudiced man, but given my background as a nightlife club promoter, living and breathing flyers and paper for a very long time.

• 50:34Rory Sutherland?

  Did you do that nightclub game where you created artificially long queues?

• 50:37Chris Williamson?

  Of course I did.

• 50:38Rory Sutherland?

  Of course you did.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  Of course I did. Let me, let me, let me give you this one first. So one of the few prejudices that I have in my life is against single sided flyers. Single sided flyers are around about 90% as expensive to do double sided flyers because almost all flyers are double sided. My second biggest prejudice are against double sided flyers with the same thing printed on both sides. You have two sides of a piece of paper.

• 51:03Rory Sutherland?

  That basically says, I can't even be bothered here. What should we put on the back? Oh, just put the same thing.

• 51:07Chris Williamson?

  Command C, command V, send it. I don't care. Then after that, just tiny, tiny little things that you can do. We found that if you go, there's something called a spot UV, which is the kind of gloss that you put over the top of a piece of paper that gives it a smooth finish. If you go uncoated, which isn't that much more again, and if you go a little bit heavier GSM, you get this almost sort of organic furry feel to it. It's like every innocent smoothie label, right? You know, it kind of feels a bit more kind of raw and organic and natural.

• 51:36Rory Sutherland?

  We see what we're talking about here is this brilliant thing. Okay, which is, it's very simple if you want to solve problems. Okay. Which is stop trying to think like Newton and come up with universal, universally applicable, context free laws. Okay. That's been done. Okay. It's called physics. Okay. We've done that. Instead, you've got to think like Darwin. Okay. Now.

• 51:58Rory Sutherland?

  We mentioned earlier this this difference between effectively evolutionary thinking, which I think um the evolution is a study of how things change, not how things are. Okay, that's a fundamental difference. What do you mean? Well, evolution come the the most banal description of evolution, but which is also incredibly insightful is things are the way they are because they got that way. Okay, which sounds like absurdity, but when you when you actually think a little bit more deeply, then it forces you to ask the question, well, how do they get that way? Okay, and where else could we go from here? You know, what are the tools that are disposable to to get from here to somewhere better? Okay, now, one of the things I think that is an obstacle to problem solving, I think the reason

• 52:43Rory Sutherland?

  that comedians are often evolutionary thinkers, Ricky Gervais being an obvious case, but John Cleese, another one, okay, absolutely fascinated by um, you know, evolutionary thought, is because it's a gate it's a gateway to complexity. It's a gateway to thinking in terms of complex systems and complex systems changing over time. And and it's an escape from the idea that there must be universal laws. I've got a friend called Jag Bhala, known on the web as Hanging Noodles, who always argues that we monotheistic cultures like Christianity have a disadvantage in our thinking because unlike Hindus, um, we're prone to what he calls monotheorism. We need one theory to explain everything. Okay, and he points out that actually in Hinduism, you you know, we don't have that problem

• 53:27Rory Sutherland?

  because we're used to the fact that there's, you know, the the elephant and the I mean, I think I think he said his mother praised on on an altar which has an elephant, a monkey and Jesus on it. Right. And there's no there's no inherent contradiction to that. Now, actually, that's why I'm quite hopeful about having a Hindu prime minister, because I think if we unleashed his uh lack of monotheorism. Yep. And freed him from political dogma. Uh, he could be creatively really quite interesting. But that complexity thing is really interesting because one of the things that you you need to lose in order to understand complex systems is an idea of what you might call discussing things that make you look important. One person called it the higher twaddle, and that's talk that's, you know,

• 54:09Rory Sutherland?

  I noticed this with a former chief executive, you know, if he was interviewed, instead of talking about advertising and, you know, he'd always talk about like the Fed and Janet Yellen, you know, and likely interest rate rises, okay, right?

• 54:21Rory Sutherland?

  And that's kind of, that's a self-important thing to talk about. Weirdly, people in Britain, instead of solving British problems, somehow weirdly adopt American.

• 54:30Chris Williamson?

  It's a signaling thing.

• 54:31Rory Sutherland?

  And it's a signaling thing, which is, I care about these things, and I'm so important that I'm only going to debate them at the very highest level.

• 54:38Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 54:39Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. And so, I mean, there are all these people, people going around trying to defund the police in the United States. I'm a Brit, right? First of all, my responsibility for what I think is a terrible criminal justice system in the United States, my responsibility for that ended in seventeen seventy-six, okay? I don't think it's great, but it's not my problem, okay? Secondly, I wanted to start some Brit demonstrations, going around going, disarm the police.

• 55:03Rory Sutherland?

  Because it's, it's, what's so interesting is if you're American, this defund the police is debatable, but the idea that the police shouldn't carry guns is probably to them so bizarre that they think you're insane, okay? Other things in the United States, four weeks of paid vacation, okay? I've never met anybody in Britain so right-wing that they think we should have less holiday time. Nobody. Zero. Nobody's ever said, well, you get another two percent on GDP growth if we just got rid of people's holiday. Doesn't happen. Never exists.

• 55:31Chris Williamson?

  If we cut maternity leave down to just two and a half weeks.

• 55:34Rory Sutherland?

  No, no, no. Those things, actually, once you have them, they're air fryers, they're Japanese toilets. Once you have them, there's no going back.

• 55:40Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's an evangelist and they get grandfathered in.

• 55:42Rory Sutherland?

  Once you, once, once, once you've got there, you never go back.

• 55:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. And I'm kind of going, well, you know, first of all, you, you have to, now, if you look at what Darwin did to have what is probably one of the five biggest insights, to be honest, I mean, I'm going to stand up for Alfred Russell Wallace, not least because I was born in Lambaddock, which is the same village that he was born in, tiny Welsh village. And my ambition is to be, I think you've probably already succeeded, is the, the second-best evolutionary thinker born in Lambaddock. I think that's a kind of attainable, sensible ambition, okay? But I'm really worried that someone will crop up, you know, you know, Imperial College London.

• 56:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some fledgling evolutionary psychologist from Lombardia.

• 56:25Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly.

• 56:25Chris Williamson?

  Christ.

• 56:26Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah. And. It was very sweet because I spoke at the Royal Institution and I made the prediction that I was probably only the second person from Lambaddock ever to have spoken at the Royal Institution. And sure enough, I think Alfred Russell Wallace spoke there in sort of 1860, whatever it was. It's survived into the 20th century, actually. But if you look at what Darwin did and what Russell Wallace did, okay, they didn't get involved in self-aggrandizing theory first. They went around interesting, funny little places and they looked at the beaks of finches, okay? Now, I think if you want to solve political problems, actually, this is why I love working in advertising, okay? Because you can get down into the weeds of microscopic things like what's the effect

• 57:08Rory Sutherland?

  of choice architecture on property selection or indeed dating websites. You can actually, we have a kind of mantra in our behavioural science practice, which is you dare to be trivial. Because our argument is, in a complex system, quite often the things that make a difference may be surprisingly small, they're kind of butterfly effects, and your job is to look for the point of intervention in the system where the smallest change has the biggest effect. But Mr Fuller called it trim tab, okay? On his gravestone, it says, "Call me trim tab." And the trim tab, I'm not an engineer, but it's the bit on the end of a rudder, I think, on a ship or plane, which only moves slightly, but it's the greatest point of leverage in terms of turning that ship.

• 57:50Rory Sutherland?

  It's like an extra rudder on the end of a rudder or something.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:55Rory Sutherland?

  And my point is that we have, and I had an argument with someone who was the, I think he was the political correspondent of the FT, and I said, "When John Major," a lot of your listeners would be too young to remember this, but I'm always conscious of this, I find myself doing things like now, explaining what a fax machine was and things like that. But when he invented the cones hotline, he was widely ridiculed for that, okay? So he invented this thing, which was a phone number where you could report cones that were blocking off the road where no roadworks were being performed, and you could also say, you know, you could also get advance warning of where cones were going to be.

• 58:34Rory Sutherland?

  At the time he came up with that, he was the prime minister, okay? And this was regarded as the most comical and absurd thing you could possibly imagine.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Like everyone was being tyrannized by roving bands of cones.

• 58:45Rory Sutherland?

  He was solving a problem which, like potholes, which annoys a great number of people all the time. Okay. And it was non controversial, but it was considered absolutely beneath his dignity. Well, my only argument is that probably the way you solve big problems is by tinkering around with a lot of small things. And then sometimes the big problems just weirdly go away. Okay. I think that tackling problems head on is usually counterproductive. But the argumentation tendency that people want to win an argument rather than solving a problem. First of all, causes this tribal polarization, which means that people very rapidly then start saying,

• 59:24Rory Sutherland?

  I won't actually argue for what's good, I'll argue for whatever path of action most annoys my opposing tribe.

• 59:31Chris Williamson?

  Correct, yeah, it's not what's most effective. It's what signals that I am a acolyte.

• 59:39Rory Sutherland?

  Yes, I'm a devoted unquestioning acolyte of this particular.

• 59:43Chris Williamson?

  Let me give you this one. I've come up with this idea of the unreliable ally. So if I know one of your views and from it, I can accurately predict everything else that you believe. You're probably not a serious thinker because you've put your entire world ideology on as a onesie.

• 59:56Rory Sutherland?

  Incidentally, Dominic Cummings' great insight was he said that effectively the language of left or right is a is a tribal convenience for people who are into political cosplay.

• 1:00:08Chris Williamson?

  Correct, correct.

• 1:00:10Rory Sutherland?

  It's rather like, you know, okay, most people are kind of interested in politics in the way that I'm interested in Star Wars, which is I'll watch it if it happens to be on, but I'm not going to go to a convention and dress as Darth Vader. Okay. And politics is full of the kind of people who dress up as Darth Vader and, you know, get unbelievably involved in insane details of, you know, how the Federation is actually the governance of the Federation or something, okay? Most people aren't like that. The other insight of Dominic Cummings was he said, most people in reality are both more left wing and more right wing than politicians fully understand. So ordinary people in a way. A saner and more diverse politically than the people who've been forced to take sides.

• 1:00:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they get reduced down to a dashboard though, right? And that isn't able to fully capture, you know, one vote from somebody doesn't fully encapsulate just how far right and how far left you are, because on balance, you aggregated that you are a bit left, so you voted Labour, or you are a bit right, so you voted Conservative. This idea of-

• 1:01:04Rory Sutherland?

  So avoiding that identitarian thing, I mean, you know, I, I, I write for The Spectator, partly because the weird thing is, it would have been completely, actually, no, that's not fair, okay? Actually, that's not fair. I was gonna say that in the 1970s, it would have been the opposite, where the right-wing press got much more annoyed about you writing something left-wing than vice versa. Actually, that's probably not fair of the British press. Very interesting, by the way, which is, if you're American, okay, there's quite a simple narrative which you can reasonably believe, which is that most progress socially, not necessarily economically, but most social progress happens under a democratic regime, okay? So you go back to say, "Votes for Women"? That was my cousin Woodrow, who is bizarrely, he's like my fourth cousin twice through.

• 1:01:49Rory Sutherland?

  His mum was English, from a Scottish family, okay? Um, I, I, I, just, just to even things out, my, my other traced American relative is in prison in Washington State for kidnapping and attempted murder, so swings and roundabouts, right?

• 1:02:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:03Rory Sutherland?

  Um, but, um, uh, the, the interesting thing there is that, you know, most of those kind of, uh, forward movements, the civil rights movement, et cetera, happened under, in a democratic regime, okay? And so it's very easy, if you take the American narrative on board, which is basically, they're these well-intentioned Democrat people who do nice things, and then Republicans tend to be nasty, okay? I don't think that maps very neatly onto the UK, okay? So if you look at the UK, uh, "Votes for Women" was actually a Conservative government, uh, the NHS was set up undoubtedly by a Labour government, actually, but actually on the recommendations of Beveridge, who was a Liberal, okay? Um, I think, um, "Same-Sex Marriage" was Conservative government, I think the legalization

• 1:02:47Rory Sutherland?

  of, by the way, if you go back, "The Guardian" supported the South in the American Civil War, okay? "The Spectator", a right-wing publication, was about the only publication in the UK to support the, uh, Union against the Confederacy. "The Spectator" in the 1960s, okay, was known as "The Buggers' Bugle". For its campaigning for the legalization of homosexuality, okay? And another force that was absolutely decisive in that campaign was bizarrely the Church of England. So there's, well, not that bizarrely, I suppose, if you consider homosexuals in senior church positions. God. Okay, no, no, no, no, no. At the time, no, no, there were quite a few, trust me, okay? But, but I mean, actually, there was an Archbishop of Canterbury at some point in the sixties who kind of needed protection

• 1:03:32Rory Sutherland?

  because of his position on that matter. If you want, if you want to see a really advanced group in terms of being ahead of the curve on anything, it's the Quakers. I mean, if you're an empiricist, everybody would become a, you know, what we really need is Quaker revival, okay? But the thing is, you can't have a demonstration, can you, as a Quaker? What do we want? Okay, it doesn't really work. But, but my point is that actually, if you look at it, if you look at the British social progress, as, I mean, you know, the anti-slavery campaign, some of them were Tory, okay? Shaftesbury was. It's actually, British progress is much, much less easy to, uh, kind of stereotype than in the United States.

• 1:04:13Rory Sutherland?

  And so, you know, you actually look at the, you know, you look at the history of different publications and their opinions on different things. The idea actually, which my kids seemed to absorb, which was everything was horrible until left-wing people came along and made it better. Yeah. Which is more or less this sort of, this force of history thing is kind of a bit borne out, I have to say, in the U, you know, it's complicated, obviously. It's a bit, you know, you could say, well, there is some empirical evidence for that in the United States. Although you had a democratic party which was completely weird for, you know, while the South was overwhelmingly Democrat, you had that kind of weird unholy alliance thing going on. But it's not really safe. And this business of taking American concerns because they're the most important, because it's America, okay?

• 1:04:56Rory Sutherland?

  And getting wildly excited about them in the UK, even though our problems are different, okay? So I'll, I'll give you just a very simple example of this, which is, you know, if you talk about white privilege, okay? And I, I'm to some extent the beneficiary inarguably of exactly that. But the only point I'd make is that when I was, one of the reasons I'm white, okay, apart from the obvious ones, one of the reasons I'm white is I was born in the UK in nineteen sixty five, when I think, someone correct me on this, the population of the UK was ninety seven percent white, okay, in nineteen sixty five. So, you know, the odds that I'm gonna be white, it's not like, it's not, it's not a situation like the United States where you've had generations of people

• 1:05:40Rory Sutherland?

  effectively unfairly disadvantaged, okay. The people who are disadvantaged hadn't arrived at the point when I was being born, to the, to the most part, okay. Now, as a consequence, simply transplanting American history and American preoccupations and American narratives, and imposing them on Australia, the UK, France, okay, doesn't really work. And yet, these people do it because they want to identify themselves with the highest profile, you know, biggest debates de nos jours, so they can take sides. And that's completely inimical to, you know, we got, we got other things to be guilty of if we're Brits, let's be honest, okay.

• 1:06:23Rory Sutherland?

  It's very interesting, actually. I, I had a great aunt who's an anthropologist called Beatrice Blackwood, who spent her, her life kind of connected to the Pitt Rivers Museum. And her diaries survive. And sometime about nineteen twenty three, she went to Memphis, I think, might have been, I think it was Memphis, okay. I thought that was really interesting to see, you know, how does, you know, fairly, you know, obviously as an anthropologist, fairly conventional English woman of nineteen twenty three, upper middle class family, how does she react to going to the American South in the nineteen twenties? And I thought her reaction would be, gosh, this is really, you know, tiny bit, you know, it's a bit dodgy, you know, it's a bit off, you know. She was absolutely horrified. I mean, there's, there's just these pages of her raging against the fact that she wasn't even allowed to visit a black household, because they wouldn't allow

• 1:07:08Rory Sutherland?

  her in, because if word got out that a white woman had been in their house, there'd be trouble. Okay, now.

• 1:07:16Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, we got, we got loads of flaws over here, which we can solve and we can look at. But I don't think, there's a wonderful case from your part of the world, isn't there? Which is a battle where the pubs refused to deny access to coloured servicemen when, when they were billeted, somewhere in the North East, isn't it?

• 1:07:34Chris Williamson?

  Not sure.

• 1:07:34Rory Sutherland?

  Are you a monkey hanger, are you, or?

• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

  Technically a smoggy.

• 1:07:37Rory Sutherland?

  Oh, you're a smoggy.

• 1:07:38Chris Williamson?

  As it's referred to.

• 1:07:39Rory Sutherland?

  The American audience at this point is completely switched off.

• 1:07:42Chris Williamson?

  T-side, middle of the...

• 1:07:43Rory Sutherland?

  Got it, got it.

• 1:07:43Chris Williamson?

  Where ICI, a huge, big industrial plant that spews out all manner of smoke is.

• 1:07:48Rory Sutherland?

  But I mean, you know, different countries, you know, the situation in Canada is fundamentally different from the situation elsewhere. And the idea that you have to solve problems by basically looking to the United States and then just importing wholesale, whatever happens to be the fashionable topic du jour over there, seems to be crazy. And if I were in the US, I'd be competing anyway for four weeks paid vacation, which would benefit everybody.

• 1:08:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that seems to be the, the vanguard of social change should be paid vacation and a bit more maternity leave.

• 1:08:16Rory Sutherland?

  The only person who suggested that was Bernie Sanders and everybody thought he was some sort of communist.

• 1:08:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, I, I'm not sure if it was just because of that, that they thought he was a communist, but there may be other reasons as well. One of my favourite stories that I've learned over the last couple of years about David Ogilvy that I've never got a chance to talk to you about was when Fortune published an article and titled it, "Is David Ogilvy a Genius?", question mark. I asked my lawyer to sue the editor for the question mark.

• 1:08:43Chris Williamson?

  Is there any truth in that?

• 1:08:44Rory Sutherland?

  Gosh.

• 1:08:50Rory Sutherland?

  Funnily enough, he's an interesting case in point because he's a university dropout. Okay, so he didn't have a degree. He was, when he started the agency, he was former chef, failed tobacco farmer. I think during the war, he'd been in MI6, somewhere in Washington as well. He was kind of Ian Fleming character in many respects.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:09Rory Sutherland?

  You know, he, he, and Ian Fleming, by the way, was also successful in a sense, relatively late in life. And by the way, we need more of these stories because, you know, you can re, you know, it's never too late. Colonel Sanders, you know, sorry, was 65 when he founded Kentucky Fried Chicken, as then was, okay?

• 1:09:29Rory Sutherland?

  And David Ogilvy was a kind of Colonel Saunders of advertising. He was relatively late and he had the advantage of surviving for a long time. There are people within Ogilvy who think that his brother Francis, who tragically died young and was based in the UK rather than the US, was as much the brains behind the operation as David was. But I met him once, fortunately, and I knew his wife quite well, his widow now. And, yeah, I think he had some advantages, okay. So he was doing advertising at first for fairly aspirational products at a time of great American Anglophilia. So he was advertising Guinness, Rolls Royce, Schweps, the English Tourist Board, for example, which allowed him to do a particular style of kind

• 1:10:14Rory Sutherland?

  of urbane aspirational advertising at a time when most American advertising was quite crass.

• 1:10:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it was to an educated audience that could work out the inference.

• 1:10:23Rory Sutherland?

  I mean, famously, that Rolls Royce advertisement at sixty miles an hour appeared only twice, and it was in the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  What was that?

• 1:10:30Rory Sutherland?

  Sixty miles an hour, the loudest sound in this new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the electric clock. What is it that makes the Rolls Royce the best car in the world? There really is no magic about it. It is simply patient attention to detail, says an eminent Rolls Royce engineer. I even memorized the subhead. But it's, he was a very, the one thing everybody can learn from him is writing. And he is closest, I think, as a prose writer. If you read his books, one of his books is terrible, weirdly, which I think is called Blood, Brains and Beards, his autobiography. The rest of the books are excellent. I think everybody's allowed one bad book. But it's a wonderful prose style, very similar to Conan

• 1:11:12Rory Sutherland?

  Doyle, in that it's very, very simple and easy to read, with every sort of fifty-seventh word being a slightly more complicated or slightly more highfalutin word, just to remind the reader that the writer isn't an idiot. And I think it's actually a great approach to communication, which is that little signalling of, in the Rolls Royce advertisement, if you are too diffident to drive a Rolls Royce, you can drive a Bentley.

• 1:11:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:35Rory Sutherland?

  She says you have a Bentley with a less kind of grandiose radiator grill, effectively. And you know, and so he was, it was actually, it's a probably actually, you know, other people who are big fans of that kind of prose, so Kingsley Amis was a big admirer of Conan Doyle, and it's a particular way of writing which is incredibly easy to read, but at the same time really intelligent and quite urbane.

• 1:11:58Chris Williamson?

  What I really, what I really loved about, at least my research that I have managed to do with David Ogilvy is his approach to engendering, which you guys have obviously continued now, engendering this, there are no wrong answers creativity kind of culture, which I think is really great.

• 1:12:16Rory Sutherland?

  Well, it's a huge, I mean, I was saying to some clients the other day, we actually, we make it easy for ourselves in one way, which is it's one of very few corporate, this is why I'm very interested in the comedy world, I'm very interested in other forms of anomalous economic activity, if you like, where you're actually paid to be weird. And you, you don't realise how rare and precious it is until you move into, until you encounter management consultants, okay, where the whole thing is kind of templated, formulaic, they recruit engineering graduates, which by the way is a terrible waste of engineering talent. I want engineers going and making bloody things, I don't want them bloody well producing

• 1:12:56Rory Sutherland?

  PowerPoint decks at sort of £200 an hour, what a waste, you know, you know, those people could be producing, I don't know, space rockets or something, but instead they're going and producing these effing PowerPoint decks for management consulting firms. And the, the value of actually having, so most organisations, first of all, regard logic as a good proxy for, in other words, the course of action that has the best argument attached must be the best course of action. And what's unusual about advertising and comedy and a few other things, music obviously, I guess, is that we don't buy that, that we don't buy the idea that whatever has a good argument attached to it must be right, because there's probably a better idea, which

• 1:13:39Rory Sutherland?

  comes from left field, which you won't arrive at through pre-rationalisation, you can only post-rationalise it. Now- That distinction, by the way, is quite interesting. I won't go into the whole thing about Charles Russell Purse, brilliant American philosopher of the 19th century, and I won't go into the stuff about, you know, the whole thing of abductive inference being a different form of mental process. But if you look at actually quite a lot of pharmaceutical progress, okay, it actually happens backwards. Okay, it's not, we have this disease, we need to cure it, ooh, look, let's do these things, here's a cure. Those processes generally lead to fairly, well, actually not that reliable, you know,

• 1:14:23Rory Sutherland?

  tolerable incremental progress over a very long period. Now, let's not discount that, because over a period of 80 years, we do get better at things.

• 1:14:33Rory Sutherland?

  The real breakthrough things happen backwards, okay, which is Viagra, penicillin.

• 1:14:38Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:14:39Rory Sutherland?

  In other words, it's almost a cure for which there is no known disease, rather than a disease for which there's no.

• 1:14:45Chris Williamson?

  What can we use this for? It's giving people erections.

• 1:14:47Rory Sutherland?

  Well, what happened was, it was intended as an angina remedy, Viagra, and there are two stories about it, one of which is that the nurses noticed that when the guys came in for their kind of, people on the trial, when they came in for their kind of check-up, they were sitting in a really weird way.

• 1:15:03Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:15:05Rory Sutherland?

  The other story I've heard is that at the end of the trial, they were told, well, okay, we're obviously processing the trial results, which were pretty inconclusive as far as angina went, so could you hand back any unused pills you have? To which the response in every previous trial had been, yeah, sure, here they are. And at this trial, went, no!

• 1:15:23Rory Sutherland?

  There's also a fascinating story, which is that a German pharmaceutical company got there first, noticed the side effect, and immediately rejected the drug, okay, because they failed to see the opportunity to, in other words, as an, any angina cure that caused people to go around in a priapic state of tumescence was obviously no good as an angina medication, and they failed to see beyond it, which is that, now, I'll tell you two other stories of this, I was talking to some other people, one of the great things about being a vice chairman is you can just go and talk to, I mean, to be honest, okay, most discussion and decision-making and argumentation is top-down, most progress is bottom-up or horizontal, okay?

• 1:16:04Rory Sutherland?

  So we organize organizations in the absolute worst way for problem-solving, which is what, you know, what you need is people who know quite a bit about three different things to solve a problem. Because more and more modern problems aren't problems within a specialism, they're problems that involve the combination of two specialisms. So anyway, here's an interesting one, which is a drugs company I was speaking to, giving a talk to. And to be honest, I think I learn as, when I give these talks to companies, often I learn as much from them as they do from me. They pay me, so fine, okay. This is a case where they were looking at drugs to treat autoimmune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis.

• 1:16:42Rory Sutherland?

  And what happened was that some of the drugs they tested were appalling, right? Because they actually had the opposite effect, they boosted the immune system. And of course, if you've got a disease where your immune system is attacking your own body, it's the worst thing you want to do. So they put these on the shelf and go, okay, you know, rule that out. And then someone a little while later goes, ding. If you're trying to practise immunotherapy for cancer, a drug that strengthens the immune system, that's not a bug, that's a feature. Okay? And similarly, that happened with Night Nurse, which is one of my favourite marketing stories, where they were looking, when they created Night Nurse, and this was long before there was something called Day Nurse, okay, they were looking to produce a flu remedy.

• 1:17:27Rory Sutherland?

  And they produced a very successful, to be honest, it was treating, actually, treating the symptoms rather than the cause, okay? But they produced this flu treatment, so not a remedy but a treatment, which was brilliant, but the downside was it sent you to sleep. So you couldn't drive or operate heavy machinery, um, don't regularly operate heavy machinery, but it's a bit of a... I love that warning. Yeah, I love that warning too, yeah. Oh, fuck, I was about to do some heavy excavating. My afternoon of forklift driving has been taken from me. It's rather like that video message, which is you mustn't show this video on an oil rig. Do you remember that? Yeah. At the beginning of VHS videos, it said, this is not licensed for the display on oil rigs. And you imagine those people 500 miles out in the North Sea going, oh, fuck, press the pause button. We were about to watch Speed 2.

• 1:18:12Rory Sutherland?

  We were just about to watch Speed 2, and that's ruined it for us. You know, any moment now, someone's going to turn up from the Copyright Licensing Authority, and BP are going to be in trouble. And, um, but anyway, um, the fascinating thing is that what happened is they said, okay, so it's no good, it sends people to sleep. And then a little guy, I've always heard the story as a little guy, kind of from the marketing department, said, actually, if you position it as a nighttime flu remedy, okay, the fact that it sends you to sleep... Is a bonus, it's not a problem. So Night Nurse was born by basically reframing, and this is what I said about High Speed Two. I said, High Speed Two is a terrible answer, really, in the sense that it goes at the wrong speed along the wrong route.

• 1:18:57Rory Sutherland?

  Lots of things are terrible about, you know, the whole thing was misconceived. But it was the first thing that was wrong about High Speed Two was the question they asked. And they asked an engineering question, which is how do you transport X people over Y miles at a time of Z, T, okay, right? And so they set down those kind of mathematical parameters. Now, a marketing person would have asked a different question, which is a much more interesting, open-ended question, which has far more scope for expanding the solution space to allow for creative solutions. And the question a marketer would have asked is, how do you make the train service between Manchester and London so good and so enjoyable people feel stupid driving? Now, speed, obviously, okay, speed may be part of that.

• 1:19:41Chris Williamson?

  Convenience, comfort, enjoyability.

• 1:19:44Rory Sutherland?

  Connectivity, catering, okay, variation of seating. So, you know, I mean, you remember Strangers on a Train, those Hitchcock films, where they used to have the observation car at the back of the train? Fuck me. Every time you watch, this is a train in the 1950s, you go, oh god, I wish they had trains like that now. They even had a smoking thing at the back, didn't they? Now, I did have a crazy idea, which is, if you spent the money, okay, this is hypothetical, but this is why comedy is so important. It's much more easy to start silly and rein it back than it is to start boring and rein it forwards, as it were. And I said, just as a hypothetical exercise, if you spent, if you kept the tracks the same and you spent all the money on both buying and recreating the world's greatest steam locomotives, right?

• 1:20:29Rory Sutherland?

  And you ran the trains from Manchester, like your train at 9.15 were pulled by the Union Pacific Big Boy, okay, or the Mallard, right, or a replica of the Mallard. Now, it would be slower, okay, I'm assuming the wifi could be quite good. You wouldn't go into full, you know, kind of, you know, 19th century or, you know, mid 20th century nostalgia. But every single tourist to London would go to Manchester just to ride on the effing train, right? If you had a replica of the bloody Harry Potter train, okay, you'd actually get people coming to London so they could travel to Manchester.

• 1:21:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:06Rory Sutherland?

  If you think that's, by the way, comical, I've got a friend who's the warden of an Oxford college, a former boss of mine, and the tourist visitors to Oxford colleges basically have completely bifurcated. There are colleges which nobody visits and there are colleges which are swarming with tourists. The entire discriminator between those two is whether the college features in a Harry Potter film.

• 1:21:27Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:21:28Rory Sutherland?

  So New College Oxford has a tree, apparently, which is featured in one of the films, and that has tourists swarming in.

• 1:21:34Chris Williamson?

  Cue for this tree.

• 1:21:35Rory Sutherland?

  Next door, you can have a fantastic college, architecturally magnificent, didn't feature in Harry Potter, you know, basically it's.

• 1:21:41Chris Williamson?

  Pointless.

• 1:21:42Rory Sutherland?

  It's, you know, it's what you call those things that blow through the place.

• 1:21:46Chris Williamson?

  Tumbleweed.

• 1:21:47Rory Sutherland?

  Tumbleweed, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:48Chris Williamson?

  What's your thoughts on the abandonment of this billion-dollar train thing? There's something recently that's been thrown up in the air.

• 1:21:55Rory Sutherland?

  You can still solve it. You go and hand the job to, I've said this, you go and hand a hundred million pounds to Johnny Ives, Ive and his mate Mark Newsom. Mark Newsom, Australian designer, already has form here because he designed the Qantas business class seat, which in my opinion is the best, actually, never mind business class, it's the best airline seat ever conceived by the wit of man. And you say, you give them the brief, okay, we've got this stupid railway going along this stupid route, how do you make it just absolutely amazing? I mean, Johnny Ives back in the UK, right, I'm sure a hundred million will get him out of bed, okay? And you just go, okay, you're in charge of the design of the train interiors, you're in charge of the catering, the connectivity, you're brief, open brief, make this journey

• 1:22:36Rory Sutherland?

  so amazing that people want to go on the train for the sake of the train, not for the sake of the journey. That's the brief. It's the brief that Cunard effectively had, okay? So when jet and jet aircraft were invented, okay? The Blue Ribbon, which was that competition for how fast you could cross the Atlantic, became, to be honest, a bit of an academic exercise. Because if you could get there in under a day by plane, even if you had to refuel in Gander, it didn't really matter whether the QE, the Queen Mary was faster than the bloody United States or the Normandy anymore. Okay? So Cunard basically had to go, okay, we've got to stop thinking of these ships as a source of, a form of transportation. They've got to be a destination in themselves. And consequently, they kind of invented the cruise ship industry, sort of.

• 1:23:19Rory Sutherland?

  And I, I don't give them 100% credit, but that idea of, so cruise ships, when you think about it, you board a cruise ship, you go around in a circle and you come back. I mean, you do visits and places.

• 1:23:28Chris Williamson?

  Paying for a journey.

• 1:23:29Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, but actually, the cruise ship is as much of a destination as the destination is. And you can do that with high speed too.

• 1:23:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What would you do?

• 1:23:37Rory Sutherland?

  Train twister is my suggestion. Solution to train overcrowding is to turn close proximity to other people from an annoyance to a source of entertainment. Okay?

• 1:23:46Chris Williamson?

  Lot of intimacy concerns there.

• 1:23:48Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, they're probably, I did think of the legalities, but you know, your next station is head corn, left hand, yellow.

• 1:23:54Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay.

• 1:23:55Rory Sutherland?

  Come on, come on. Well, you'd have, you'd probably have to have gender segregated twisted carriages.

• 1:24:01Chris Williamson?

  That's a concern. It depends if you're going to Brighton or not. That might be a bonus. You've also got the, the issue, I suppose. I've seen a lot of the people that travel up and down. This country is getting older.

• 1:24:11Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Chris Williamson?

  And I'm not sure whether you, you would have to have at each different stop, some sort of paramedic perhaps, or a physio that could give a rub down.

• 1:24:18Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, that is part of the appeal of the cruise ship industry to the elderly in the United States, which is you've got a doctor on board.

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:24:25Rory Sutherland?

  You've got three weeks where your medical care is basically taken care of.

• 1:24:29Chris Williamson?

  If you tumble, tumble down the water slide too quickly.

• 1:24:32Rory Sutherland?

  It's not, not irrelevant. And by the way, if you're a cruise ship doctor, you're a shitting good doctor because you've got to be able to cope with everything, right? You can't specialize.

• 1:24:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:40Rory Sutherland?

  If someone's on board, you're sort of, you know, 200 miles from land. You can't say, I'm terribly sorry, it's not my specialism.

• 1:24:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, from a perforated eardrum to a half.

• 1:24:48Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly, exactly. Yeah. I bet you've got to be a shit hot generalist.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  What would you do to improve business class flights?

• 1:24:55Rory Sutherland?

  Interesting.

• 1:24:57Rory Sutherland?

  Uh yeah, I've got an idea for that for short haul, which is really mischievous. You know how they always say that the the biggest car company in the world, Uber, doesn't own any cars? And the biggest, uh, you know, accommodation company in the world, Airbnb, doesn't own any houses. I've got this idea to start an airline that doesn't own any planes, okay? And this is, I did think of having a vaping airline. I did wonder about that.

• 1:25:18Chris Williamson?

  Well, you can just vape on board.

• 1:25:19Rory Sutherland?

  You just vape on board, sod that.

• 1:25:21Chris Williamson?

  Like a vaping tax, a vaping surcharge.

• 1:25:23Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, and you'd have two, you know, you'd have two classes, you know, twenty milligrams at the front.

• 1:25:27Chris Williamson?

  Ah, fantastic.

• 1:25:29Rory Sutherland?

  But I did wonder about that. But actually, my idea was you buy a country house near Stansted, okay? And every time you fly, okay, you park your car at this country house, okay? You're checking your luggage and the country house is it is like the party in the Wolf of Wall Street. Okay, right? It's like Eyes Wide Shut, okay? It's absolute total opulence, okay? And then when you're ready to fly, you're driven in, you know, Dr. Evil's car, which of course is an S-class Mercedes with the windows blacked out, isn't it? You know, okay, which is, I don't like, you know, it's kind of like, you know, Dr. Evil's natural conveyance of choice. Okay, you're driven to the plane, you walk onto a Ryanair flight, okay?

• 1:26:14Rory Sutherland?

  And the Ryanair flight costs you thirty seven quid and it costs two hundred and fifty quid to use the lap. You're a nightclub promoter, right?

• 1:26:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:20Rory Sutherland?

  We could go into business, don't you think?

• 1:26:21Chris Williamson?

  I'm ready to go.

• 1:26:22Rory Sutherland?

  So the whole idea is, okay, the bit on the plane is only an hour. It doesn't really matter if it's Ryanair and all, okay? You know, you could do a thing where you book the middle seat out, okay? So you've got a bit of space. But basically you use Ryanair and the whole aim is you make the airport experience amazing. Where you're literally ferried to the plane, then the plane bit, you don't try and compete because there's a limit what you can do at thirty thousand feet to make it amazing.

• 1:26:44Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:45Rory Sutherland?

  Well, certainly a limit to what's illegal that we're making it. What's legal that would make it amazing is quite, there are lots of illegal things, I'm sure you could do it.

• 1:26:51Chris Williamson?

  That would make it more amazing.

• 1:26:52Rory Sutherland?

  That would make it amazing, but we'll, we'll kind of, you know, we'll, we'll, we'll draw veil over that, shall we say?

• 1:26:57Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, well, so we were talking earlier on about kind of this, uh, culture of creativity that you guys have managed to foster and kind of perpetuate as well. I know that you've spoken to Rick Rubin.

• 1:27:07Rory Sutherland?

  Yes, yeah, that was fantastic.

• 1:27:09Chris Williamson?

  You think, you think a lot about creativity for yourself.

• 1:27:12Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, Rick asked me a question, which I'm going to ask you. He said, why haven't you moved to the United States? And you have moved to the United States. Now.

• 1:27:22Rory Sutherland?

  You've moved to Austin, which I think is very clever.

• 1:27:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Rory Sutherland?

  Because I think Austin is actually an interesting game, which is Americans are choosing it because they want to live within a cool, a cool culture rather than the cash culture. Okay, in a sense, the status game in Austin is slightly different.

• 1:27:38Chris Williamson?

  You've read that Paul Graham essay, each city whispers something different to you.

• 1:27:41Rory Sutherland?

  Lovely.

• 1:27:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:42Rory Sutherland?

  I haven't, but I will.

• 1:27:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:44Rory Sutherland?

  He's, he's an interesting guy.

• 1:27:45Chris Williamson?

  You know, you go to Miami, Miami whispers to you, you are as important as the watch on your wrist or the shoes that you wear or the car that you drive.

• 1:27:53Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  Right, LA whispers to you, you are as important as.

• 1:27:57Rory Sutherland?

  As your role in the entertainment industry.

• 1:27:58Chris Williamson?

  The people that you know and the people who know you.

• 1:28:00Rory Sutherland?

  You know, in LA, there's a club which is only for people who don't work in the entertainment industry. Because any other club they join, they're automatically at the bottom, you can, you can own some business, you know, literally a billion dollar business and you can own it, but in LA, if you go to the same club as the celebs, you're basically treated like filth.

• 1:28:18Chris Williamson?

  Second class.

• 1:28:19Rory Sutherland?

  So they have, they have a kind of separate club for people who aren't in the film industry, fascinatingly. And LA, you're right, it whispers, London's very complicated because it's the bloody centre of everything from government to advertising to business to.

• 1:28:31Chris Williamson?

  I can't remember what he says, London, London whispers to you, but yeah, so the.

• 1:28:37Rory Sutherland?

  Austin also has the great advantage of being a democratic city in a republican state.

• 1:28:40Chris Williamson?

  People say that blue dot, red ocean thing, I see no one that's liberal. Everybody that's there is in some degree based or conservative.

• 1:28:50Rory Sutherland?

  Sorry, really?

• 1:28:52Chris Williamson?

  I, that's what I see, man.

• 1:28:53Rory Sutherland?

  I assumed that, you know, I assumed it was my, my idea of heaven, which is kind of it's short range left wing and long range right wing, which is.

• 1:29:00Chris Williamson?

  That's probably about.

• 1:29:01Rory Sutherland?

  So I can go out and I can buy really good coffee made by people with interesting body art, but then in the afternoon I can drive into the desert and fire machine guns at oil drums.

• 1:29:09Chris Williamson?

  Both of those things are actually true. Yeah, you can, that's Austin in a nutshell.

• 1:29:13Rory Sutherland?

  Drive a tank.

• 1:29:13Chris Williamson?

  That is, that is Austin in a nutshell, but definitely one of the things that's interesting.

• 1:29:17Rory Sutherland?

  I absolutely adore Texas.

• 1:29:19Chris Williamson?

  So I, I've been.

• 1:29:19Rory Sutherland?

  So much fun. I've been having the, the odd dig at, you know, I said I've got nothing against the United States, my cousin Woodrow was president of the fucking place, but. Uh, I have to say that uh Texas, I find absolutely love. Now, I'm a Brit, I'm a white guy, etc. Actually, it seems to me, I've got a Texan colleague who always says, all Texans get on pretty well because they're all Texans. Okay, they have an identity which transcends other things. Okay. Now, Austin, you say that actually you find oddly that you don't find that kind of blue dot.

• 1:29:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, I don't know, man. It's just, I don't know how much of it's a selection.

• 1:29:52Rory Sutherland?

  I love my visit there, but I love Houston, I love Dallas.

• 1:29:55Chris Williamson?

  I don't know how much of it's a selection effect, because the people that I'm around are going to be people who have maybe achieved a degree of financial freedom that's caused them to lean more right or whatever. But there's definitely uh.

• 1:30:05Rory Sutherland?

  And low taxes.

• 1:30:06Chris Williamson?

  Correct. There's definitely a freedom to and a freedom from culture. So there is a freedom to do the things that I want, and there is a freedom from any of the fucking interventions of the people from Washington, etc., etc. Uh, but going back to the creativity thing, for the people who want to try and get a uh. They want to artificially inseminate their creativity muscle.

• 1:30:25Rory Sutherland?

  Yes.

• 1:30:25Chris Williamson?

  What are some of the things that you advise the guys that you work with in the companies you work with to do to engender a creative culture?

• 1:30:31Rory Sutherland?

  Study biology, not just sort of physics and maths. In other words, study complex things. Um, I have a kind of weird theory which might form a chapter in my next book, which is in a weird kind of way. Cops are better scientists than scientists are. Okay. Now, let me explain, okay. If, so one of the things I recommend is read a lot of true life crime. Okay, study that kind of stuff. By the way, there's a fantastic Andrew Schultz uh. Uh, routine on this, on his wife's propensity to watch um films about serial killers.

• 1:31:03Chris Williamson?

  The female obsession with serial killers is never going to make sense to me.

• 1:31:07Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, but do you have, because I have it as well. So is it great? Because my wife and I both, I think she likes it because there's a lot of psychology and I like it because someone gets killed, but no, no, no.

• 1:31:16Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:31:16Rory Sutherland?

  I'm only joking.

• 1:31:17Chris Williamson?

  Bond over your love of true crime.

• 1:31:18Rory Sutherland?

  There is a really interesting thing about reading about um uh a true life crime, which is. It's one case where you get an extraordinary amount of detailed study into the life. If you've read those, you know, uh, books about, say, Peter Sutcliffe and his family. You get an extraordinary amount of detail into a family which in many cases is completely ordinary, except for the, obviously the outlier, that somebody kills somebody or a lot of people. Um, so that, you know, that you do get that weird thing, which is a very deep study, not into a major historical figure, except in the worst possible sense.

• 1:31:51Rory Sutherland?

  Um, but um, no, it is interesting, but what it is about detective work is you're kind of working, okay, there's a Conan Doyle piece. So I actually, funny enough, one of the, I think one of the sources of my creativity was obsessively reading Sherlock Holmes short stories as a fairly young kid. Okay. My behavioural science thing was probably weirdly reading Aesop, who is really the first behavioural scientist, even though he lived in the sixth century B.C. You know, Jesus was also a pretty good behavioural scientist. If you look at it, you know, the parable of the lost sheep is basically loss aversion. Okay. You have really interesting things like, you know, the parable of the vineyard is, you know, perceived equity. You know, actually, there's a hell of a lot of behavioural science in

• 1:32:34Rory Sutherland?

  Jesus. Um, seriously. So that's, that's my third book. You know, there's that book Jane Austen was a game theorist. Okay. There's a fantastic book. My, my, my book's gonna be, my third book's gonna be Jesus was a behavioural economist.

• 1:32:47Chris Williamson?

  Right. I wonder how that one's gonna go.

• 1:32:48Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't know how that's gonna go, Dan. But, um, but actually, what, what Conan Doyle talks about through the mouthpiece of Sherlock Holmes is this business of reasoning backwards. And he said that everybody knows how to reason forwards. This has happened, so this is gonna happen next. And it's the natural mode of thinking. Reasoning backwards is not actually that difficult to do, but most people don't do it. And that is, if you think about a detective, a work of detection, it's this thing has happened, now we have to find out what were the pre-existing conditions that led to this outcome. And in advertising forward-thinking creativity, it's we want to get to this place. In the words of Roger L. Martin, a very brilliant business guru, what would have to be true for this to come

• 1:33:30Rory Sutherland?

  about? I think that's the question, by the way, a lot of political movements don't ask. They, they have a hypothesized ideal future. Okay. And they don't subtly ask the question, okay, what needs to happen between now and, in other words, play the hand you're dealt. We happen to be here, we want to get there. Let's not just ignore where we are and immediately effectively fantasize into existence a perfectly neat, uh, society, because change doesn't work like that. You have to start where you are. You have to play the hand you're dealt.

• 1:34:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:34:03Rory Sutherland?

  It's very, very easy to say, why did it take them so long to, you know, uh, give votes for women, et cetera, et cetera. But actually, if you look at the reality of it, these things take time. And also persuasion is slower than legislation, but it's persuasion that actually makes things work.

• 1:34:21Chris Williamson?

  Have you got the?

• 1:34:21Rory Sutherland?

  So I'll just make that distinction with in regard to drink driving, okay? The breathalyzer, you know, penalty points, licence bands for driving for American, Americans, we don't have a distinction between driving under the influence and driving while intoxicated. If you're basically intoxicated, you lose your licence, okay?

• 1:34:38Rory Sutherland?

  It, the legislation sort of worked, but a lot of people in my parents' generation thought it was a bit naughty to get caught over the limit. My parents didn't drive drunk, I just want to absolve them of that. But some of their contemporaries did, and my parents wouldn't stop someone leaving the house if they'd had too much to drink. They'd encourage them to stay, but they wouldn't like grab their car keys. Now, when something makes it where its way from being imposed to being adopted, what you see in my children's generation is they would wrestle one of their friends to the ground before they got into a car over the limit.

• 1:35:09Chris Williamson?

  So America is so different to this.

• 1:35:11Rory Sutherland?

  I know.

• 1:35:12Chris Williamson?

  So different. The attitude of Americans to people that drink, drive is like, you'll be at some bar or something, some, oh, we're going to go to such and such a place. Uh, would you want to come? I was, oh, right, okay, brilliant. Presuming that there's an Uber waiting outside and someone gets into their Ford F-150. I go, I've just watched you sink three margaritas over the last hour and no one, no one really bats an eye. I saw this amazing video, I'll find it and I'll send it to you.

• 1:35:37Rory Sutherland?

  LA is like that as well.

• 1:35:38Chris Williamson?

  LA?

• 1:35:38Rory Sutherland?

  LA, yeah, yeah. I mean, Uber has probably reduced this to some degree, but the extent to which people used to drive around LA and talk to gay. My brother-in-law, who lived there for quite a few years, just couldn't get his head around it at all.

• 1:35:50Chris Williamson?

  There was a, a great video of when they first introduced the, uh, you can't drink and drive. Drink and drive, not drink then drive. You can't drink and drive. And they're talking to these guys and, and girls from the deep south in America and they're all in, you know, beat up Chevy trucks or whatever. And they're interviewing them through the window and this dude sat there and there's another one with a woman who's sat there, child on passenger seat without seat belts on, beer between legs, saying, I don't know what this country's coming to, that a guy can't finish his hard day at work and, you know, have a beer when he's on his way home. You know, this country's being run by communists, these goddamn commies trying to take our beers away from us. And I'm like, you're drinking and driving.

• 1:36:33Rory Sutherland?

  You know, literally.

• 1:36:34Chris Williamson?

  Drinking and driving at the same time.

• 1:36:34Rory Sutherland?

  There's the extraordinary thing, I think, in New Orleans, or certainly in Louisiana, I think, isn't it, where you can actually have drive-through margarita stands.

• 1:36:41Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal.

• 1:36:42Rory Sutherland?

  So you literally put a margarita in your cup holder, yeah.

• 1:36:44Chris Williamson?

  Nothing in America is beyond being drive-through-able. The bank, CVS, fucking margaritas, everything is drive-through-able.

• 1:36:54Rory Sutherland?

  That, by the way, I never answered Rick Rubin's question, why I never moved to the United States. And there are two reasons, one of which is I'd probably make a million dollars, but then I'd start shopping at Whole Foods and I'd be back to where I started. Hey, right. Okay. So the one thing I can't get my head around.

• 1:37:10Chris Williamson?

  This fucking individual Malthusian trap that you've got yourself into.

• 1:37:13Rory Sutherland?

  We had this LA guy who came over and he was a LA creative guy, wonderful guy, and he was enraptured about Waitrose. Now, this won't be funny to American audience, apologies, okay, but he said, the food is such good quality and such reasonable price. It's okay. And you suddenly realize he'd grown up on Whole Foods or Bristol Farms or those LA.

• 1:37:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:33Rory Sutherland?

  And it's completely bipolar, American grocery retail, you know, German grocery retail is all about price, really.

• 1:37:39Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:37:40Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. American grocery retail, British grocery retail is really all about brand, actually. It's quite interesting. And then you have American grocery retail, which is just like you have a choice between two absurd extremes, you know. It's like having first class and standing room only, you know.

• 1:37:54Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:37:54Rory Sutherland?

  It's kind of weird.

• 1:37:55Chris Williamson?

  I think what happens with British supermarkets is that they are woven into the class structure as well.

• 1:38:01Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:01Chris Williamson?

  Right? You know, little.

• 1:38:02Rory Sutherland?

  Our system isn't all bad, you know. Let me explain this, okay. One thing which I think is problematic about the British class system, but is also quite nice, okay, is you do reach escape velocity relatively soon, okay? If you prove yourself reasonably successful materially, okay. So, okay, this is a total stereotype, okay. But if you're a Brit, you're going to do this, right? Okay. You're going to come back to Britain with some money, which I hope you've made in the colonies, okay, right?

• 1:38:30Chris Williamson?

  Slowly exporting it, yeah.

• 1:38:31Rory Sutherland?

  And you're going to buy the old rectory in Minchin Hampton, a flat in London, you'll have a. Range Rover, a Labrador, um, a wife called Polly and two children at private school.

• 1:38:41Chris Williamson?

  A membership to Soho House.

• 1:38:43Rory Sutherland?

  But basically at that point you can stop, okay, because anything more than that is actually evidence that makes you suspicious. You're probably a drug dealer, you know, if you've got a private jet or something like that, people will go, it's probably up to no good.

• 1:38:55Chris Williamson?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:38:55Rory Sutherland?

  Probably a bit shady, it's not really respectable. And so there is that kind of weird thing probably, which is the, the royal family sumptuary laws, which is, you know, because we had a royal family who actually in many ways, their pleasures until recently were extraordinary. Walking around muddy fields.

• 1:39:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a cult, there's a culture of sort of elite modesty in some ways in the UK, you know, look at a Land Rover Defender. It's, it's a, every single person.

• 1:39:24Rory Sutherland?

  I have a weird thought in the car market, which is once you produce the electric Land Rover Defender, there can be no more prestigious vehicle than that, in a weird way.

• 1:39:34Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 1:39:35Rory Sutherland?

  Because it's,

• 1:39:37Rory Sutherland?

  it's hard to explain, the Land Rover Defender is unbelievably beautiful, by the way, the latest iteration of it is fantastic. If you made that electric and therefore, you know, you've got a big, tough, versatile vehicle, big, heavy thing with a huge battery, quite a lot of range. The performance is going to be fine, right? Because it's electric. Okay. And generally it doesn't matter what the electric car is, the performance is going to be great. Okay. Why would, if you had the money, why would you have any other vehicle? Okay. And the only other vehicle I can imagine, by the way, is, um, will a proportion of, so I'm as a Georgist, I believe that there should be a single land value tax. And I believe that an awful lot of technology exists so that people can escape from the rent-seeking depredations of landlords and landowners.

• 1:40:22Rory Sutherland?

  And that's one of the great advantages of places like Texas. Okay. You've got a super abundance. Because Austin, like say Vegas or like say Phoenix, okay, they were basically built after the car was invented. Okay. So living eight miles from the centre of Phoenix doesn't matter because you can just drive in.

• 1:40:39Chris Williamson?

  Retrofitted to have the automobile.

• 1:40:40Rory Sutherland?

  It, it, well, in Phoenix, well, I love that. Do you ever, do you ever go there? Phoenix Scottsdale, Santa Fe?

• 1:40:45Chris Williamson?

  I'm going to Scottsdale in a couple of weeks' time for the first time.

• 1:40:48Rory Sutherland?

  Go and stay at the Hotel Vallejo.

• 1:40:50Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:40:50Rory Sutherland?

  It's kind of hotel where the Rat Pack would have hung out. It's really, really cool and fun. Okay, but I absolutely love the place. Now, bear in mind, okay, as a Brit, okay, the two most pointless cities in the United States to visit are New York and San Francisco because they're a crap attempt to recreate a European city. Whereas Brits love places like Austin or Houston or LA or Chicago because they're really different. They allow you to have a completely different life to the life you'd have in London. And I'm going to make an accusation, okay? Deep down, everybody wants to live in suburbia, okay? But in Britain, living in suburbia isn't cool. But if you live in LA, you can go and buy effectively a suburban house, you know, up in the kind of, you know, just off, what's that place called?

• 1:41:36Rory Sutherland?

  Wonderland, you know, the valley thing that goes up towards the Mulholland Drive.

• 1:41:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:42Rory Sutherland?

  You can basically live in a glorious suburban house and because it's LA, it's totally cool. Okay? So that's one of those little games. You see, if you move to Bexley Heath, your friends would start disowning you, right? But if you move to LA and buy a nice suburban house, totally different.

• 1:41:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. So I was thinking about the rebrand, speaking about that sort of West Coast phenomenon, this rebrand of Twitter to X. What's your assessment of?

• 1:42:08Rory Sutherland?

  It's a very weird thing to do because I would wait until he creates the everything app before you rebrand it.

• 1:42:14Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Rory Sutherland?

  That's what seems strange to me.

• 1:42:16Chris Williamson?

  Bundle Neuralink and SpaceX.

• 1:42:19Rory Sutherland?

  Bundle payment vehicles. I mean, if he, if he built, I'll forgive him everything if he builds in a content payment mechanism to Twitter.

• 1:42:27Chris Williamson?

  How do you mean?

• 1:42:28Rory Sutherland?

  There is a fundamental, there are lots of holes in the ecosystem, the digital ecosystem, which haven't been plugged because they're natural monopolies and therefore it's very difficult for them to reach critical mass as network goods unless they have monopoly status. Now, looking at the Royal Mail, which is the first real network good, the Penny Post technically, not the Royal Mail, okay? The Penny Post was an extraordinary thing. Because there'd been one penny postal services in London for about a hundred and fifty years, and this guy Roland Hill, with the mathematical help of Charles Babbage, i.e. the kind of inventor of the computer and one of the ten greatest mathematicians of

• 1:43:10Rory Sutherland?

  his time, managed to do the maths to say, actually, you can scale this up to a national and subsequently an imperial level. So there was an imperial penny post in nineteen ten, whatever, you know. Could mail something to Australia or something. When Ramanujan, it didn't include Australia and New Zealand, you had to pay extra for them. But India. But it included India. So when Ramanujan wrote to G H Hardy in Cambridge, he paid a penny for the letter. Wow. Now, the mathematics there is to say that in a network of the postal kind of network, the gate, the efficiencies in trunk routes, in other words, the cost per mile when you're transporting fifty thousand letters at a time, the cost per mile is so low that

• 1:43:55Rory Sutherland?

  all the costs basically are in collection, sortation, and then last mile delivery. So as a consequence, the distance is actually more or less irrelevant to the cost of carriage, and therefore we can have a flat rate for postage. And it required Babbage to do the maths to prove it worked. Even then, it lost money for the first few years because people weren't in the habit of writing to people five hundred miles away because they didn't know anybody. Yeah. Apart from the else, you know. Takes time to develop the friends. It takes some time. It's a bit like if you own the world's first fax machine, it's not really very useful. Yeah. Okay. And I think there are lots of things, and I think two of them are a locker system for e-commerce delivery. And what the government should do is basically licence

• 1:44:36Rory Sutherland?

  a monopoly for ten years. Say, okay, if you offer an open access locker system, we'll give you ten to fifteen years of Schumpeterian rent. From your your monopoly, okay. And by the way, it has to be open access so that local shops, I can ring up a local shop in Seven Oaks, okay, and say, can you drop off a copy of this book in my locker or in this locker, you know, sometime this evening after you shut, right? Not just not just e-commerce, but actually all forms of local commerce and indeed peer-to-peer sending. If I want to send something to my dad, if there's a locker in his village, he's ninety-three, I can basically pop it in my locker and be sent to his, because then you remove the last mile cost of delivery, which is causing environmental costs, it's causing transportation congestion, and it's also, it's not ultimately

• 1:45:21Rory Sutherland?

  scalable, because, as I spoke to someone at P and G about the delivery, the subscription model for things like razors, they own Gillette, right? And they said, the problem with this model is it works at a limited extent. But if we bought everything that way, our home, our homes would turn into a delivery hub, you know, your house becomes the logistics hub, and every time you open the window, it's beep, beep, beep, beep. Okay, it just doesn't make sense at ultimate scale, it doesn't make sense. What's this got to do with Twitter and X? Right. Okay. So there's a similar problem, which is with micro-payments for, now, I've got a friend called Dominic Young, who's in a company called Axate, which is also looking at this problem, which is, most people don't want to subscribe to most content, okay?

• 1:46:03Rory Sutherland?

  Pay to subscribe, okay? Now, there isn't a single case, there may be one case in like Finland, okay, but that's it. There is, there's barely a single case in the world of a tabloid newspaper making a success of the subscription model. What Twitter could do is launch a micro-payment system where I keep like twenty quid on my Twitter balance, and every time I want to read an article in, well, I do subscribe to the New York Times, but I don't subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and I'd bugger if I'm gonna subscribe to the FT, right? Because the FT, there are lots of articles in the FT, I'd pay a pound to read, but I'm not paying thirty-five quid a month or whatever. I mean, most people claim the FT, I guess, or at least it's tax deductible, okay? But also, the FT, there's

• 1:46:46Rory Sutherland?

  a, there's a psychological thing going on here, which is that there are certain things in the FT which I would love to read, there's some fantastic journalists there, this guy called Garnish, something or other, brilliant guy, okay? But equally, if I pay forty quid a month for the whole of the FT or whatever it costs, that's five hundred quid a year, right? Okay, well, I feel that, you know, seventy percent, eighty percent of that money is going to produce articles on the prospects for central banking reform in Ecuador, which have no interest to me at all, right? Not sure they have that much interest to FT readers, but nonetheless, okay, I don't want to pay for the stuff I don't want. And it's a psychological thing, even if the net value to me of each of those articles

• 1:47:28Rory Sutherland?

  added together might add up to twenty pounds, I'm not paying for the whole thing because I feel I'm paying for a lot of value that I that other people are getting, but I'm not. So if you centralise the payment ability through Twitter, you could then distribute this. I keep my Twitter balance at twenty quid or twenty US dollars, and I go, oh, that FT article looks a bit interesting, I'll pay fifty cents to read that. Yeah, yeah. Now, you can really monetise high quality, and the same goes for video content, by the way, the same could go for musical content, okay? Although Spotify has made that work fairly well. But I think for high quality journalism in particular, but equally tabloid journalism, the people who buy the sun buy it in the way you buy chocolate or crisps or a packet of cigarettes, right? It's an impulse bar, next to the till, and you go, oh, I feel like a bit of a treat,

• 1:48:14Rory Sutherland?

  I'll buy a copy of the super sore away sun. And it's XP, and then you take it with you. Those same people do not want to, just as there are people who will only have pay as you go mobile phones, even if they would be better off on a contract, okay? And I won't buy, I won't buy a train season ticket because my argument is there are two days of the week where I don't take the standard journey. Now, I might actually save money overall on the three journeys I do take, but it pisses me off that I'm getting proportionally worse value than the people who travel in five days a week, but I'm still paying the same. So that feeling of pissed offness prevents me from subscribing to a season ticket, and it prevents me from subscribing to a lot of publications where I would give them ten quid a month if it was pay as you go. So would you, if you had been Elon?

• 1:48:59Rory Sutherland?

  Also, by the way, if I subscribe to every publication, that, you know, I think I subscribe to The Atlantic, I think I subscribe to The New Yorker, but let's add, okay, Wired, New York Magazine, let's add

• 1:49:12Chris Williamson?

  New Statesman.

• 1:49:13Rory Sutherland?

  The New States, okay, I do subscribe to the Spect, I write for the Spectator, so that's obviously

• 1:49:18Chris Williamson?

  Should have got a freebie.

• 1:49:19Rory Sutherland?

  Exactly. And I subscribe to the Times and the Telegraph, I think. Okay, and then I read.

• 1:49:24Chris Williamson?

  You're probably accumulating, what, at least a grand a year?

• 1:49:27Rory Sutherland?

  Well, this is the point, that I, I've basically reached peak subscription, okay?

• 1:49:31Chris Williamson?

  Subscription saturation.

• 1:49:32Rory Sutherland?

  So in other words, there is a limit to the number of direct debits people are prepared to have.

• 1:49:36Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:37Rory Sutherland?

  And therefore, you cannot grow the market for paid, high-quality content, or paid entertainment content.

• 1:49:43Chris Williamson?

  Tell you what, it's an interesting business that I found out about recently. I think it's called Rocket Reach. And this company, they go through, maybe you link them to your bank or something, I don't really know how it works. But they go through and they look at all of the debits that you, that you've got, that are kind of lapsed, or pointless, or fucking something like that, and they get rid of them. Yeah, so if you'd been Elon, would you?

• 1:50:01Rory Sutherland?

  By the way, I'd also, I would also add legislation here, which is, it is too difficult to cancel a recurring credit card payment. I was paying for Club Penguin for my kids, you know, when I was picking them up pissed from All Bar One, you know, at one o'clock in the morning, okay? I was still paying for Club Bloody Penguin. Now, I mean, you know, I probably had a little sneaky visit to, no, no, I didn't, don't worry.

• 1:50:27Rory Sutherland?

  But I did not go on clubbing. The only time I went on Club Penguin as an adult is my children, when they were younger, would make me play the games to earn points to decorate their igloo.

• 1:50:37Chris Williamson?

  Fantastic.

• 1:50:38Rory Sutherland?

  So they'd outsource to me to get me to play the games.

• 1:50:40Chris Williamson?

  Dad, go to work, please, virtually.

• 1:50:42Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, I wasn't doing anything else. I don't want to end up in the nonsense wing of Wakefield Prison, okay? I wasn't going on for any other purpose.

• 1:50:53Chris Williamson?

  Fucking hell. Look, let's get back to X for me. Get back to X. If you'd been Elon, would you have waited until you were able to bundle everything underneath? Right?

• 1:51:01Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, because there's too much equity in that. Nobody, everybody refers to it as Twitter brackets X.

• 1:51:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:07Rory Sutherland?

  There's a hell of a lot of equity in that. It made perfect sense as a name. You had a tweet.

• 1:51:11Chris Williamson?

  Tons of brand.

• 1:51:12Rory Sutherland?

  It's a very, very bizarre decision of Elon's. I mean, you know, undoubtedly, you know, quite, I mean, the most bizarre feature of Elon, okay? If I may say so. Which is, if you take a comedic viewpoint, one of the great things you do, you take this sort of Darwin mentality where you look at little things and suddenly you discover these absurdities everywhere. And Elon's greatest absurdity, okay, is he's in favor of driverless cars, but man's space travel. Now, I don't want to be rude, okay. What he means by man's space travel is people who have no obvious aeronautic ability should be able to project themselves as humans into space. But cars, which obviously benefit from being driven by a human, have to drive around autonomously. Now, I don't want to be rude, but isn't that

• 1:51:55Rory Sutherland?

  the wrong way around? Okay. Shouldn't cars be driven by people and spacecraft be autonomous? I don't want to be, you know.

• 1:52:01Chris Williamson?

  How much input do the humans in spacecraft have now?

• 1:52:04Rory Sutherland?

  None. My brother is an astrophysicist. If you want to get astronomers and astrophysicists absolutely driven to a point of apoplexy, just mention man's space travel. Okay. Because they regard it as per dollar spent, an extraordinarily bad way of discovering things about the universe.

• 1:52:24Chris Williamson?

  It should just be robots.

• 1:52:25Rory Sutherland?

  It was described by one colleague of my brother's as spending $300 million to find out how mice wank in zero G. Okay. You know, the kind of experiments you performed on man's space travel are kind of absurd compared to something like, you know, a space telescope or something of that kind.

• 1:52:46Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:52:47Rory Sutherland?

  You know, whereas if you look at what those probes do, that, you know, the non-human probes.

• 1:52:51Chris Williamson?

  I like stuff, bring it back.

• 1:52:52Rory Sutherland?

  It's just, that's just joyous, absolutely joyous. However, I do have a colleague in the advertising industry, Trevor Beatty, whose lifetime dream has been to go into space. And I think he's done this with Virgin. I get it.

• 1:53:03Chris Williamson?

  What is it now? 250 grand?

• 1:53:05Rory Sutherland?

  I think that was it. Yeah. And all credit to him. He's not some rich dilettante guy who decided it to be cool. I mean, he's probably quite rich, but he, he's been an absolute lifetime space obsessive.

• 1:53:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:19Rory Sutherland?

  Literally since being a child. So it's a, it's perfectly good use of it. I can see why he does that.

• 1:53:24Chris Williamson?

  Each time that we speak, you have become an evangelist for a new category of products. I think this is maybe your fifth or sixth time on the show.

• 1:53:31Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:32Chris Williamson?

  Each time that we've spoken, I feel like the first time was the Japanese toilet, the second time.

• 1:53:37Rory Sutherland?

  Air fryers.

• 1:53:38Chris Williamson?

  Was the air fryer.

• 1:53:39Rory Sutherland?

  I was the John the Baptist of bloody air fryers. I can tell you that much. Right? I mean, seriously, I went to Philips, who at the time had a monopoly of air fryers. Now, this is a really interesting point for anybody who's got a business. The thing to look at at a business is not just the rate of growth. Okay, you can have extraordinary rates of growth, which consist of lots of people trying something and deciding it's shit. I mean, if you compare that thing, what was that Facebook thing, Threads, right? Now, if you look at the actual data for the adoption of Threads, it was absolutely, you know, exponential rates of insane adoption. If you go there, it's basically, you know, it's

• 1:54:18Chris Williamson?

  Fucking wasteland.

• 1:54:19Rory Sutherland?

  Absolute wasteland. Okay, now, the reason for that is they made it very, very easy to sign up. People had a look, didn't like it. You can't actually leave Threads, because if you want to leave Threads, you've got to delete your Instagram account, which understandably, people don't want to do. So that's a kind of furloughed trap, okay? Now, it looks impressive, means nothing. By contrast, there are things which grow very, very slowly at first. It's a sigmoid curve. The data you need to look at to give yourself reassurance if that data is there is the repeat purchase rate or the subsequent conversion to evangelism.

• 1:54:49Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:50Rory Sutherland?

  Not many people had air fryers. Now, I had this even, the reason I went to Philips and they didn't listen. And I said, look, sit, trust me, you're sitting on an effing goldmine here. If you just promote your, effectively, they were the only manufacturer of air fryers at the time, okay? If you promote your air fryer and you advertise it, you can create kind of move.

• 1:55:10Chris Williamson?

  Were they not promoting it at all?

• 1:55:11Rory Sutherland?

  No, not at all. Didn't advertise it at all. I have no clue. I don't know what that, it drove me nuts.

• 1:55:16Chris Williamson?

  But it's now Ninja, right? Ninja, Ninja.

• 1:55:18Rory Sutherland?

  No, Ninja wasn't, Ninja wasn't there, Tefal wasn't there.

• 1:55:20Chris Williamson?

  No, but now, now if you look at it.

• 1:55:22Rory Sutherland?

  Ninja has become the, um, the Tesla of air fryers.

• 1:55:26Chris Williamson?

  I've got a, I've got a 450 XL. I've got a 450 XL.

• 1:55:29Rory Sutherland?

  Is that the double, is that a double?

• 1:55:30Chris Williamson?

  No, it's a single, it's a single, but yeah, it's single but extra big and it goes to 450. So here's my, I'm sure that you've done this already. Look at me teaching the, teaching the Messiah how to use his own fucking air fryer. From frozen steak, salt the shit out of it, 12 minutes either side, slap it on a plate, done, perfectly, every time.

• 1:55:51Rory Sutherland?

  Perfect, every time.

• 1:55:51Chris Williamson?

  So I asked, I want, I needed to eat more red meat in my diet, according to my dietitian. So I asked the only person I know who eats a very, very high volume of meat, Michaela Peterson, who only eats meat.

• 1:56:01Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah, that's a bit weird, isn't it? I mean, I have to say, okay, I, I, I.

• 1:56:08Rory Sutherland?

  My attitude to Jordan Peterson is a bit the same as my attitude to Frankie Boyle, which is in small doses, I quite like him, but I think he's overcommitted to a particular dogma. And I think what he says, and there are very interesting insights to be derived from him, but I wonder, there's a phrase that was used of Enoch Powell, this equally applies to people on the left, okay, which is you're driven mad by the remorselessness of your own logic. Okay. And I don't think, I don't think anybody should see the world through exclusively a lens of black and white, left or right. Okay. I just don't think it's helpful, conducive to problem solving. An example on the left would be James O'Brien, of someone who's, you know, I call it James O'Brien Jesuitism, which is that you, you're

• 1:56:53Rory Sutherland?

  so obsessed with the rightness of your cause that you effectively construct an argument from a fairly dubious assumption and arrive at a place, and therefore you go QED, my position on this is incontestable. Okay. And what's less visible about that is that the starting point or the driving assumption or axiom of your argument isn't that great. Your argument seems wonderfully convincing. It's a bit like dating sites, okay. Every time I make, I've never been on a date, just in case my wife's watching me. I don't, you know, I don't, I don't know what dating site I go on in terms of, you know, Fat Welshman. There's probably a niche there, isn't there, I guess. But in any case, by the way, you

• 1:57:34Rory Sutherland?

  mentioned that asymmetry that you said, astoundingly, that in your entire time as a nightclub promoter, and as I assume, because I can't tell this bloke, a pretty good looking guy who was on Love Island, by the way, which is partly a WPP creation. So we can take a small amount of credit, by the way, for your incredibly deserved elevation and fame. But you've only actually been spontaneously approached by a woman three times, twice, was it?

• 1:57:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, twice, twice.

• 1:58:02Chris Williamson?

  That overcoming of approach anxiety for women, guys talk about how hard it is to go up to women, and that's true, that is true. But for a girl to do it to a guy, they need to swallow something else, which is that if they are rejected, they've had to overcome a social convention that is very, very embarrassing to have done, to be rejected. It's the same reason, it's the reverse reason actually of why women are ashamed for not, women are ashamed of not performing in bed in a different way to manner, but men get shamed for not always being hot to trot when the wife is. For some reason, if you as a guy, the guy is always supposed to be horny.

• 1:58:39Rory Sutherland?

  That's the Jimmy Carr joke, isn't it, that men and women desire sex to the same extent. The difference is, if a woman wants sex, it actually happens. I think that's a Jimmy Carr routine.

• 1:58:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't disagree. Go back to, let's, let's round out this evangelist thing. So we had, we had a Japanese toilet, we had the air.

• 1:58:56Rory Sutherland?

  See, I do, I do take my Darwinism very literally, which is, don't, don't have a sense of proportion, don't get worried about being distracted. Because, okay, I imagine on the Beagle, the guy, you know, I mean, the guy spent 10 years of his life fucking around with earthworms, for God's sake.

• 1:59:10Chris Williamson?

  Mustang Mackie, which may become Mustang Mackie GT. What was the other thing? There was something you got for your dad, a telephone with massive buttons?

• 1:59:21Rory Sutherland?

  No, that, that was a very interesting thing, which was that the idea of designing for the disabled is actually a good business policy, even because you will actually find yourself with a target audience far larger than the one you originally anticipated.

• 1:59:36Chris Williamson?

  Anyone who's got shopping in their hands.

• 1:59:37Rory Sutherland?

  It's rather like, actually, you know, gluten free, okay? The number of people who are actually gluten intolerant to the extent of having celiac disease is pretty small. But there are a hell of a lot of people who are trying to avoid gluten, who will also buy a gluten free product. And in the same way, what, the example I always give is, you know, disability legislation mandates wheelchair ramps, they're also handy if you've got wheelie luggage. They mandate door handles rather than doorknobs, because people who have bad arthritis can't use a doorknob. But actually, if you're carrying two bags of tea, you can open a door handle with your elbow, because when you're carrying two bags of tea, you effectively lost the use of your hands. And, you know, Putting the shampoo bottle that opens at the top and the conditioner that opens at the bottom. You could argue that's just for people with severe visual impairment. But actually, no, because I'm in the shower. I've got severe visual impairment.

• 2:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:00:22Rory Sutherland?

  It has to have had your fancy laser eye surgery.

• 2:00:25Chris Williamson?

  Wish I could see up to everything.

• 2:00:26Rory Sutherland?

  So presumably you can see everything.

• 2:00:27Chris Williamson?

  What else?

• 2:00:28Rory Sutherland?

  I can't see a fucking thing.

• 2:00:29Chris Williamson?

  What have you been, what are you evangelizing about at the moment?

• 2:00:32Rory Sutherland?

  Um, that's very interesting. Um, actually, electric cars interest me a lot because one, I mean, one of the things that interests me is that if you work in the advertising industry, it practices what is, makes it very, very interesting is that it's, as I said, its problem solving methodology is slightly odd. It's not the standard scientific, you know, we must have complete certainty. P value less than naught point naught five before we proceed. It's closer to detective work, which is you might act on a hunch. Because the hunch or the little bit of anecdotal information doesn't give you a decisive answer. But it tells you what to investigate more. Okay. It tells you where to direct your attention.

• 2:01:16Rory Sutherland?

  Now, if I had time, I don't know how much time I've got. There are two extraordinary stories here about how the capture of Levi Bellfield, effectively a ghastly serial killer, effectively happened because a former girlfriend of Bellfield's uh, wrote to the police, I think, or contacted them and said, I had this boyfriend once. And there was a copy of a magazine and all the blonde women had had their faces defaced with a biro. Okay. Now, there's no evidential value to that. You can't bang someone up for 20 years for defacing a copy of Vogue, although it probably wasn't Vogue. I'm not sure the Bellfield household kind of stretched to Harper's and Queen or anything, you know, but whatever magazine it was, right? And you can't arrest someone for that, but you should investigate. Okay.

• 2:01:59Rory Sutherland?

  Similar thing happened with the Yorkshire Ripper, which is uh, effectively, there was a very shrewd cop, and I can't remember his name, Yorkshire cop, relatively junior. And the Yorkshire police were obsessed with the idea that he had a Newcastle accent. Do you remember this?

• 2:02:12Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:02:13Rory Sutherland?

  Because you had that fake, those fake tapes sent in, which the police, the police wrongly believed that there was information in the tapes.

• 2:02:19Chris Williamson?

  Sunderland technically, they'd narrowed it down to some pit village.

• 2:02:22Rory Sutherland?

  South Shields.

• 2:02:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, some fucking pit village.

• 2:02:24Rory Sutherland?

  That was what was extraordinary. There was an accent expert who placed him to within five streets.

• 2:02:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:29Rory Sutherland?

  That was the unbelievable thing about the accents of the North East.

• 2:02:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:32Rory Sutherland?

  They have that degree of, but he wasn't the actual perpetrator. And one day, this couple, they have to go and interview people who are suspects, largely because their car is regularly sighted in the red light district of Leeds or Bradford. Okay. And or else they have some other reason to raise suspicion. Okay. And they routinely have to go and interview these couples. It's an awful thing to do because first of all, you've got to get the wife out of the room. So you can ask the husband why he's always in the red light district. Okay. So you have to go, oh, my throat's like sandpaper. Make us a cup of tea, love. But they started this couple of cops just started with this kind of break the ice riff, which was, right, madam, now's your chance to put your husband away for good, to get rid of your husband for good. And so they made light of the fact that they were making inquiries into the Yorkshire Ripper.

• 2:03:17Rory Sutherland?

  But by starting with a joke, they kind of detoxified the whole exchange. Okay. They were saying, don't worry, you know, he's not, you know, you know, you don't need to panic. It was a wonderful little joke, you know, now's your chance to get rid of your husband. Okay. And

• 2:03:30Rory Sutherland?

  every single person they played that joke on, about 10% of them got angry and 90% of them laughed, as you might expect. Okay. Some people just don't have a sense of humor. Um, which is what's slightly weird about woke comedy, which is you allow comedians to be policed by people with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever, which doesn't seem to make much sense.

• 2:03:51Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 2:03:52Rory Sutherland?

  Um, but they just don't have, they don't have a sense of humor. When they interviewed Sutcliffe, that was the only occasion where they told that joke and they didn't either laugh or get angry. They just took it as a dead kind of statement of fact. Now, then they noticed, okay, he had a gap in his teeth. He was a lorry driver, the pattern of wear on his footwear, because you're a long distance lorry driver, matched some footprints that have been found near the scene. And they immediately went up to the head of the inquiry and said, we should look at this guy. And the guy said, does he have a Geordie accent? No, he's a local man. Right, forget it. And they, this guy really bollocked them for being suspicious.

• 2:04:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't want to, I don't want to see anybody.

• 2:04:28Rory Sutherland?

  I don't want to see anybody without a Geordie accent, basically.

• 2:04:31Chris Williamson?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:04:32Rory Sutherland?

  And, um, uh, so now what's interesting about that is it's, as I said, it's reverse reasoning. It's kind of okay. And also it involves to some extent a degree of no's. I think there's something in this. I'm not quite sure what, but let's explore it a bit further. Now, you might argue. Maybe that's how we should actually pursue some pharmaceutical research. There's a company called Helix in Cambridge, which effectively is aiming to do pharmaceutical research backwards, which is find interesting compounds and see what they treat, rather than define a narrow disease and find a way to treat it. Now, it's what you might call post-rationalised science, rather than pre-rationalised science. Now, a lot of advertising works through that way. It works backwards, which is you come up with some weird idea through some mental

• 2:05:17Rory Sutherland?

  process of inspiration that you're not quite sure about, and then you reverse engineer the reasons why it might work. Now, a lot of people see that as cheating. Just as the German, you know, Germans said, well, you know, we designed a drug to treat angina, and it makes people penises, okay. This is clearly a failure, okay. Well, actually, no, it's the right answer to a different question. And it worries me that we discount, we discount it so often when we come up with an interesting answer to a different question. Now, the advertising industry is probably relatively tolerant of that, you know. You know, I always say, look, don't apologize for post-rationalisation. If it's an answer, it's an answer, okay. How you got there, this isn't like a high school maths exam where

• 2:06:00Rory Sutherland?

  you have to show you're working out, okay. And sometimes the place you get is, by the way, weird. I always say, look, in psychological issues, in physics, the opposite of a good idea is wrong, but in psychology, the opposite of a good idea might be another good idea, okay. It's a bit like the difference between, you know, if you like policing conversation on the one hand, and Andrew Schultz on the other, okay. They're complete opposites, but they may actually, in a weird way, be, you know, solutions in some kind of strange way. And we, you know, the psychology of humour is kind of fascinating, because it is kind of harmless play. I mean, you know, all primates, all mammals, kind of engage in kind of play fighting, and we do it verbally as well as physically. You know, I'm not

• 2:06:42Rory Sutherland?

  going to start wrestling with you now, that'd be completely weird, okay. But we can engage in a bit of verbal That's what banter is. Banter. Yes. And, you know, and it's kind of like, you know, the tone is that there's also a form that abuse forms in friendship. And British English is slightly more high context than American English is, in that Not that Americans don't do it, but British English is very much, you say, the opposite understatement, that in other words, tone of voice determines meaning or context determines meaning more than it does in American English.

• 2:07:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:15Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, that's not me speaking, that's an American, by the way, it might be Jonathan Haidt. And so that kind of verbal play, which is, you know, if we weren't friends, I wouldn't be able to be rude to you like this, you know, which is kind of, again, it's kind of reverse reasoning. But those kind of games exist all over the place, which means that actually the opposite of something can it can be just as valuable as the thing itself.

• 2:07:37Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:38Rory Sutherland?

  If you like. And I, you know, I think it's important in problem solving because I think it's an additional string to your bow, just as I think that that solving problems psychologically rather than technologically is is an extra string to your bow in terms of, uh, you know, solving, uh, difficult problems. Make the railway enjoyable, don't make the railway fast, et cetera. Okay. I think that's an extra, that expands the solution space. And this business of allowing people to imagine and then work backwards, which according to, um, uh, interestingly, the scientific method and and of course, the method of scientific funding would be unless you've identified an absolutely clear problem, you're not allowed to do anything. Okay.

• 2:08:22Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:08:22Rory Sutherland?

  Right?

• 2:08:23Chris Williamson?

  You have to experiment and find things.

• 2:08:24Rory Sutherland?

  Now you'll get some funding because you have demonstrated the absolute clarity of your way ahead and the single point of your destination.

• 2:08:31Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:08:32Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. Now, if you look at someone like Andre Geim, who came up with graphene, you know, now, okay, first of all, he discovered graphene with equipment that you could have bought from Staples or W H Smith's, okay, which is just taking, taking bits of pencil graphite and endlessly pulling them apart with a bit of sellotape.

• 2:08:51Rory Sutherland?

  But he actually himself says, I don't like that kind of research. I like kind of what he calls hit and run research, where you just find an interesting angle of inquiry and piss around for a bit and see where it gets you. And then you discover the use subsequently.

• 2:09:05Chris Williamson?

  I think that's a good strategy. I think that's a strategy.

• 2:09:06Rory Sutherland?

  And I just, I just wonder, I just wonder about our world where you have to win an argument before you can act. In other words, you need approval from complicated bodies of people before you can do anything.

• 2:09:17Chris Williamson?

  You've got this thing about how all creatives have to justify their ideas to rationalists.

• 2:09:21Rory Sutherland?

  It never happens the other way around.

• 2:09:22Chris Williamson?

  To do it the other way around. Rory, let's bring this one home, mate. We've got lunch to get to with.

• 2:09:26Rory Sutherland?

  Okay.

• 2:09:26Chris Williamson?

  And George, every single time you come on, I absolutely love it. Thank you for joining me. What can people expect next couple of months?

• 2:09:32Rory Sutherland?

  Well, we'll, we'll catch up again, but can I also say, I mean, nothing gives me more pleasure than to see how this entire series is just flourishing and absolutely brilliant. I think it's.

• 2:09:41Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 2:09:42Rory Sutherland?

  It's, and, and there's a great quote from Jimmy Carr on your interview where he says YouTube became the biggest TV station in the world and nobody noticed. And I think, by the way, you know, we'd be wrong if we didn't kind of end with a bit of a P. And there's a wonderful article in the FT saying that, you know, YouTube is the jewel in the crown of the internet. One of the things I recommend to everybody, by the way, you said, what am I evangelizing for? I'll tell you, YouTube Premium.

• 2:10:06Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 2:10:07Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. Subscribe to YouTube Premium. And secondly, watch YouTube on your TV, right?

• 2:10:13Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:10:13Rory Sutherland?

  I don't understand. Okay. My kids, right? They, they want to watch. They want, for fuck's sake, right? Okay. Everybody in, in your whole childhood was, how big is your telly?

• 2:10:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:24Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. There's, by the way, a lovely joke about that, which is, okay, which is wonderful thing, which is only of value to Brits. So I really apologize. So Kenneth Williams' mum was obviously pretty similar to Kenneth Williams because they were sitting backstage waiting for some filming to finish on a Carry On film. And someone said to their neighbour, which is one of the other relatives of Charles Hawtree or something, you know, what television have you got? I've got a 14 inch console, to which Kenneth Williams replied, Kenneth Williams' mum replied, 14 inches, that'd be enough to console anyone. Okay? So clearly there was a kind of family tradition of absolute smut.

• 2:11:01Chris Williamson?

  And now people are watching it on their phone.

• 2:11:02Rory Sutherland?

  But we all competed for how big your telly was. And then I have these kids who are staring at this sort of pathetic little letterbox. Watch it on your big, watch YouTube on your big telly. It's broadcast quality, nearly all of it. It's 4K. There's 250,000 hours of content where I think the title starts with the words, how to.

• 2:11:21Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Rory Sutherland?

  Okay. If you want to repair, now, what I think has happened. Is first of all, we've had, we've had several YouTube revolutions in that, well, several things, okay. There is a problem with certain technologies, which is when they're new, they're not quite good enough. So they hit the hype cycle at the wrong point.

• 2:11:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:38Rory Sutherland?

  Uh, that was true of video conferencing, okay. When it was, when it was, when it was hyped, it was a bit shit. And by the time it stopped being shit, it was too late to hype it. Cause you looked a bit like that guy on the fast show, when isn't electricity brilliant?

• 2:11:51Chris Williamson?

  It's a premature problem.

• 2:11:52Rory Sutherland?

  It's premature problem, okay. And I think that happened a bit with YouTube, you know, it was a bit sort of flaky, it was all filmed on crappy phone cameras, you know, it was all a bit pixelated and wobbly. And now actually, it is the, it is the only part of the internet which has no annoy, if you have the YouTube premium, it has no annoying qualities to it at all.

• 2:12:12Chris Williamson?

  No, and the algorithm is shit hot. Well, if I, if I keep on following you around the internet, I'll consider that a, a win.

• 2:12:17Rory Sutherland?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:18Chris Williamson?

  Rory, I love you to bits. Thank you very much for.

• 2:12:19Rory Sutherland?

  Likewise, mutual.