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Curious Worldview
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Curious Worldview
Rory Sutherland | An Hour Surveying The Worldview
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I am stoked to welcome back one of the most out there and interesting writers, thinkers and speakers, Rory Sutherland.
He founded the behavioural science team at the Ogilvy group, he is one of Europe’s most powerful advertising executives and author many many books and articles, his most recent book, Alchemy, coming highly recommended and is a treatise on how great marketing ideas are built around the profoundly irrational… Rory appeared once before on this podcast in episode 115.
And today, for his second appearance I was lucky enough to do this with Rory in person, I got the train out of London to Rory’s hometown and we settled up in the courtyard of a beautiful little cafe in the sun. And so, you get the ambience of birds and wind to frame the conversation.
There are no timestamps on this podcast today, because with Rory’s erudition there is unseen flow from one thought to another that makes a narrow subject timestamp non suitable, rather, consume this one in full, we open with Salman Rushdie and his days as a copywriter to Rory reflecting on his recent notoriety, a powerful insight that the best marketing is in fact fat tailed, behind the scenes of his Rick Rubin interview all the way to me asking Rory whether he’s ever done a floaty.
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I am stoked to welcome back one of the most out there and interesting writers, speakers, and thinkers, Rory Sutherland. He founded the behavioral science team at the Okel V Group. He's one of Europe's most powerful advertising executives and author of many, many books and articles. His most recent being, Alchemy, coming highly recommended, and is a treatise on how great marketing ideas are built around the profoundly irrational. Rory appeared once in this podcast before in episode 115, and today, for his second appearance, I was lucky enough to do this with Rory in person. I got the train out of London to Rory's hometown, and we settled up in the courtyard of a beautiful little cafe in the sun. And as such, you get the ambience of birds and wind to frame the conversation. There are no timestamps on this pod today because with Rory's aerudition, there is an unseen flow from one thought to another that makes a narrow timestamp non-suitable. Rather, consume this episode in full. We open up with Salmon Rushdie in his days as a copywriter, to Rory reflecting on his recent notoriety, a powerful insight that the best marketing isn't fact fat tailed behind the scenes of his wonderful Rick Rubin interview, which you should all check out, all the way to me asking Rory whether he's ever done a floaty. So as per usual, pump your good juice into the algorithm with five stars on Spotify or five stars on Apple. These reviews make the show more discoverable for others, and therefore it is the best thing you could do for me and this little podcast outfit. Use the top link in my description for the newsletter. Rory's first appearance on the pod, and with absolutely no further ado, here is the wonderfully infectious Rory Sutherland.
SPEAKER_00Is it working?
SPEAKER_01We're on. We're rocking and rolling.
SPEAKER_00Right, I'll leave it.
SPEAKER_01So Rory's just tucking into a bit of Brecky, but uh no worries, mate.
SPEAKER_00I'll leave that for a bit.
SPEAKER_01Let's go. Fantastic. Rock and roll. So in the 13 years between graduating from Cambridge and writing Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie was among other things a copywriter at Ogilvie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's right. Yeah, as was Faye Weldon, actually. Um uh fantastic uh I I I I only met Salman once, uh, not while he was at Ogilvy, but subsequently, I knew Faye reasonably well. And actually, the advertising contribution to English literature uh is quite extraordinary in the sense that just as actors often effectively are do modelling or advertising work uh to keep the wolf from the door, there was quite a tradition of uh aspiring novelists and writers. Uh Don DeLillo was at Ogilvy in New York, for example. I think he hated it actually. I don't think he liked it very much. Um Raymond Chandler was a copywriter for a time, I don't think he liked it very much. But again, it kept them going and it um, you know, it gave them what you might call early stage funding uh for their literary careers.
SPEAKER_01Would you say that there's a line between being a great novelist and a great copywriter?
SPEAKER_00To be honest, I don't think the discipline's bad. I mean, having to write, okay? You know, uh a large part of the pain of actually writing is just getting started. And so um it's endlessly easy, I think, to get either writer's block or effectively endlessly to delay things or endlessly to rewrite the first paragraph. And simply having that kind of work experience where you have a deadline and you have to get things done. The effect it's had on my writing is that mostly I write I write journalism or I write body copy. So I'm pretty good at writing 200 to 1,500 words. When it gets to structuring a whole chapter or something like an academic paper, arc. Absolutely, you know, I need the equivalent, I think, of PowerPoint slide sorter, um, you know, where you can just move things around with a with a big overview. And it's difficult to do that with text. So what you'll notice if you read my book, Alchemy, and it was my wife's suggestion, is uh it's a lot of very short paragraphs. And strangely, the publisher was wildly disquieted by this because publishers, as Nassim Taleb has pointed out, have very conventional views about what constitutes a book.
SPEAKER_01Better realize than live in extremists then.
SPEAKER_00And actually, you're right. Uh and also what's interesting is that people seem to really like the short chapters because it made it kind of toilet readable. Uh, you know, it made it readable in short bursts, and I think it meant you got started.
SPEAKER_01A couple of other books with really short chapters that were phenomenally successful, around the similar time Alchemy came out, although different subject matter, Psychology of Money by Michael Norton not Michael Norton, is it?
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, uh Morgan Housel. Morgan Housel, precisely.
SPEAKER_01Yep uh The subtle art of not giving a fuck, Mark Manson. You know, different subject matter, but still the same idea of it's almost blog posts chapters rather than longer.
SPEAKER_00It's worth noting the Bible is written, uh basically, in that sort of highly granular, broken down form. And what's interesting is people really seem to like it. The other thing they seem to like is a bit of advice is record your own audiobook because you can put a level of emotion, and actually you can riff a little bit. You've got freedom to change a conversation when you're recording your own audiobook. If you employ a voice actor, they're only judged on two things, which is clarity, fidelity for the original text. You can't even change do not to don't if you're a voice actor reading an audiobook.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. But when you're reading your own book, you know exactly what you want to do. You know exactly what you want to say, and you probably rewrote it a little bit.
SPEAKER_00Okay, you go, this chapter's okay in print, but no one would actually say that conversationally, so I'm just gonna recast the whole thing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And you also have quite the voice to match, so that doesn't hurt.
SPEAKER_00Well, I I think it I think the author the the spoken voice, which we've got to remember, writing in evolutionary terms is only about, you know, 5,000, six, maybe five, six thousand years old, not much more. Literary writing, probably more recent than that. I mean, the earliest writing was probably effectively bookkeeping. And um one of the things actually that interests me about uh video conferencing, I think it's much more important as a technology than we've given it credit for, for the simple reason that there was this extraordinarily yawning gap in communications between things that were textual and asynchronous, okay, typically email, you know, text messages, um, you know, Snapchat letters, okay, highly asynchronous. And then you had the phone call, which was a bit of a kind of weird anomaly, okay? And then you had this vast yawning gap all the way over to meeting in person, which in a global world might mean getting on a plane, it certainly might mean getting on a train, it certainly means effectively to meet someone in person for half an hour is a commitment of a morning, okay? There are lots of other aspects to it which make video calling, I think, preferable in many ways. One of which is you can cancel or reschedule without being a total dickhead. It's an important facet that. That if I if I commit to meeting someone on video, and I say I'm terribly sorry I'll have to move this till tomorrow, yeah. I'm not I'm not totally comfortable about doing that. I try to do it as infrequent as I can. But it's not like someone I've travelled into London to see you, and now you ask, you're doing something else.
SPEAKER_01What are you doing in Manchester?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and so uh I mean I I one of the things that annoys me at the moment about the current kind of tech babble, don't get me wrong, I think AI is both highly interesting, potentially important, potentially dangerous, potentially very valuable. I think it has a lot of um uh you know you know very, very interesting possible applications for good and ill. Um, but I don't think we're talking enough about video conferencing, the simple reason being that it's old, okay? Actually, the technology that made it possible is old, but the behavior that made it possible is pretty recent. And you find that about most communication technologies, which is that they hit a kind of escape velocity. There's a kind of inflection point in their growth. So the fax machine, I don't you don't know what a fax machine is, do you? You've seen them in the movies, okay. So that thing at the end of the usual suspects, okay, where the picture comes out of the thing that looks like it's that's a fax, okay? That actually existed, would you believe it, in the 19th century, the actual technology to do that. Presumably it was incredibly slow and incredibly expensive. But it only really took off before email killed it. Uh, really in the late to late 80s, early 90s. The postal strike in the UK accelerated the adoption. I had a friend who had a fax machine in the 1970s. He had an office in London, an office in Los Angeles, and they used to fax um, he was a concert organizer. They'd fax legal documents from the Los Angeles office to the London office and back again, but he never remembers in the 1970s sending a fax to anybody else. It wasn't a network, it was effectively a point-to-point transmission system. And so one thing I do say to a lot of our clients is you're all having AI conversations because you're terrified in case the chief executive suddenly springs on you and says, What's our AI strategy? What are we doing with AI? Because it's the kind of dominant, kind of uh, you know, open, open-ended question. There are a lot of businesses that should have a Zoom strategy. Oh no, no, which makes it so compelling. And terrifying in some respects. I mean, have you seen the the AI-powered website do not pay.com?
SPEAKER_01No, I haven't. It sounds as fascinating.
SPEAKER_00Now that's where the agent works not on behalf of an organization, but on behalf of an individual. And anything from cancelling subscriptions to challenging parking tickets to Bill Browder's son? Demanding I think you might be right. Okay, I have heard of it that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. Uh to for example, challenging fees or demanding refunds. There's a famous story about this, which is that the the major distribution companies like FedEx and UPS used to give you your money back if the package arrived late. And they could afford to do that because most people didn't bother to do it because it wasn't their money anyway, it was a corporate expense. And then I think someone launched a website called Pay Me Back, which automated the whole process where you uploaded all your tracking numbers and it automated the process of actually demanding refunds. At which point uh the distribution companies basically stopped offering that uh as a guarantee. I think that do not pay poses an existential threat to a lot of businesses, media businesses in particular, which are surviving off the subscription inertia model.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, definitely. How many, it's like a gym membership, how many vacant subscriptions are out there? Maybe not as dramatic as a gym membership, but nonetheless. You know, it can be you commit to the monthly subscription that's maybe paid annually, and 12 months come around, you forgot about it, it's there.
SPEAKER_00And by the time it's paid, it's too late, and you c and you realise, okay, I would have cancelled if you'd given me the chance, but now I've got a claim for a refund. This is just too goddamn painful. Now the second do not pay.com automates that procedure. And I have an interesting philosophical question.
SPEAKER_01Great market correction, though.
SPEAKER_00Well, there's an interesting question about advertising, which is at the moment everybody in the advertising industry is assuming that the AIs, the best AIs, will be working on behalf of companies finding customers.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_00But surely the only logical way to do advertising in a world in which effectively search costs are near zero is to reverse the polarity of advertising so that you as an individual would appoint an advertising agency for yourself, kind of like a butler or concierge, you would brief them on your interests, requirements, etc., and they would go off and effectively barter for your attention. Okay? Now, you know, there are models, a very interesting Australian company called Meet Magic, which does this at the B2B level, where you secure a meeting with a potential customer as a B2B supplier with a costly signal by donating about a thousand Aussie dollars to charity. And so their argument is well, if I give on Zoom 45 minutes of my time to this person to pitch, one, if they've spent a thousand dollars giving it to charity, they're they're serious.
SPEAKER_01It sounds like they read alchemy and straight up ripped off all the time. Costly signaling. And you know this person has taken a genuine cost to put this into my attention, the more likely it opened it to the same.
SPEAKER_00So my argument is that other than billionaires, who probably do do this kind of thing, or the chief executives of huge corporations, no one's thrown a FedEx envelope away unopened. No one's thrown a UPS Express envelope away unopened. Because humans, contrary to economic theory, humans are possessed of a high degree of social intelligence. And they don't just look at things from a kind of solipsistic, what does this mean to me, viewpoint, they also second guess the intentions of the sender. And whether it's a charitable donation or whether it's highly expensive express delivery, the fact that you've actually sent spent money to convey the message is probably evidence of seriousness, it's evidence of relevance because you wouldn't just spray and pray if you're paying a thousand bucks a time, or if you're sending something by FedEx, you've actually thought about who you're talking to in advance. Okay. So there's relevance, commitment, quality of internal message, because you wouldn't send something by FedEx and not pay some attention to writing it, writing the contents well. And so this costly signalling theory, which comes from evolutionary biology, um, part it's been refined a bit since, by the way. Uh Amot Zahavi is the Israeli biologist who first sort of coined the phrase costly signalling. Um, I think Darwin kind of instinctively understood it, but didn't call it that. He understood sexual selection, obviously, and the peacock's tail, which he once said made him physically sick, because it seemed such a refutation of the theory of natural selection until he realized that there was sexual selection. In fact, sexual selection is probably That's amazing.
SPEAKER_01So just to explain exactly if I understand what you just said, the tail only serves as a signalling method to attract mates, but it doesn't defend him in any other way, it doesn't do anything else for him, and therefore that costly opportunity cost of what else that tail could have been is an example that's right.
SPEAKER_00Well, it's proof that you have resources to spare. It's also that, in a sense, at the center of all showing off is do things that other people find harder to do than you do. Not necessarily that it's impossible for them to do it, uh-huh. But if you're a very fit bird, the cost in survival terms of having a decorative tail is lower than it would be for an unfit bird. And therefore, it's a skin-in-the-game proof, demonstration, or what you might call um what might you call it, a testimonial, if you like. It's a skin-in-the-game testament to your fitness. In other words, it's hard to fake. And consequently, I think the understanding of costly signalling in human behavior, uh, you know, that that humans are in many ways peacocks. I don't know if you read The Status Game by Will Store, for example. Fantastic book. Unbelievable. And we have to be, I think we have to be, one one thing that would make a lot of I think make possible a lot of progress in human society is if we just acknowledge this. Because one of the strangest things about status signalling is it is necessary for us to practice a high degree of self-deception in order for it to appear convincing. You see what I mean? Absolutely. And so consequently the great guy on this is Robert Trivers. Uh he's written a book called Deceit and Self-Deception, which is one of the most important books I think you can read. How about that? Uh, in this area. Sivers. Trivers. Uh Bob Trivers, who was the he was really the I think the kind of originator of you know gene-centric uh evolution before Dawkins popularized it. And um uh so it is necessary for us not to know our motivation when we state a signal because that would destroy the effect of the activity because it would make it effectively, you know, uh it would ruin we we we have to delude ourselves, we have to have a degree of internal illusion and self-deception when we practice this behavior. No, no, I'm really doing it because I like Armani suits. Okay, I'm not doing it for how it makes me feel or how it makes me look. I love the cut and the quality, you know. You know, I bought this, you know, Aston Martin because of its fantastic engineering. Okay.
SPEAKER_01Because zero to sixty really mattered to me. Yeah, no, exactly. Uh Rory, um, not to cut you off, but we do have we do have a limited amount of. Of course, no, no, keep going. And I want to have a bit of halo. I want to see um how, say, terse and pithy you can be on just a number of sort of rapid fire questions. And to start off, I can see three separate vapes hanging off your neck, and I can see one in your left hand. You've done quite a bit of work in pr um alternative to smoking or preventative for smoking. I've got this in my top pocket here. Uh-huh. I'd love I'd love to hear your thoughts on snus.
SPEAKER_00So you spent a bit of time in Sweden, presumably, have you? Lived there. Four years. Four years. They had to actually get some sort of legal exemption when they joined the EU, which exempted the Swedes from standard anti-tobacco legislation in the rest of the European Union, which was highly restrictive towards snus. And what is interesting is that Sweden and the UK, I think I'm still right in this, it was certainly true about a year or so ago. The UK, which has been highly liberal in terms of vaping restriction, and Sweden, which has always always had snus, and now has effectively what are I mean the nicotine I think comes from tobacco, but it's effectively a tobacco-free um pad or this is a chemically nicotine delivery system.
SPEAKER_01There is no tobacco in it, no tobacco in it at all.
SPEAKER_00Probably the nicotine was actually retrieved from tobacco leaves because it's the best place to find it. But what is interesting about those two countries is they were pretty easy going about those alternatives. They they now seem to have the lowest rate of actual tobacco smoking in Europe.
SPEAKER_01I think it's less than 5% of Swedes smoke.
SPEAKER_00That's astoundingly low, because you contrast that with near neighbours like Germans, where it's actually quite high. They smoke. Yeah, they smoke, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh but SNUS, uh just from the purely from the perspective of alternatives to smoking, to to just tell someone they have to stop doing a certain behaviour is probably a losing game, but rather giving them an option for an alternative behaviour might be the right way around. There is vaping, obviously. The downsides of vaping, I would say, um, from an Australian perspective, is just that they're absolutely everywhere and people are vaping absolutely all the time because nicotine's extremely addictive, and if the social cost of smoking a cigarette is high, you don't smoke around everyone all the time. But when the social cost of vaping is relatively low, people can just sit on their couch around a bunch of other people, everyone's vaping. However, with snus, I think it achieves the best of both worlds because it's an intensely personal thing. You don't blow out any smoke and it just exists up in the upper lip, but you still get that nicotine kick and all the great things you like from that, plus obviously you're still addicted to it, but nonetheless.
SPEAKER_00I mean, these are all effectively migration paths there. I mean, what's so interesting about behavior is generally if you give government or economists or mathematically minded reductionists a job to do which as which demands a change in human behaviour. And this will be true of environmentalism as well. They tend to draw a straight line from A to B. And they go, here people are here, we want them to go there. And human behaviour is very similar in a way to something which evolutionary biologists I draw a lot of inspiration for from um evolutionary biology because it's along with funnily enough discussing traffic and transport, it's an easily mentally accessible way to understand complexity. Ah yes, you love trains. Yeah. So train you know, trains traffic. There's a great book, by the way, called Tom Vanderbilt, I think, called by Tom Vanderbilt called Traffic. And it's notionally about traffic, but it also is the best introductory guide to understanding complexity theory and uh complex systems. Because we all know about traffic. You know, if you talk about slime mould, which is apparently a very interesting, complex, interdependent system, we don't really know very much about slime mould, we don't really identify with it. Whereas traffic is a kind of perfect kind of gateway drug to understanding complexity. And what you realise about complex systems is that they evolve, they don't actually that there are there are pools of attraction, if you like, okay. You can't move them from one state to another state, and they have to find an intervening path. And so, you know, one of the things I complain about massively is that um, you know, a lot of legislation that is demanding behavioral change of people is effectively draw a definition of perfect and then draw a straight line to that point. Now, I've got to be honest, okay, I get the fact I drive an electric car myself because it suits me very well. But I'm kind of chill with plug-in hybrids. Okay? While you're driving around a city, i.e., the first twent or the first 20 or 30 miles of your driving, you'll probably be running on electric power. On many days, you'll run on nothing other than electric power because you're only driving 30 miles anyway. And on those freak occasions where you need to drive 400 miles in a hurry, you have the gasoline engine as backup. Okay. Slightly suboptimal, I buy that. Just as, yes, vaping is suboptimal compared to quitting. But the point is, you've got to find a migratory path and understand path dependency. And legislators and economists, by and large, don't understand that. Because it's irrational. I mean, I'll give you a lovely example of this. I was just talking. A bunch of energy people. We're trying to get people to get installed heat pumps. And one of the requirements of getting a government grant for a heat pump is you must rip out your existing gas boiler. In many cases, the heat pump will also require you to replace all your radiators, dig up your lawn, place a load of pipes underneath your lawn, and then write a check for £25,000 to a weird installing company that you've never heard of, okay? People don't do that. Okay. What you might call the market opportunity among people who've got £25,000 burning a hole in their pocket and wouldn't rather go to the Maldives, okay, is vanishingly small, even with the government grant, okay? And so sure enough, they've massively undershot their targets. By consequence, now my brother, just to be clear, he's an astrophysicist, right? He knows he knows his heat pump maths. What he's doing is what I think you could persuade normal humans to do, which is one room at a time, at a cost of a couple of thousand pounds, he's installing air conditioning units in his house. Air conditioning units are also heat pumps, they work in both directions. If you live in the UK, they will work as a heat pump, i.e., extracting heat from outside and putting it inside, probably 15 to 20 times more frequently than they'll work as an air conditioning unit. Not true in Australia. I buy that, okay? Right? And I said, well, why don't you get a grant for doing this? Give them and he said, well, first of all, I want to keep my boiler as a backup. I've got the radiators there, I don't want to rip them out. If there's a really, really cold three-day period, I want to be able to use my pre-existing boiler to back up the heat pump. I need the boiler while I'm transitioning one room at a time. And he said, thirdly, they won't give you a grant for air conditioning units because the fear is you might use them as air conditioning and therefore increase energy consumption. To which I said, kind of, mate, this is Britain. Okay. That's a really, really good argument if we're in Somalia. Okay. If we're in southern Italy, good point. Sure. I'd say. Yeah, fair point because actually that thing is going to be used, you know, going to be used as an air conditioning unit most of the time. In the UK, we've also got brick and stone houses. So it has to be pretty hot for three or four days before your bedroom kind of becomes difficult to sleep in. Because there's a fair amount of kind of heat or cool retention in the stone or brick for most British homes. And so this is just dumb. What you've got is an incentive to do something that nobody wants to do when there's actually an easier progressive path, likewise with solar panels. Now, in Holland and Germany, solar panels are now so cheap. People are buying them and using them as fences. For real. It's obviously suboptimal because you want the thing technically at the diagonal. Right. You know, they are south-facing fences. No, no, but vertical, vertical is undoubtedly slightly is significantly suboptimal, but on the other hand, they need it to do the job of a fence. Sure. And your neighbour wouldn't be very keen if your fence leaned over at 45 degrees. I guess, I guess, I mean you could have a nice chat with your neighbour and say, let's have a 45 degree fence, and we'll make it half and half.
SPEAKER_01On both ends.
SPEAKER_00What that suggests to me is that actually it isn't price or efficiency that's holding back people from installing solar panels. It's actually the bizarre requirement that you put them on your roof.
SPEAKER_01Right. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00Because, you know, if there's one thing you know as a homeowner is basically if it ain't leaking, don't tick with your roof. Right? You know that. Don't have people up on your roof, don't have because the next thing you know is you've got a problem, and it's a £20,000 problem to fix. And the other thing I think that's problematic with solar panels is I want to be able to try them out one at a time. I want to be able to buy a couple of solar panels for a thousand pounds, use them to partially charge my car, or maybe supply electricity to a battery in the garage, and then if it impresses me, I'll go and buy some more. That's how humans like to make changes, and this is why vaping was crucial. Because I went to the behavioural insights team and I said, Look, I don't know much about the science of this, but there are two things I'll predict. One, it's the most important thing in getting people off tobacco smoking in well, since the Dole report came out, which revealed the link between smoking and cancer. Yeah. It's the biggest potential news there. That's prediction number one. Prediction number two is that ever most people, not everybody, most people in the standard health establishment will try and kill it because it's not perfect. Right. They've invested years of their lives in trying to teach people how to quit. Similarly, I always had this argument about um, which thankfully is now taking off. Don't if you want to be an environmentalist, okay, you can tell people you mustn't have a tumble dryer. You, you know, actually, by the way, Americans. Have you lived in the US? No. In Arizona, okay, places like that. I remember being in North Carolina by the sea, and the American hosts dried all our clothes in a tumble dryer. It was 85 degrees outside, and there was a sea breeze. That's hilarious. But there's a massive social stigma attached to drying your clothes outside in the US. It's like ghetto. It's ghetto stuff, you see. So they're actually pumping a load of electricity in hot weather climates with low humidity, they're drying their clothes indoors. That is a bit whack. That is. It also doesn't help that they're all descended from wacko Puritans. So by all of them, you mean the Americans. Yeah. So, well, the culturally descended. So if someone saw a pair of underpants on a line, they'd probably have like connections or, you know, some mild kind of cardio event. But one of the things I just said is look, don't get people to stop what they're doing. That's difficult. Just encourage them to put on their washing machines, their tumble dryers, and their dishwashers. Late at night, 10 o'clock at night in the UK, on a good day, okay? Your tumble dryer is a zero emissions appliance because it's running on nuclear or it's I'm not zero, nothing's zero. It's running on nuclear, it's running on, you know, possibly on wind.
SPEAKER_01Significantly better than the alternative.
SPEAKER_00Vastly better than putting it on at six o'clock in the afternoon. Rory, I want to get through as many of the things.
SPEAKER_01Of course, keep keep firing away. Luke Burgess's book Wanting is full of examples of a memetic design in advertising. In your career, you or your team, have you ever intentionally thought about memetics in your campaigns?
SPEAKER_00We've obviously looked at seeding behaviours or words or vocabulary or languages. That's slightly different. What is undoubtedly true is that in a sense mimetic design makes evolutionary sense, okay, because in a world of imperfect information, i.e. not an economic model, you quite often have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. And one of the most sensible decision-making heuristics you can use under such circumstances is social copying. Because if you don't socially copy, you've got to learn everything from first principles. And while you're learning things from first principles, one of those things is gonna kill you. You're making a lot of mistakes, and some of them might kill you. So if nobody else eats the yellow berries, don't conduct a randomized control trial with the yellow berries, just go, fuck this for a game of soldiers, I'm not eating the yellow ones. Nobody else seems to do it. Why would I?
SPEAKER_01Um in your career though, um, specific mac cup m uh uh specific campaigns the team has worked on, have you thought how can we think about the mimetic perspective of this, or what would memetics be in this example?
SPEAKER_00I mean, obviously there's memetics in website design, which is uh you know, a thousand people are looking at this. Very interesting finding, by the way. This is really fascinating. It's so uniform, it's so true. It's not quite universally true, which is a thousand people are looking at this, generally works really well. A thousand people have bought this already. Social proof, works pretty well with male clothing, consumer electronics, etc. Female fashion, killer, apparently. Okay. So uh female fashion is fundamentally different from male fashion in many, many ways. Because there's more variety. I've occasionally made the mistake. My wife had some dress she liked, and an identical dress, the the very same dress, came up on sale at a discount. So, well, you really like the original, I'll buy you another one. Yeah. And when I said I got you a second one of those, she looked at me as if I was basically I should be sectioned. Because apparently, if you're a woman, you know, as you as a bloke, right? If you find a pair of underpants you like, a pair of trousers you like, I'll get eight of them. Exactly. Yeah. You know, I'll just I'll sod this. I I I found a very good make of underpants on ASOS. I just went, I'll sod this just by twelve. Okay. Now, you can probably do that with underpants if you're female, but with anything external, no way. But no, no. I mean, undoubtedly, I mean, it any human that didn't deploy social intelligence and mimetics, of course, would be at an evolutionary disadvantage. Um however, this all comes down to the really interesting question that the extent to which we desire things, because they are desirable, undoubtedly leads to the potential for what you might call feedback loops and collective insanity, doesn't it? And if you think about it. Explain that. Well, fashion. Someone once described female fashion as innovation without improvement. Okay. Okay. Harsh, but pretty fair, to be honest. No one has no one actually in the environmental movement has really got I mean, there are obviously campaigners against fast fashion and this kind of thing. But um there are undoubtedly cases, I think, in um uh marketing. I'll give you a perfect example of one. We should look at two things. We should look at memetics, I want it because everybody else wants it. Yeah. Okay. The other one, which is I think even more powerful, is I don't want it because other people don't want it. So it's reverse memetics, okay? That is more powerful.
SPEAKER_01Because the social stigma turns it.
SPEAKER_00The social stigma. There's a wonderful quote from Abraham Lincoln, would you believe it, who said that um, you know, if you had to attend church and walk around your uh uh your your town all day wearing your wife's bonnet, you wouldn't be encountering any genuine physical discomfort. But the experience of doing it without being able to explain you're doing it for a bet, okay, would be agonizing. And it always fascinates me, which is I've always wondered if there's a kind of innovation archaeology where you can go and look at products that deserve to succeed, but the user imagery killed it. An example I give is the wine box. Okay. You're an Aussie. I know I know do you have you gone to the screw toxic? Okay. The wine box was an obvious improvement.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well on wine bottles. Well, it doesn't break, it's portable, it's got a handle, it's got two litres. You can actually have a glass of wine every evening without forcing yourself to drink another five if you live alone. It keeps much longer. There is no, I think, real deterioration on taste. The wine box, however, was not a socially acceptable thing to take to uh um the right kind of party. I mean the Kiwis had to make a really bold step in universally going over to screw top bottles.
SPEAKER_01And actually, the the other end of that, and this is from Alchemy, you point out that uh wine can be more expensive if it's served from a heavier bottle. Yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Opposite end of the goonsack. So there's a whole load of you're absolutely right. There's a whole load of heuristic bollocks that you have to overcome. Fascinating, isn't it? But the real one, which I'm thinking about at the moment, and if any of your listeners have suggestions, a case of a utterly fantastic technology which failed the mimetic desire test, frozen food. It is the best way of maintaining nutrients without additives at a lower cost. At a vastly lower cost, a much more efficient supply chain, uh, vastly longer shelf life. It's basically a brilliant, fantastic idea. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Can I interrupt you on this? Hold your point though.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01I were I work with um uh pretty affluent people, and I came in to work one day uh with my grocery shop. Well, not one day, I came in in the afternoon and got my grocery shopping for the night, and I had a bag of frozen chicken. And one of the guys who's a Finn Smoker would say in Swedish, but he's uh he's he's he has fine tastes. Um he looked at me with absolute disgust. Yes. And we're mates, so he could like take the piss out of me about it. But I said I made the point to him that just because it's frozen does not mean it's any different than the chicken you bought that's chilled on the shelf. Because what do you think? They killed that chicken and then put it on a fridge straight away? No, it was frozen straight away. All of your meat has been frozen at some stage unless you slaughtered it yourself, anyway. Which is just to go to the point that it's all this, and this is why your work is so compelling, and every interview you do, in my opinion at least, is very compelling. Is because you speak so clearly about how the social stigma drives so much behaviour, and then the the consumption at the end of that, in this case, for example.
SPEAKER_00Because you probably have a world where, with the exception of property, where there still remains scarcity, positive memetics may be less of a problem because consumer capitalism, for all its many faults, is very, very good at producing really desirable goods in fairly abundant quantities. Okay, you have obviously wonderful anomalies like luxury brands, you have the property markets, you have certain things. The education market is the ultimate luxury brand. You know, if you think about it, logically one of the Ivy League universities should have broken ranks and gone 70% online by now. Right. That would destroy their entire business model of maintaining rejection. The rejection of most applicants is actually that it's a scarcity, is effectively their point of difference. And that's what enables them to charge $250,000 for what is a you know, not not unnecessarily brilliant education. I mean, if you think about it, there's a hell of a lot you could do by, you know, with $250,000 if you're prepared to go online. My goodness. You could have rock star academics, you know, lecturing from all over the world.
SPEAKER_01So actually, Harvard and I think MIT too allow, they open up for free so many of their course material, which means you're actually spending that $250K on the accreditation at the end, not what you learn. That makes sense, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So some people game the system by taking their Harvard admission letter and going straight to Silicon Valley and saying, I've been offered a place at Harvard, I I'm gonna get a Harvard degree. That's smart. Right? Yeah. But I'd really rather work for you. So I qualify as a selected bunch of the body. So I qualify as part of the selective bunch. The admission letter is free, the degree, three or four years later, costs a quarter of a million dollars and four years of your life. And yet the degree really doesn't really convey that much more about you than the admission letter. It's not as if people get kicked out of Harvard. As as the great comedian Louis C.K. pointed out, all these people whose parents basically bought their way into Ivy League universities, they didn't flunk out, did they? Now, if Harvard were a genuinely meritocratic institution, it'd be getting rid of a third of those people. And the people who'd fake their way into by pretending to be water polo players would have been found out on day five. Yes. But it's not like that. It's a I mean, uh Scott Gallowa uh Scott Galloway is the ultimate uh and actually um I don't think I know Scott Galloway writes about this as education as the ultimate the the American particularly, and to some extent the book.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no. Uh he does a bit of the guy. Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_00He is concerned about young males, um, but he also does a very large amount about sort of uh wealth inequality and wealth distribution, uh, and he does a very large amount about, you know, effectively that the education system isn't doing its job. It's supposed they're supposed to be public servants, and they've become Hermes or Louis Vuitton. Okay. Essentially their business model is inseparable from a kind of Hermes or Louis Vuitton. Fascinating thing, by the way, with luxury goods, it's not quite enough to just create one out of scratch. Okay. Uh most successful luxury goods, and I was talking to a colleague of mine, brilliant guy called Antonius Cochellis, Greek guy, about this last night. Love that. They have a heritage in something that was actually useful and necessary, which they have now taken to an extreme. Okay.
SPEAKER_01So in the case of the brand's not 200 years old, can it be a luxury?
SPEAKER_00I mean, a perfect example would be Louis Vuitton's saddlery, I think, isn't it? They're originally a leather leather maker and saddler who then went into luggage and then went into everything else. You know, Panorai, it was uh, you know, the submariner, an Italian submariner's watch. Okay. Now the interesting thing is that I go, you know, Panorai, yeah, it's a really prestige brand. It's the uh brand for. I didn't even know the Italian Navy had a bloody submarine, right? I mean, maybe they didn't. Maybe it's bullshit. I always loved the bullshit. A friend of mine who was into watches and into aviation. Yeah, love it. Went up to a British Airways 747 pilot and said, Do you actually wear a pilot's watch? Now, think of the millions that have been made selling those pilots' watches with a little all I know is they've got a little triangle at the top, okay? And the British Airways pilots. You know what the British Airways pilot says, of course we bloody don't. There's a sodding great clock, okay? In the middle, right in the middle of the flight display on the cockpit, there's a sodding great clock.
SPEAKER_01We don't need a watch. Okay? So why are people so irrational where they're willing to pay that giant premium just for this feature of exclusivity? Have you come to some sort of pithy conclusion on this?
SPEAKER_00This upsets me because we have an absurd economy. I'm gonna do a really odd thing now. I'm gonna I'm gonna do something which is let's let's be kind to utilities, okay? That doesn't sound like you. Now, we get unbelievably pissy about the cost of sending a letter by Royal Mail or whatever, okay? We get hugely pissy if our gas bill, our electricity bill, goes up by 10-15%. But those things are practically vital to modern life itself, right? If you have if you have to spend, you know, three hours without electricity, two hours without broadband, okay, you know, an hour without running water, okay, you're basically back in the Stone Age. You're probably sitting around the piano singing hymns to entertain yourself. So at least you're back in the Victorian age. And yet we're unbelievably stingy with those companies. You bastards, you're taking money. But the consumer surplus, the consumer surplus from running water is monumentally huge, okay? What would you really pay? If if your broadband of extra. Okay, if your broadband were run by the mafia, okay? And the mafia, unlike commercial capitalism, knows how to capture consumer surplus, okay? Because they'd come around to your house and go, nice uh nice uh broadband connection you've got there. Wouldn't it be a pity if someone turned it off? How much would you pay to maintain your home broadband connection? 200 a month, 250, running water, be another 150. But all those things fall to the marginal cost, and then we become mean about them. And the same people who go insane when a company that supplies them with electricity or energy then fly off on holiday and go and spend £220 on a pair of sunglasses, which are basically three bits of folding plastic. And by the way, we regulate, okay? We have a thing here called Off-Wat, Off-Wat, which regulates the water industry. We have Offcom, which regulates things like broadband and telecoms. Uh, we have a thing called Off Something or Other, which regulates energy and electricity supplies to the home. In a logical world, we let those people make quite a lot of money because it's good to have a really well-funded electricity grid. And we'd have a regulator for luxury goods called Off-Twat.
unknownRight?
SPEAKER_00Which we're going to say, sorry, those sunglasses, that's just ridiculous. Right, right. Okay, come on, come on. They cost £7.50 to make, you know, and uh you you know you're charging £270 for them. This is just a stupid misdirection of human effort and time.
SPEAKER_01But then those same people would travel to the place where that off-twat uh tax didn't exist and pay even more of a premium for it.
SPEAKER_00But it is, I mean, you can't. I mean, I okay, I'm not I'm not saying anything new here, because this this was something that mystified economists until they got to the marginal cost, the marginal revolution, which is why is it that we pay very little for water which is essential to life, but we're obsessed with diamonds which are essentially pointless. Right. And it's this whole scarcity plus marginal cost thing.
SPEAKER_01Is there anything more of a signalling item than diamonds?
SPEAKER_00But the I mean the other the other interesting thing, by the way, largely created by marketing. I mean, De Beer's a fantastic campaign, a diamond is forever in the United States in the 50s, must have been in terms of the value generated. Um that was a that was a that that was a campaign that, you know, if you think about it, we still we still feel its effects today because it actually created social norms around engagement rings and social norms about how much you should spend on an engagement ring, how else can two months salary last a lifetime? One of the greatest, greatest and most pointless ads ever written. That is our slight problem.
SPEAKER_01Highly effective. Oh my goodness. Um we got ten more minutes, Gory, so forgive me I keep interrupting you, but I just want to move on. Um, how do you explain the rationality behind this? We will off we will we will offshore the positive externality of the environmental cost in the price of our goods, but then at the same time cry foul about the environmental cost of those goods. Does that make sense to you? So, what we're saying is we're we're happy to offshore We know that we can't produce all of this clothing that we're wearing within the United Kingdom because there is a bunch of regulations and taxes, not just labor but as well, like practices to produce the cotton the right way to diet, the right way to everything else. But it will happily offs uh offshore it somewhere else. Where all of that environmental negative externality is not priced in. And therefore we don't actually have the market price of the goods.
SPEAKER_00But people are very, very happy to mentally blank it even when they are.
SPEAKER_01So how do you explain this? Just the c the comfort of the consumer with the colours.
SPEAKER_00People aren't nearly as nice as they pretend to be. I mean, if you wanted me to advise the Conservative Party for the upcoming election, I'd say uh this is totally cynical, but I think it would work. Okay. I'd say we're going to abandon all environmental targets completely, and we're going to give every household in Britain a hot tub. And let me explain. Everybody pretends they comp uh they care about environmentalism even though they really don't. And everybody pretends they don't want a hot tub, even though they really do. Okay. So the best way to get enjoyment out of hot tubs, because there's a certain amount of social stigma attached. They seem a bit pervy, it makes you look as if you're in the lifestyle. The way to maximize happiness.
SPEAKER_01Let's all go into the hot tub.
SPEAKER_00If you made hot tubs compulsory, you would massively increase human happiness because you would have a hot tub without the embarrassment of being seen to own one. The same goes for Japanese toilets, okay? Oh, you love it. Massive reverse memetics, because once you've had a Japanese toilet, dry wiping is barbarism. I mean, you horrify me, frankly.
SPEAKER_01So made we we we're dry wiping and flushing a bunch of toilets.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, you're usually on the beach, so I suppose it's yeah, not a major problem. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Have you ever done a floaty?
SPEAKER_00But um This is nature's answer to the Japanese toilet. Nature's answer to the Japanese toilet. Yeah. Generally, you're a nation. I had a conversation with Rick Rubin about this. That the the best place to pee is actually um in a swimming pool. The second best place to pee is in your own garden, and the third best place in the toilet. But with defecation, you've got to reverse that order, okay? It's toilet, garden, someone else's garden, and then swimming pool, okay? It goes in reverse. Um but um no, the interesting I mean I mean, what is interesting there is that um you know that is a case where actually if you made those things compulsory, you would increase human happiness because I mean we forget this, by the way. When things become universally available and commoditized, we forget the fact that they had to be marketed. But I spent about ten years of my working life, half the time for about ten years as a copywriter, I was persuading people to get broadband at home. Yeah, unbelievable. You know, mobile phones required marketing. I mean, it seems okay, uh utterly by by which I mean the category, I don't mean an individual mobile phone. I mean you actually had to say, no, no, these are really handy. Yeah. Now mostly it happened through social pressure in that you reached a certain penetration level of mobile phones, and if you were the asshole without the mobile phone, your friends would go, Well, we're meeting that run some pub, we'll give you a ring, you haven't got a mobile, and they basically go, get with a not not having an email address drove internet um adoption. But nonetheless, all these things, electricity, about 40-50 years in in the UK. I mean, there were still homes in the 60s without electricity, r rural homes. It actually took, you know, uh basically, you know, 50 or 60 years of persuasion to go from zero or not quite you would have started off with some uh Victorian homes would have had it, rich homes. And then it, you know, it took a long, long time for that to actually be uh become considered a kind of essential. And so we forget the role that marketing plays in successful innovation because once an innovation succeeds, we post-rationalise our reasons for buying it. Exactly. And so no one ever says, you know, I bought the iPhone because Steve persuaded me to. We go, which is exactly what happened, by the way, we bought we go, we bought the iPhone because it's a brilliant phone. And we we we ourselves are unwilling to acknowledge the extent to which marketing, it's exactly like basically all our signalling instincts have to remain at an unconscious level in order to work. Darwin was really I think Darwin wrote about this about facial expression and so forth. That certain things have to be kind of involuntary and innate because if they're conscious, they don't work.
SPEAKER_01Does it shock you how good humans are at s at just vibing a person immediately based off these thousand micro expressions and and how well we can sense bullshit?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean that it that's one of the reasons I'm interested actually, I'm one of the reasons I'm interested in Zoom, and I think that uh we should be I actually proposed, and interestingly Zoom were not uninterested in this, because I actually got in touch with their marketing director, who I know fairly well. And I said, instead of selling to companies, why don't you sell to a government? What if I could persuade the UK government basically to pay you what would it be about 40 million a month? Everybody in the UK has full feet fully featured Zoom access. Now, my argument for doing that is that's about the cost per month of building about a mile or two of motorway or you know, three feet of high speed two. I mean, but why why not devote some of your transport budget to stopping people traveling at all? To obviating the needs to get on the roads or the rails in the first place. It strikes me as a perfectly obvious way to look at things.
SPEAKER_01This is why people find you so compelling. It's because it's just this reframing of an idea that we just take for granted, truly like out-of-the-box creativity. Um, that's just a comment, by the way. But Rory, we have three minutes left. Okay, of course, got it, got it. We have three minutes left. Um clearly I haven't gotten to most of the questions I wanted, but when did you start getting notoriety? Just by the way, before we're sitting outside, a person came up to you, asked for a selfie. When did your notoriety start?
SPEAKER_00Some of it is very weird. Um, it partly arose because I were I work for WPP, which for a long time had a wonderfully scandalous uh um I mean outspoken, by which that is what what I mean, uh CEO called Sir Martin Sorrel. And this gave me an unusual freedom to speak out because nothing I said was nearly as kind of um uh you know uh fear-inducing as anything he might say. So I got a sort of free ride, I think, from various press offices and press offices and so on. But some of it's just accidental, and some of it's actually uh it's just a product of doing the same thing for a long time. Right. Basically, I it wasn't fully intentional. My logic of doing podcasts is very simple, which is if I can speak to a hundred or a thousand or five hundred or five thousand people in an hour, okay. How about your five thousand. Five thousand, perfect, okay. Now I'm actually speaking to a small stadium at this point, okay? Now, if I can speak to five thousand people in an hour, it's a hell of a lot more efficient than speaking, spending five thousand hours speaking to people one at a time. Okay, there's a wonderful network effect. Then this guy, wonderful guy called Hugo, off his own bat, just starts taking clips from everything I've said over the past 15 years and starts putting them on TikTok. Now I had no idea this was going on, except for two things. My kids went, Dad, you're a fat 58-year-old man, you've got no business being on TikTok. What do you mean I'm on TikTok? And then I started getting mobbed by school kids. I mean, there were other applications, so some of my talks on behavioral economics actually got used in schools. I didn't really realise this. Um, and my argument there is that um effectively uh fame, okay, is compounding and largely unattributable. And the reason doing advertising is so difficult nowadays is because everybody demands that everything is perfectly attributable and pays back in a very short time.
SPEAKER_01One of the best uh things that stood out for me from Alchemy was that a lot of advertising is fat-tailed, which I think draws into this point here.
SPEAKER_00I can believe that I think a lot of it is fat-tailed, a perfect way of describing it, and it's totally non-valued.
SPEAKER_01Therefore, it can't be fully attributable.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely fair. I think the maths that people are using to evaluate advertising uh is childishly wrong. It's addition, subtraction, multiplication. This is a complex system. There's a hell of a lot of it is probabilistic. You can't know in advance. What you're doing is you're advertising to increase the probabilities of nice things happening. The value of being famous is ultimately that people come to you rather than you having to find them. Which, how do you calculate the value of that across a whole organization? Because it applies to potential employees, it applies to potential customers, it applies to potential business partners, okay? If you become a destination rather than, you know, so in other words, you can sit on a throne and wait for customers and partners to come to you, which you can do if you're famous, rather than having to kind of go, hi, it's only me, and having to go and seek people out. The value of that is absolutely kind of impossible to quantify, okay? It's it's incalculable. Yeah, and finally, uh, sorry, do you have one more point? And yeah, my other point is that um uh it's it's necessarily slow and it's necessarily unattributable in the sense that there are a few people who are famous for one thing, you know, Monica Lewinsky or Ted Bundy. Okay. Actually, Ted Bundy would have been a if Ted Bundy hadn't gone into the serial killing, I think he'd be a massive TikTok or YouTube star, wouldn't he? He would have succeeded at something. Yeah, okay. Maybe. But you know, Fred West or, you know, uh, you know, or uh Monica Lewinsky, you can say if that thing hadn't happened, you probably wouldn't have been famous. Yeah, okay. Sucks to be remembered about that. Most famous people, other than the, you know, people who are kind of one event famous, essentially it's a whole concatenation of inseparable, intertwined things that contribute to their fame. And the attempt to sort of effectively say, okay, this fame thing, it's valuable, what's the best way of creating it? Yeah. Is a kind of completely absurd distinction. Right, right, right. Because by its nature, it's kind of indiscriminate. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Very Telebian point to just round this off. Alchemy obviously was a huge invitation to serendipity in your life, as were your other books, as were all your podcast appearances. You were with Rick Rubin, which I think is, at least among my own friends, like recognized as one of the great podcasts, you and Rick Rubin. Whoa. Um, it's just phenomenal, you know, for so many reasons. Rick is this, you know, like I don't know, absolute godlike guru type figure. Yeah. And I can only imagine how you know exciting that was to spend the day with him. But you didn't even get to see the house, you just got the order out.
SPEAKER_00Um, so how has this house, by the way, as you would expect, is exquisitely beautiful in every possible respect. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um, and so given the notoriety, particularly for the last five years, maybe that's just my own bias from having noticed you over the last five years, but how has what great serendipity has come into your life because of this?
SPEAKER_00Um you increase your surface area exposure. This is very Tulebian, okay. You increase your service surface area exposure to possible upside optionality. So it simply brings you more options. Yeah. Now, in a funny kind of way, sometimes that's a pain, okay? You'd actually, in a way, be happier if you had fewer competing options, fewer decisions you had to make into in that, you know, should I take advantage of this? Should I go and explore that? Nevertheless, looked at probistically, and an awful lot of human life, when my daughters go to a party, they don't have a party strategy, they don't have an ROI on party attendance. What they know is the opposite, okay, which is if you don't go to parties, nothing like you're never gonna get lucky in every sense of the word, lucky, but okay, right, not just sexually or romantically, but also you'll never get invited to any other parties if you don't go to any party. Or you could meet the person that gives you the job. Or you can meet the person who gives you the job or whose dad works in a field where you want to know a hell of a lot more. You're simply doing it to increase probabilistic uh opportunity, okay? And yet in business, we're so obsessed with quantification that we've actually turned off this business function. We go, unless you can say in advance what value you'll derive from this particular activity, I'm not going to allow you to do it. It's also happened in government. And this seems to be fundamentally insane. Um that a large part of life, we know that bees divide between bees that follow the waggle dance, exploit, and scout bees that go and explore. They go off at random. They're trying to maximize opportunity. They're not trying to maximize efficiency, they're trying to maximise opportunity. Marketing within a business is really very much the fat, the long-tailed, fat-tailed opportunity maximization engine of business. Some part of it, performance marketing, direct marketing, can be very much efficiency driven. That's fine. But you have to acknowledge that some marketing activities that are highly worthwhile can never actually be reduced to perfect attribution or quantification. And we should have fought this illusion, which was sold to businesses by tech firms, the illusion of basically management by numbers. We should have fought it and instead we went along with it. I think we had a kind of Stockholm syndrome. We just went, oh, look, we're being abused by Accenture, and these people, they seem to have a lot of spreadsheets. We better pretend to agree. And what we should have been doing is going, actually, mate, it's bollocks.
SPEAKER_01Well, Rory, we gotta go. Absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Absolute pleasure.
SPEAKER_00Very generous of you to give me your time. Absolutely stupid. It's been a joy. Thank you very much indeed.